Before You Begin

Before you begin.

It begins with a walking stick left behind at Baker Street, and a manuscript dated 1742 that tells of a great hound, "a foul thing, a great, black beast," loosed upon a wicked Baskerville on the moonlit moor. From that single uncanny seed grows one of the most famous mysteries ever written: a baronet dead of fright beside his own gate, an heir summoned from across the sea, and a legend that no rational man can quite explain away.

Arthur Conan Doyle had already tried to be rid of Sherlock Holmes, sending him over a waterfall to his death. Public outcry never forgave him, and here Holmes returns in full force, though for much of the story he is absent and it is the steadfast Dr. Watson who walks alone across Dartmoor, sending his reports back to London. That bold structure, half detective puzzle and half gothic ghost story, is exactly why the novel endures: it lets the supernatural breathe while never abandoning the cold light of reason.

The setting is the true hero's stage. Doyle paints the great Grimpen Mire, the lonely stone huts of prehistoric men, the wind on the tors, and a Baskerville Hall ringed in fog and family curse. Few books have made a landscape feel so alive and so hostile, or made the line between superstition and crime so thrillingly thin.

What follows is an illustrated companion to that world. Step into the gallery to meet the cast, trace the road from Baker Street to the moor, and stand at the edge of the mire before the story carries you in.