8. The Hound of the Baskervilles resulted from a chance encounter with a journalist
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a trained physician who reached worldwide fame with his Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Doyle based his character of Sherlock Holmes after one of his teachers from medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell. Known for his emphasis on observation in making a medical diagnosis, Bell could infer someone’s recent activities just by observing them; he later worked with forensic experts on murder investigations, including the Jack the Ripper case. After eight years of writing Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle ended his series with Holmes’ death in the story “The Final Problem,” published in 1893.
The author shocked his fans by killing off their favorite character, and the public demanded another Sherlock Holmes story. Returning home from volunteering as a physician during the Second Boer War, he befriended the English journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson on the ship. A year later, when Doyle and Robinson met again in Devon, England, they decided to collaborate on a novel. The journalist shared folklore stories of the seventeenth-century squire Richard Cabell, who had sold his soul to the Devil. After Cabell’s death in 1677, the townspeople of Devon reported seeing hellhounds, or ghost figures of black dogs, around his grave.
In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle recounted the legend in the background story of Hugo Baskerville, who was killed by hellhounds after he cursed his family by making a deal with the Devil. Although Robinson reportedly was supposed to collaborate on this particular work, there is much debate on how much input the journalist had on the story. Although Doyle acknowledged his friend’s contributions, he seemingly backtracked later, in 1907, claiming that “My story was really based on nothing save a remark of my friend Fletcher Robinson’s that there was a legend about a dog on the moor connected with some old family.”