Amateur Detective
Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Hound of the Baskervilles" is a literary classic. Featured within its pages is a timeless mystery that showcases the return of Doyle's infamous detective Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick Dr. Watson. In this adventure, they travel to the spooky Grimpen Mire in Dartmoor to attend to the case of the Hound from Hell haunting Sir Henry Baskerville. One notable theme present throughout "Hound" is Doyle's masterful use of descriptives to craft a perfect horror-movie setting for his characters to get lost in and his villains to hide in.
The integral scene to understanding "the sublime" in relation to "Hound" comes when Sherlock, Watson, and Baskerville are riding in the horse-drawn carriage to Baskerville Manor. As the sun sets and the fog begins to settle in across the moors, Watson comes to a greater understanding of what exactly makes the moors so scary:
"Our wagonette had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which as cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky... We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us."
This passage touches on some key aspects of "the sublime", namely terror and the "un-knowable". As Watson and crew descend upon the moors, the readers can almost feel the chill in the air through Doyle's description: surely if I ever found myself heading into a "barren" or "chilling" wasteland in the dark of night, I would be anything but emotionless. As cliché a concept as it is, Doyle transforms the moors into a character of their own, equally as haunting and dangerous as the devilish hound and the escaped convict that hide within the stone huts and foggy cliffs. When Watson relays to the reader that the moors have a habit of "swallowing" people and causing them to disappear without a trace, it calls to mind a monster that is in desperate need for a meal - and as you walk along the wet and muddy grounds of Dartmoor, it isn't hard to imagine that very thing happening to you.
By employing the use of "the sublime" in his description of the dark and foggy moors that surround Baskerville Hall, Arthur Conan Doyle engages the reader in a way that allows them to imagine themselves in place of Watson, a feat that every fiction writer craves. I, for one, am glad that Doyle decided to continue the legacy of Sherlock on instead of killing him off for good - his many adventures have delighted fans ever since their publication! And I do say that fellow is quite dashing - or so I've heard.
Courteously yours,
I.M. Notsherlock
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