Doyle, Arthur Ignatius Conan, Sir | The Hound of the Baskervilles; perhaps the best-loved crime story

Doyle, Arthur Ignatius Conan, Sir 

The Hound of the Baskervilles. London: George Newnes, 1902

8vo. 16 plates by Paget; endleaves and pastedowns lightly foxed. Publisher's pictorial red cloth, blocked in gilt with black hound to upper cover, spine gilt-lettered; small segment of gilt lacking on upper cover, apparently publisher's defect. Quarter morocco clamshell box.

An uncommonly bright first edition of the famed crime novel.

Following Doyle's decision to end the Holmes and Watson stories with "The Final Problem" in Memoirs (see lot 10), pressure from his readers encouraged him to write another novel in the series. The tale was inspired, in part, by Bertram Fletcher Robinson (Daily Express correspondent during the Boer War), with whom Doyle struck up a friendship when travelling back on the same ship from Cape Town. On a golfing holiday in 1901 Robinson mentioned the legend of the Black Hound of Hergest associated with the Vaughan family of Hergest Court in Herefordshire. Doyle subsequently re-located the story, with Sherlock Holmes as the main protagonist, to Dartmoor in Devon, Robinson's native county.

Doyle wrote to his mother on 2 April 1901: "Robinson and I are exploring the moor over our Sherlock Holmes book. I think it will work out splendidly... Holmes is at his very best, and it is a highly dramatic idea."

(See lots 9, 10, 12, and 13.)

REFERENCE:

Cooper & Pike, Detective Fiction, pp. 115-119; Green & Gibson A26a; De Waal 87