What one reviewer at amazon said about Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles:
My first foray into the work of the most famous detective novelist in English literature was both better and worse than I expected it would be. Doyle writes in fascinating detail, but ultimately his means of plotting "The Hound of the Baskervilles" will slightly disappoint today's readers.
The best thing about this novel is the world that the author creates in and around it, a world replete with mystery and unidentifiable threat and foreboding. Characters are drawn early and drawn well, usually via a pseudo-scientific narrative that presents visible traits or facts and then draws conclusions from there. In so doing, Doyle fits himself snugly into the realist tradition going back at least as far as Balzac's earliest novels, but Holmes' pre-occupation with scientific method pushes this even further until he becomes a sort of storyteller within a story; each clue leads to a supposition that is just as often speculative fiction as it is right on the money. The effect of this is one of the necessary components of great detective fiction: that is, we readers are presented with solutions that are not correct and that necessarily keep us reading until we get the correct one. Doyle does this well.
However, it's another necessary component of today's detective fiction that is missing in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and that this reader missed dearly: the right solution, carefully and mischievously tucked into the narrative along the way. Part of why we read detective stories is to see whether we are as good at solving them as the detective in the story is, and Doyle refuses to allow us to do that. I don't want to give the ending away, but I will say by way of complaint that it comes from left field, and in such a way that the reader never could have guessed it. The writer of such a tale would today be accused of lazy emplotment. The best counter-example to this is the masterful job done by someone like Scott Turow; the power of "Presumed Innocent" is largely that, when the mystery is revealed, we realize that we should have seen it all along, just like the protagonist did (although 99% of us DON'T see it all along, because Turow is that subtle). We have been teased and held in the dark not just by Turow, but by the narrator we have come to trust. When the plot is done right, the ending should feel like an ending to the story we've just been told, and not the introduction of something completely new.
Despite that fact--the fact that Doyle won't let me play detective--"The Hound of the Baskervilles" is an enjoyable read and offers insight into the earliest avatars of today's most popular type of fiction.
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