Conan Doyle’s Hound: The Origins of a Crime Classic.

“A man like that mustn’t die of a pin-prick or influenza. His death must be violent and intensely dramatic,” so said Arthur Conan Doyle in December 1892. The man he planned to kill was none other than the world’s first consulting detective – and his most famous creation – Sherlock Holmes.

      The following August the great detective’s fate was sealed, and when announced in The Final Problem (published in December 1893) both readers and shareholders of The Strand Magazine were said to have been shocked at the author’s decision. Such was Holmes’ reputation that after he had plunged to his death with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, some of London’s city gents wore black armbands. Conan Doyle’s reason for such a dramatic and permanent course of action was that Holmes “takes my mind from better things”. With Sherlock now gone he could devote more time to writing his historical novels, what he considered his ‘more serious literary work’. It would be a career moved that would prove unwise. But the world had not seen the last of Sherlock Holmes, and it would be a gigantic menacing hound from British folklore that would bring about his resurrection.

      Eight years after the publication of The Final Problem, Conan Doyle was staying at the Royal Links Hotel in Cromer, Norfolk. It was March 1901. With him was a young journalist called Bertram Fletcher Robinson. The two had met on-board the SS Briton, bound for England from South Africa. Fletcher Robinson, unbeknown to Conan Doyle at the time, would be very instrumental in Holmes’ return, for he would later draw the writer’s attention to the legend of the black dog, and Cromer just happened to be the stomping ground of the most malevolent of these creatures – Black Shuck.

      British folklore is peppered with tales of spectral black dogs and phantom hounds, either singly or in packs; hence the number of Black Dog Lanes and Black Dog Inns to be found in villages and small towns countrywide. Some are said to guard ancient burial sites, pathways and reputed buried treasure. Others are believed to haunt the locations where tragedy has occurred, such as a disaster, brutal murder or a place of execution. A few black dogs are considered benevolent – protecting lonely travellers or children out playing. When during the 1930s an outsider questioned locals living on the Quantock Hills in Somerset whether it was safe for them to let the children wander alone the villagers replied: ‘They’ll be all right. Old Gurt will look after them’.

      Black Suck, however, or Old Shuck, (‘Shuck’ deriving from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘the demon’) was, and still is, regarded as a particularly nasty specimen. Described as a huge black shaggy creature – about the size of a calf – with large saucer-shaped eyes that glowed like burning coals and wept fire. Anyone unfortunate enough to meet him was lucky to escape with their life. East Anglia as a whole is littered with the fouls deeds of this creature. In one such incident, described in a tract published in 1577, a ‘most horrible similitude’ appeared in the form of a black dog during a violent thunderstorm at a church in Bungay, Suffolk. After it materialized in ‘fearful flashes of fire’ the creature ran through the congregation, killing two and injuring others. The same tract goes on to describe how this particular Black Dog went on to create more havoc at the nearby church of Blythburgh, some seven mile away. There it left two men and a boy dead and burned the hand of another parishioner. Burn marks on the church door are said to have been made by Shuck before it disappeared. A weather vane in the village market place commemorates the incident.

        Conan Doyle’s (or Dr Watson’s) description of the hound of the Baskervilles is that of an…

      …enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us…

      Sound familiar? But as we shall see, Black Shuck is not the only contender as the inspiration for the hound.

      Fletcher Robinson was a Devonshire man and would have grown up with similar tales of phantom hounds stalking the wild and untamed landscape of Dartmoor. Among these were the Dewer, a mythic huntsman, and his pack of Whist Hounds (also referred to as ‘Wish Hounds’). Said to emerge from Wistman’s Wood – a collection of ancient gnarled and twisted oaks – he would hunt down the souls of unbaptized children. As a Scot, Conan Doyle’s own childhood would have had tales of the Scottish faerie hound called Cu Sith or Cu Sidhe; a large fearsome creature, usually black but sometimes green, and said to be the size of a small horse. It would hunt down and abduct human women for their faerie masters, who were then used to nurse faerie babies. During such hunts the beast would give three blood curdling howls that could be heard for miles. Other Scottish Black Dogs were solitary and seen as omens of impending death. So with tales such as these it’s not surprising that Conan Doyle was sent scrabbling for his writing materials.

      Such a ghostly creature would make a great opening for a novel, but the story would require a strong central character. But whom? Conan Doyle quickly decided that Holmes would be the most fitting protagonist. ‘Why should invent a character,’ he said, ‘when I have him already in the form of Holmes?’ Sherlock’s cold scientific mind would prove to be the perfect counterpoint against the supernatural terror of the phantom hound. As always Holmes would be accompanied by his down-to-earth, no-nonsense, narrator – Doctor John Watson. There was just one thing, and that was that Holmes was still dead! On this point Conan Doyle remained adamant. Instead the story would be set before the great detective’s fatal showdown with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Boyed-up with enthusiasm Conan Doyle wrote to his mother explaining how Fletcher Robinson and he were ‘going to do a small book together’ and that it would be ‘a real creeper’. 

      After his Norfolk holiday, and a brief couple of weeks in London, Conan Doyle headed for Devonshire. For the first eight days he stayed with the Fletcher Robinson’s at Park Hill House, their home near Newton Abbot. There he met Henry (or Harry as he preferred to be called) Matthews Baskerville, who was the family’s young coachman and groom. Harry, who had been in service with the Fletcher Robinson’s since he was fifteen, would later claim that he had been the inspiration for Sir Henry Baskerville. But as with the hound itself, there are others believed to be the source of the cursed Baskerville’s featured in the book. Harry would later recall how ‘Mr Doyle and Bertie’ would spend evenings in the billiard-room ‘long into the night, writing and talking’. With Fletcher Robinson as his guide, Conan Doyle made frequent trips onto the moor, soaking up its atmosphere. Then as now Dartmoor, though isolated, has numerous farm dwellings, but in Hound it is portrayed as a vast untamed wilderness, with bogs, tors and prehistoric settlements. From Park Hill the pair then moved seventeen miles west to the Rowe’s Dutchy Hotel in Princetown, which they made as a base while researching the main locations featured in the book.

      In his original manuscript Conan Doyle included real people and places, but then thought better of it and they were quickly fictionalised.  The Hound of the Baskervilles was serialised in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902, raising the magazine’s circulation to thirty thousand copies, much to the delight of shareholders. Conan Doyle didn’t do too badly either, being paid £100 per thousand words. So anticipated was this new Sherlock Holmes story that people had to queue just to get a copy. George Newnes published it in book form in June 1902. Holmes was back – despite what his creator may say. In fact the writing was on the wall; the Hound whetted the public’s appetite so much that a year later Holmes was back again - this time for good - in The Empty House. What followed were three more collections of short stories and another novel, The Valley of Fear (published in 1915).

      It was during the 1950s that fans began to speculate where exactly the  hound had originated; which of Britain’s Black Dogs was the source behind Stapleton’s canine monster? Until then it had been widely assumed that Dartmoor was the sole source behind the fiendish hound. With its tales of Whist Hounds and legends such as that of the wicked Sir Richard Cabell (or Capel) – who pursued his half-beaten wife across the more, before murdering her and killing her pet dog, which later hunted him for the rest of his life – there was no question of Dartmoor not being the sources of inspiration. However, other legends of the hound materialised. One of the strongest contenders came from the Welsh borders.

      Near the village of Hay-on-Wye lived another branch of the Baskerville family at a huge country house called Clyro Court (now a hotel). The family’s coat of arms shows the head of a wolfhound with a spear through it mouth and five drops of blood. According to the family legend during the War of the Roses, a faithful hound had tried to warn his master that the enemy were at the gates. Baskerville, instead, became so infuriated with the dog’s whining that he drove the shaft of a spear through the poor creature – only to discover that the enemy were indeed at the gates! After that every time a member of the family died the hound was seen the night before, complete with spear. Conan Doyle allegedly – I say allegedly as there is no evidence to substantiate or disprove the claim – visited the Welsh borders sometime during the late 1890s, saw the coat of arms and visited the family at Clyro Court. After hearing the family legend he asked if he could use their name for a story he was planning. They acquiesced on the condition that he relocated his story to avoid any stigma and ward-off bothersome tourists. The Hound of the Baskervilles, it seems, was not good for their reputation.

      According to the people of Herefordshire, however, it was the Baskervilles of Eardisely Castle, near the market town of Kington that were the inspiration. Here too was a family legend involving a phantom dog – this time a huge black boarhound. This branch of the Baskervilles married into another local family – the Vaughans of Hergest (pronounced ‘Hargest’) court, who just happen to be their neighbours. One local legend tells how Thomas Vaughan rode around the countryside terrorising the locals until his death in 1409. Afterwards, in strangely similar circumstances to that of Black Shuck, he was said to have appeared in Kington market as a black bull and devastated the local church. The spectre of his equally nasty dog could still be seen dragging its chain whenever there was a death in the family. However, it’s the Vaughans and not the Baskervilles that this particular hound was originally attached too. Over time it seems it has been transferred from one family to another.

      There were also other Herefordshire connections to the book: a family of landowners called Mortimer lived just outside Kington (indeed, Mortimer is a big name in the area), and there was also a hamlet called Stapleton. Coincidence? Possibly – possibly not? But there is something else to consider, and that is Kington and Eardisely are only a few miles from Clyro Court. So if Conan Doyle did visit the Baskervilles there then it’s not that inconceivable that he made the short trip across the English border into Herefordshire. However, an article that appeared in the October 1930 issue of The Strand Magazine makes it pretty clear as to which branch of the Baskervilles Conan Doyle was thinking of when constructing the novel.

      Written by the then editor, Herbert Green Smith, it claimed that Fletcher Robinson’s main contribution to the story had been to ‘draw the attention of Conan Doyle to the tradition of the fiery hound in a Welsh guide-book’. If true then it means Harry Baskerville’s claim as the inspiration for Sir Henry looks unlikely. Furthermore, an inscription inside a first edition copy of the book presented to him by Fletcher Robinson reads: ‘To Harry, with apologies for using the name’. That’s the name, and not your name. So which branch of the Baskervilles was it? Well the case for the Welsh branch of the family is strengthened further by Conan Doyle’s note to his mother. Sent from Cromer, he informs her that the title for his ‘creeper’ will be called ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. This clearly demonstrates that he had come across the name before his trip to Devonshire. True, Fletcher Robinson could have mentioned his groom during their stay in Norfolk, but what is more likely is that he had come across the name in that same guidebook.

      Harry Baskerville later claimed he had never heard of the Welsh or Hereford Baskervilles, or their hounds. Honestly, there is no reason to doubt him on that point. Today The Hound of the Baskervilles is considered by many as the greatest detective story in English literature. Not once during its history has it been out of print. It is a classic that ranks amongst the great gothic novels of the 19^th century. Titles such as: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And like them the Hound has been adapted for cinema and television on numerous occasions, some good; others not so.

      Black Shuck and the spectral hounds of Dartmoor probably did play their part in the story’s development; writers after all draw their inspiration from a variety of sources. The story of Richard Cabell, for example, echoes the legend of Hugo Baskerville at the start of the story. But it’s more likely that we owe our thanks to a Welsh guidebook and the legend of a Welsh wolfhound – a wolfhound that went on to become a bestseller.

Copyright © Marting Charlton, 2015. 
Originally published in the May/June 2009 issue of The New Writer. This edited version, with new material added, written in December 2014. The copyright on all images used has expired and are now in the public domain.