Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle by Daniel Stashower

Author:Daniel Stashower [Stashower, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2014-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

17

The Footprints of a Gigantic Hound

“Holmes!” I cried. “Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive?”

—DR. WATSON IN “THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE”

In March 1901, while the nation was still in mourning over the death of Queen Victoria in January, Conan Doyle opened a fresh round of negotiations with the editor Greenhough Smith. “I have the idea of a real creeper for The Strand,” he wrote. “It is full of surprises, breaking naturally into good lengths for serial purposes. There is one stipulation. I must do it with my friend Fletcher Robinson, and his name must appear with mine. I can answer for the yarn being all my own, in my own style without dilution, since your readers like that. But he gave me the central idea and the local colour, and so I feel his name must appear. I shall want my usual £50 per thousand words for all rights if you do business.”

Bertram Fletcher Robinson, known as “Bobbles” to his friends, was only twenty-eight years old when Conan Doyle took him on as a collaborator. A promising journalist, Robinson had been a correspondent for the Daily Express in South Africa. His friendship with Conan Doyle took hold when they shared a “very joyous voyage” back from South Africa aboard the Briton, whose passenger list included many aristocrats and prominent military figures. “Only one cloud marred the serenity of that golden voyage,” Conan Doyle would recall. “There was a foreign officer on board, whose name I will not mention, who had been with the Boers and who talked with great indiscretion as to his experiences and opinions.”

Chief among these indiscretions was the accusation that the British army, in violation of international law, was using soft-tipped dumdum bullets, which expanded on impact for maximum damage, in the campaign against the Boers. The mere suggestion sent Conan Doyle into a rage, and only Robinson’s intervention averted what might have become a “serious incident.”

The following March, the two men took a short golfing break in Cromer, on the north coast of Norfolk. Robinson, who had a strong interest in the folklore of his native Devon, kept his friend entertained with an account of a local legend involving a large, ghostly hound. This story, it seemed to Conan Doyle, had strong possibilities. He wrote a note to his mother of his plan to do “a small book” with Robinson, and he mentioned the title: The Hound of the Baskervilles.

British folklore has many phantom dogs and hellhounds. The exact origin of the legend that so entranced Conan Doyle has excited much speculation over the years. Because Robinson was a Devonshire man, and The Hound of the Baskervilles came to be set in that region, it is widely assumed that Robinson drew on a tale from his own boyhood. Much later, Greenhough Smith would recall that Robinson had taken his inspiration from a Welsh guidebook. Conan Doyle’s own boyhood would have had its Scottish “bokey hounds.” Whatever the source, the notion of a fiery hound sent Conan Doyle scrambling for his writing materials.

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