Chapter 1: What is the significance of The Hound of the Baskervilles in literature?
Hello, it is Richard and Marina, and we have a very special guest today, don't we, Richard?
We do indeed. We are joined by, I don't know if you know the podcast, The Rest is History. Heard of it. Yeah. Dom Sandbrook from that show.
Oh.
You know him? Yeah. The one who isn't married to Zendaya. Yeah. He has a new podcast.
I absolutely love this podcast, by the way. Hello, Dominic.
Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's a big fan of the show. It's a big treat to finally come on.
Well, I'm very excited to talk about The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is one of your ones coming up, I believe. Is that right?
Yeah, it is. So a bit of background. Tabby and I worked on The Rest Is History for a long time. And we used to bicker about books a great deal. So we did a few bonus episodes for The Rest Is History Club. And you'll probably remember the scenes of people sobbing with joy in the streets, huge crowds assembling, just how much people enjoyed those episodes.
So we then decided to roll it out as its own show, which we've been doing for a few weeks. And The Hound of the Baskervilles was always quite high on the list of books that we would do because I know, Joey, your producer was slacking off The Hound of the Baskervilles in the email chain beforehand.
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Chapter 2: How did Arthur Conan Doyle come to write The Hound of the Baskervilles?
Book Bicker. Yeah. Yeah.
I just think the alliteration would be annoying, wouldn't it? Okay.
Well, listen, I've been in the business a long time, but that's fine.
I think it's a Ron Seal title, the book club, no? Isn't that the technical term? It does what it says on the tin. You know what it's about. It's people talking about books. That's all it is.
You do with the hand of the basketball as well, if I can do a link like that. Oh, that's good. And I'll tell you, didn't he develop it slightly with like a newspaper man? Someone from the Daily Express at the time. Because it's so like those stories. You know, every summer there's a story that there's a panther on the Dartmoor or whatever it is like that.
And I'm always like, oh my God, this story is so ridiculous. Anyway, let me have a quick look at it. And about halfway done, I'm like... No, actually, no, because there could really be one.
But it's always a cat next to a tree, but the tree is smaller than you think it is. Yeah, the beast of Bodmin.
Yeah, but you think you'll like that, but then after a while you start thinking, well, I don't know, maybe there's something in this. And I always feel that when I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles, that you start thinking, okay, of course there's not some hellhound at least. And after a while you're thinking, actually, maybe there is. I don't know.
That's it. So you're dead right. Now, before I came on the show, I mentioned to you, to your horror, that this was like coming on North Norfolk Digital. And actually, it was born in North Norfolk. So Alan Partridge's Hinterland, for those people who don't know. So Arthur Conan Doyle, he'd killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in The Hound of the Baskervilles?
And he says to the Strand magazine, look, I'd like to write this story about a black dog on a moor. I can do it for X amount of money and it's a lot of money. He says, or I could charge you double, but I could put Sherlock Holmes in it. That's good.
They had to go and ask the directors of the magazine for permission to basically break their, you know, break their budgetary guidelines or whatever to give Conan Doyle all this cash. And then he sold it to America. And of course they said, yeah, brilliant. If you've got Sherlock Holmes in, we'll pay you loads.
So is it a sort of prequel? I don't know if I'm allowed to do Sherlock Holmes spoilers. It does seem at this stage that people being prissy about Sherlock Holmes spoilers is a bit ridiculous. But it's after he's died in The Final Problem and before he comes back. Exactly. Is this a prequel?
At the moment of this story, it's a prequel and you're sort of saying he's still dead, but this is something that happened earlier in his life before he decides to...
Exactly, because the beauty of having Dr. Watson tell the stories retrospectively is that if Conan Doyle wanted, he could put in loads of old stories about Sherlock Holmes, couldn't he? So that's the way it works. He does this. It's a tremendous success. And then Conan Doyle thinks, maybe I could bring Sherlock Holmes back.
Hence, you get the empty house and then the return of Sherlock Holmes and all of this kind of thing. So, yeah, it's a great moment in franchise revival history.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is almost multiverse. Before he thinks, actually, anything can be anything. We'll just do whatever we like to bring the old gang back.
Exactly. But it is because he'd been so enormously successful with Holmes, hadn't he? And you can absolutely understand why there comes a point where you think, I have to kill him because I am more than this. If you're Arthur Conan Doyle, you think, I am not Sherlock Holmes. I am a real man and I have real talents and I can write real stories. And Holmes has become bigger than he is.
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Chapter 4: Why is the character of Sherlock Holmes so enduring?
Cause anytime Conan, as you say, when Fletcher Robinson, by the way, I love people from Victorian era with two surnames as their name. Um, when he says, Oh, there's this beast. And, uh, you know, uh, it's, it's, it's on the more he immediately, uh, He can start writing the first Watson chapter. He's got the voice. He knows exactly what that is.
And he's got the juxtaposition between the two people. Any story can fit into that format. I'm very envious of that. That's such a lovely thing to have as a writer.
But do you know the interesting thing, though, is that the way that it always works, and it works this way in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson tells the story, but Holmes is offstage for the vast majority of the book. So it's exactly as you say, Richard. He's too potent. He's too omniscient and too insightful and too powerful a character.
So you basically, to have any narrative tension, Holmes has to be in some mad disguise as a farmhand or something. and shoved to the margins because otherwise he'll solve the case too early. So that's, and it reminds me a little bit, we did another thing we did on the book club was the Code of the Worcesters.
Yeah. P.G.
Woodhouse. And in that as well, it's the same thing that Jeeves, they have to find a way, P.G. Woodhouse has to find a way to get Jeeves, who's the kind of Sherlock Holmes and, you know, the sort of parallel, to get him off stage, to have him distracted by something so that the adventure can continue and then bring him on two chapters before the end to solve the whole thing.
And that's exactly what happens in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
So much fiction is done, so much TV fiction or particularly comedy. You think, yeah, even though the bosses are completely absurd, we won't set it amongst the butler. It's got to be the middle management level. And that's why it works so well.
And there's an economic reason why Sherlock Holmes endures and is so enormous. And that's, of course, because he's out of copyright. Which means that anyone can make any version of any Sherlock Holmes story that they wish. That's why there's so many movies, so many TV series. You and I could do a Sherlock adaptation if we chose to. But unfortunately, we're not as talented as Guy Ritchie.
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Chapter 5: How does the narrative structure impact the story's tension?
Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.
A gigantic hound. Wow. So the guy who wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles, great novelist, he said that the title of the next chapter, which is The Problem, must be the least read chapter title in all literature. Because basically, people are so desperate to skip on to find out what happens next, they ignore the heading at the top and they move straight on to the text. And you are.
I mean, when you see that, the footprints of a gigantic hound, you are hooked. Because it's the perfect, it's one of the things about the Sherlock Holmes stories, there's always this element of the weird and the kind of a possibility of the supernatural or something utterly inexplicable. That's the hook that draws you in.
Even at this moment, you know, the cogs are turning in Holmes' mind and he's probably figured it all out.
Yeah.
But of course we haven't.
So then after this, Mortimer gives him this manuscript and we learn about the curse of the Baskervilles. And this is a legend surrounding the family in question of Sir Charles Baskerville, in which an ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, was murdered by a gigantic hellhound who kind of came for him after Sir Hugo himself committed kind of a terrible crime against a young maiden.
And the curse is said to have dogged Dogs. Yeah. Do you notice that?
That's it.
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Chapter 6: What role do the supporting characters play in the mystery?
So he's been here all along solving the case under our very noses. And Paul Watson, who's been kind of writing and, you know, large portions of the book are Watson's kind of journal. And Watson has been sending him these long, painstaking letters with every detail of the case. Turns out, like, never even needed them. Holmes had it in hand all along. Poor Watson.
This is like me doing my own notes for these episodes. And then it turns out you've actually been doing them all along.
I know. I know. It's always so sad.
Yeah.
So Holmes says to Watson, you know, I know what's going on here. It's murder, Watson. Refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder. And then they hear the hound one night. They hear the terrifying howl. They hear a man screaming. Even Holmes, the great man of iron, you know, with his kind of iron will.
And rational mind.
Yeah, he's shaken to his very soul. And they then stumble across the body of the latest victim. Well, if you want to find out who the victim is, the truth behind the hound, all of this kind of thing, we will come to this, won't we? We'll be exploring the story behind the hound of the Baskervilles. We will. And particularly, there's going to be a lot of stuff.
We're the book club, not the kennel club, but there's a lot of stuff about dogs. You've done a lot of dog-based canine research, Tavi.
Yeah, exactly. We're hoping to get sponsorship from Kraft at some point. MUSIC
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