The Hound Of Baskerville
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
BACKGROUND
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for
the Sherlock Holmes stories. This book, published in 1902, is about a ghostly
mad-dog that has haunted a family for hundreds of years. When Sherlock Holmes
looks into the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville, strange events
begin to take place in the creepy countryside. The story stars the Sherlock
Holmes, whom the author based on detective-like professors he had as a medical
student in Scotland. Holmes is known throughout the world as a master solver of
criminal riddles. Dr. Watson, who is Holmes's best friend, is also the narrator
of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
MAIN CHARACTERS
Sherlock Holmes: The ultimate sleuth,
whose razor-sharp brain is always at work.
Dr. Watson: Holmes's trusty friend.
Sir Henry Baskerville: Nephew of Sir
Charles Baskerville, whose mysterious death leaves the young man a load of
money.
Dr. James Mortimer: Friend and doctor to
Sir Charles Baskerville.
Mr. & Mrs. Barrymore: Baskerville's
butler & maid, a husband & wife team.
Jack Stapleton: A neighbor and butterfly
collector.
Beryl Stapleton: A babe.
Mr. Frankland: A feisty old crackpot.
Laura Lyons: Frankland's bitter, disowned
daughter.
Seldon: An escaped killer.
PLOT
Everyone thinks a ghostly, killer dog,
which has haunted the Baskerville family for generations, killed Sir Charles.
Sir Henry, Charles's only heir has come back to England to claim his new money
and mansion in the creepy countryside. But first, Henry asks Sherlock Holmes to
clear up the haze surrounding his uncle's death.
In London, weird things happen to Henry:
he gets a note warning him not to come to the mansion, two of his shoes are
stolen, and a bad guy follows him. Holmes tells Watson to go the countryside
with Henry to keep an eye on him. Watson notices strange things going on in the
mansion. Henry falls in love with Beryl, his hot-looking neighbor, but her
brother, Jack, gets mad.
Watson gathers clues and writes reports to
Holmes, who is supposed to be in London. But Watson discovers that Holmes has
been secretly hanging around, checking things out. Holmes is pretty sure the
killer is Jack who used the legend of the ghostly, killer dog to scare Charles
to death. Holmes is sure Jack has something up his sleeve to do away with
Henry.
It turns out, Jack is really Henry's
uncle, though he keeps his mouth shut about it, so no one will know he is out
to get the Baskerville money and mansion. And Beryl is really his wife. Jack
used a real-live dog dabbed with glow-in-the-dark paint to scare Charles to
death. Jack was the bearded man trailing Henry through London. He stole Henry's
shoe to give the dog his scent. Jack also locked Beryl in her hotel room, but
she figured out a way to send Henry a warning to stay away from the mansion.
Finally, Jack lures Henry to his house at
night, and when Henry is walking home, Jack sicks his mad-dog after him. Holmes
shoots the dog in the nick of time and chases Jack into a swampy maze of
quicksand, where Jack falls and sinks to his death.
CHAPTER BY CHAPTER
CHAPTER 1
•A cane, belonging to Dr. Mortimer, is
left behind at Holmes's house. Though he hasn't yet met Mortimer, Holmes sizes
the man up simply by studying his cane.
CHAPTER 2
•Mortimer tells Holmes a creepy story
about the Hound of the Baskervilles, which starts off long ago when a pervert
named Hugo Baskerville kidnapped a neighbor's daughter and locked her in an
attic. After she escaped, Hugo chased after the girl, trailed by his drunken
pals. When Hugo's pals caught up, they discovered the dead body of the girl in
the middle of a field and saw a huge, gross dog from hell gnawing out Hugo's
throat.
•Mortimer describes that after the recent,
mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville (a descendant of the wicked Hugo),
paw-prints of a huge dog were found near his body outside the mansion.
CHAPTER 3
•Holmes grills Mortimer about the crime
scene, whose only clues point to this monstrous dog from hell.
•Alone in his room, Holmes performs an
experiment with smoke. He also examines a map of the supposedly haunted
countryside around the Baskerville mansion.
CHAPTER 4
•Holmes meets Sir Henry Baskerville, who
has just inherited his dead Uncle Charles's money and mansion. Henry has a note
warning him not to return to the Baskerville home. Holmes figures out that the
note was written in a hotel and came from pieces of a certain newspaper. He
hires a kid to look through the trash at 23 hotels.
•Henry also says a single brown shoe of
his was stolen, which was brand new and never worn.
•After Mortimer and Henry split, Holmes
and Watson tail the two in secret. Holmes spots a black-bearded man in a cab
spying on Mortimer and Henry, but when Holmes is seen by the spy, he takes off
fast. Holmes remembers the cab number.
CHAPTER 5
•Henry gets pissed because another shoe is
stolen, this time an old black one.
•Over lunch, they discuss the spy's
resemblance to the black-bearded Barrymore, the Baskerville butler.
•Holmes decides it's too dangerous for
Henry to return to the mansion alone, so Watson will go with him, while Holmes
will stay in London.
•After lunch, the first brown boot is
found by luck. But the old black one stays missing.
•That night, Holmes grills the driver of
the cab that drove the spy. The cabby remembers the spy said his name was
"Sherlock Holmes."
CHAPTER 6
•While Watson boards a train for the
countryside, Holmes tells him to keep an eye on Henry's neighbors and for
anything that looks strange.
•Watson, Mortimer, and Henry drive toward
Henry's new home -- the Baskerville mansion. They learn that a killer has escaped
into the gloomy countryside surrounding the mansion. The mansion looks run-down
and haunted. Inside, it is like a castle, with paintings of a long line of
Baskervilles.
•Mortimer leaves for his own home.
•Mr. Barrymore tells Henry that he and his
wife will soon quit working at the mansion, because they feel too depressed
since Charles, their old boss, croaked.
•Watson goes to bed in a weird mood, but
he can't sleep. In the middle of the night he hears the sound of a woman crying
uncontrollably.
CHAPTER 7
•By the light of day, Watson can tell Mrs.
Barrymore had been crying, even though Mr. Barrymore says she hadn't. Watson
now seriously distrusts this guy.
•On a walk back from town, Watson meets a
neighbor, Jack Stapleton, who is out catching butterflies. Jack warns him about
a nearby field full of quick-sand, called the Grimpen Mire, which swallows up
horses and humans dumb enough to go there. Then they hear a freakish, haunting
groan of some unknown creature.
•Watson meets Miss Beryl Stapleton, Jack's
sister, and thinks she's pretty hot. She thinks Watson is really Henry and
screams at him to get back to London, because of some danger. When Beryl
realizes that Watson is just Watson, she won't tell him what her tantrum was
about.
CHAPTER 8
•Henry and Beryl look good to one another
and start hanging out, but Jack is against it.
•Frankland watches the countryside through
his telescope, hoping to spot the escaped killer.
•Barrymore tiptoes through the mansion
after midnight. Watson follows Barrymore to an empty room, where he sees him
staring by candlelight through a window at the haunted fields outside. Later in
the night, Watson hears a nearby door open and close.
CHAPTER 9
•Beryl warns Henry to leave while he can,
but Henry is so turned-on by her that he won't go, and instead wants to hook up
with her. Jack goes nuts and tries to break them up.
•Watson and Henry catch Barrymore sneaking
around again after midnight, holding a candle to the window. Watson realizes
the candle is a signal to someone standing in the field outside. The man
outside is the escaped killer, Mrs. Barrymore's brother.
•As Watson and Henry try to surprise the
killer, they hear the same freakish, haunting groan from the Grimpen Mire.
They're afraid it might be the dog from Hell. Then they get close enough to the
killer to see his ugly face, but the killer sprints into the dark fields and
loses them.
•Watson sees the outline of a mysterious
stranger on a hill behind them watching everything.
CHAPTER 10
•Barrymore begs Henry not to tell the cops
about the escaped killer, but to let him go to another country. When Henry
says, "O.K.," Barrymore tells him a secret when Charles died, he was
outside waiting for a woman, whose initials are "L.L." Mortimer tells
Watson that Frankland's daughter's initials are "¾L.L."
•Barrymore tells Watson that a second guy
is hiding out in the countryside, the mysterious stranger that was standing on
the hill.
CHAPTER 11
•Watson visits Frankland's daughter, Laura
Lyons. Although she’s a hottie, there's something angry about her face. She
admits planning to meet Charles on the night he died to ask him for money so
she could divorce her asshole husband, but decided at the last minute not to
go, because another person she won't name gave her some money. Watson doesn't
completely trust her.
•Watson plans to find the mysterious
stranger who was watching him. He has a few drinks with Frankland, who has seen
through his telescope a kid carrying food for a stranger hiding in the
countryside. Watson follows the kid's path to a campsite, where he learns that
the mysterious stranger is the one-and-only Sherlock Holmes.
CHAPTER 12
•Watson is pissed at having been fooled by
his friend. Holmes tells Watson that Jack and Beryl are really married, not
brother and sister, and that Jack has been stringing Laura along on the side.
They guess that Jack was the spy back in London and that Beryl sent Henry the
note warning him not to return to the Baskerville mansion.
•Suddenly, they hear someone screaming
nearby, and then the freakish, haunting groan of the dog from Hell. They run
toward the noise and find the body of the escaped killer, who fell from a cliff
while running. They meet Jack, suspiciously wandering through the dark. He
seems disappointed the corpse is not Henry.
CHAPTER 13
•Back at the mansion, Holmes can't take
his eye off the painting of the evil pervert Hugo Baskerville, which looks just
like Jack. Jack is secretly a Baskerville, hunting for a huge inheritance.
Holmes plans to trap Jack, who must've knocked off Charles by scaring him to
death, and is planning something bad for Henry.
•Holmes and Watson visit Laura Lyons. By
telling her Jack is a married man and was just stringing her along, Holmes gets
her to confess that Jack set Charles up and bullied her to stay quiet.
CHAPTER 14
•Holmes and Watson hide in a gloomy field
near Jack's house while night falls and a thick fog moves in. They spy on Jack
while he wines and dines Henry. The three keep an eye on Henry as he begins his
walk home along the foggy road. Suddenly, a giant and violent dog is seen
leaping after Henry. The dog just about gnaws Henry's throat out when at the
last second Holmes shoots the dog dead.
•Holmes and Watson find Jack long gone
when they rush to his house to bust him. Instead they find Beryl bound and
gagged in the attic. She is so pissed at Jack, she's ready to turn him in.
•Jack is hiding in the Grimpen Mire.
•Beryl shows Holmes and Watson how to find
their way through the slimy field full of quicksand. There they find Henry's
missing black boot. But they fail to uncover Jack, who must've slipped as he
ran and was swallowed by the swamp.
CHAPTER 15
•Henry leaves for a world cruise to
recover from his shock.
