The footprints of a gigantic hound

     John O'Connell's The Baskerville Legacy: A Novel is a suitably bluff account, based on real events, of the dealings of the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a collaboration which led to the creation of the story which would become one of Conan Doyle's best known Sherlock Holmes cases, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

    Subtitled A Confession, it takes the form of a document written by Robinson, but with a covering letter to his solicitor instructing that the manuscript must remain unread "until Doyle and I and our immediate descendants are dead. I think a hundred years are about right".

    Beginning in July 1900 when the two men meet on the SS Briton, a troop transport ship sailing from Cape Town to Southampton at the end of the Boer War, it's a brief and briskly elegant book about the background to the writing of the famous Baskerville "creeper" concerning a family curse and a demonic hound on bleak Dartmoor, and it paints a recogniseable portrait of the celebrated Doyle while being an excellent entertainment in its own right.

    In his Afterword, John O'Connell goes into some detail about the elements of his novel, i.e. what is fact, what is speculative in the sense of imagined details, outcomes and conversations "which history omitted to record", and what - purely for fun - he has made up. He says he has always liked books "that deliberately straddle or blur the line between fact and fiction", and read in this spirit, it's a very enjoyable book with an authentic period setting, some nicely gothic touches, and without being a pastiche, a fittingly Holmesian feel to it. Perfect fireside reading as the nights begin to draw in, though there are a couple of areas in which I'd have liked a little more 'fleshing out', it's a plausible enough piece as a fictional telling of a real working relationship, and a pleasingly neat story which will, I think, appeal to lovers of Susan Hill's ghostly tales such as The Woman In Black, and of course fans of the Holmes stories themselves.

Comments

[Mr Cornflower]

I'm really looking forward to reading it. The relationship between Doyle and Robinson is set out with scrupulous scholarly accuracy in Daniel Stashower's biography of Doyle ("Teller of Tales"), but it will be interesting to read the dramatized version.