9 - Detective fiction's uncanny

Summary

Published serially in the Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902, almost eight years after Doyle had composed what he then believed would be “The Final Problem” in the Holmes oeuvre, The Hound of the Baskervilles is in more ways than one a story about resurrection and return. Even before the narrative first suggests that the key to the mystery of the titular hound lies in understanding how the past incessantly returns to haunt the present – before we learn, that is, of the legend of a spectral hound that comes back to haunt the heirs of the Baskerville estate, and before the discovery of a forgotten Baskerville who has resurrected the ghost of the past in order to lay claim to what he believes to be his birthright – the very appearance of the novel's first installment is a miraculous resuscitation of a detective whose creator thought he had laid him to rest. The Hound resurrects not only Holmes, who in “The Final Problem” plummeted to his death at the Reichenbach Falls, but also Doyle as a detective-fiction writer, as well as a sort of medium through which the irrepressible Holmes, refusing to stay dead, continues to speak and work. The spiritualist idiom is appropriate here, not just because Doyle became a passionate advocate of spiritualism, but because The Hound is already an occult text, both a transition to a new kind of detective fiction and a return to the genre's occult origins.