From our correspondente in Lewtrenchard, Devon

The hound of the Baskervilles is staring at me, with his back to the great fireplace, as I sit in my armchair inside Lewtrenchard Manor. He has a glossy black coat and the imposing frame of a Great Dane. Outside, night is falling, and the darkness is dun with fog and damp with the humidity that rises from the close-by lake, from the river that crosses the moor, and from the fallen leaves that blanket the swampy ground. No longer stationary, the hound of the Baskervilles now comes close and gently bites the biscuit that I offer with my hand, then carefully licks the crumbs from the floor. “You should see how he behaves with the dachsund”, says the hostess smiling, “She orders him around.” I wonder how Sherlock Holmes would solve that one.
One hundred years ago, with The Hound of the Baskervilles, the world’s most famous detective made his long-awaited comeback. Seven years earlier Arthur Conan Doyle, his creator, had decided to do away with him, and left him to plunge into the Reichenbach Fall in Switzerland while clinging to that most formidable of foes, the funereal Professor Moriarty, the “Napoleon of crime.”
The author’s justification had been: “It’s like having an ancient mariner hanging at my neck. I shall have to kill him before he kills me. This is not murder, it is a case of self-defence.” That year Doyle had lost his father, while his wife, suffering from tubercolosis, had been diagnosed as having only few more months to live. That his readers should be more interested in the events surrounding a fictional character more than in the tragedies striking his creator seemed all the more offensive and preposterous.
Although submerged by an avalanche of letters filled with abuse, he held fast. With Holmes no longer “hanging at his neck”, Doyle travelled, held conferences, wrote doctor stories and novels, fell in love again, and took part in the Boer War as a volunteer medical officer. In short, he lived his own life. When, in 1901, he happened upon the tale of the Baskervilles, he thought that he might make an exception for “poor Sherlock”. Not yet ready to bring him back to life, he set the novel in a period preceding the fatal clash with Moriarty. But success and popularity were such that one year later, in The Empty House, the faithful Doctor Watson found himself facing his friend and maestro, in the guise of a bookseller. “How did you come alive out of that dreadful chasm?” asks Watson. Holmes explains that thanks to his knowledge of baritsu, the Japanese system of wrestling, he managed to free himself of his deadly rival’s grip just before falling into the abyss. He then climbed up a cliff in order to leave no trace and let himself be thought dead by Moriarty’s henchmen, desirous of vengeance. Elementary, one might say. And so the stage was set for a new assortment of adventures. Ironically, years later, Conan Doyle would tell of a letter received from an affectionate but particularly severe reader, who wrote that: “Mr. Holmes may not have been killed by his fall, but he certainly suffered an impairment, because he was never quite the same afterwards.” The Hound of the Baskervilles first appeared in The Strand magazine in instalments published between August 1901 and April 1902. The first instalment had seven reprints, and people would queue in front of the office to get their copy; the average circulation doubled, reaching three hundred thousand copies every time. Since the novel’s publication in book form, it has never ceased to be reprinted, which means that there have been hundreds of editions and that there are millions of copies. There are currently five hundred clubs bearing the name of Sherlock Holmes. The most popular among them has The Hound as its emblem. The Baskerville Hounds of Dartmoor, Devon, was established in 1989 and has hundreds of members in 40 countries; it publishes a yearly bulletin, appropriately named The Hound, and organises the BEAST (Baskerville Ècarté All Stars Tournament) Prize, a world card-game tournament based on the games played by Doctor Mortimer and Sir Henry Baskerville, and the Houndathon, a marathon whose course runs through the moor in which the story is set. The club with the largest number of members (fifteen thousand) is in Japan, while the smallest one is in Great Britain – it’s called The Solitary Cyclist and counts a single member, an elderly lady. The oldest club, The Baker Street Irregulars, named after the mob of street urchins whose services were occasionally employed by Sherlock Holmes, was founded in 1934 in New York City. The most “Italian” club is called A Study in Holmes. And there’s more yet. There have been 19 film versions of the novel in six different languages. A copy of the German version of 1937, Der Hund von Baskerville, starring Bruno Güttner as the detective, was found in Hitler’s shelter at Berchtesgarten. The story goes that the Führer asked to see the film one last time before committing suicide. Nights, fog, hounds, predestination, blood, legends - his own world. “See this? It’s a novel called The Moor, and it has just been published by an American woman who has been our guest for some time. The main character is still Sherlock Holmes, only he’s married and he conducts his inquiries together with his wife...” Sue Murray and her husband James had Lewtrenchard Manor converted into a hotel in 1988 – nine rooms, a lovely Elizabethan garden, gourmet cuisine in a refined setting. “The owner of the manor, Reverend Sabine Baring Gould, was a writer with a locally established reputation. He and Conan Doyle would exchange information and comments on what they read, and this house was probably influential in the description of Baskerville Hall.” Sue Murray is cautious in wording her statement, and rightly so. Holmesians are a clan of pleasant fanatics who study their hero’s life and works as they would those of a person who actually existed, for which reason they consider Doyle’s stories as a source of information on actual events instead of works of fantasy. And so they check distances, they verify descriptions and study every detail to make sure that everything corresponds exactly to what the books say. Following this method of investigation, instead of one they have found six probable Baskerville Halls, plus a dozen possible ones. None of them, of course, has all the features of the original, which was created by combining facts and fantasy, a careful interlacing of things seen, of inventions, transformations and adaptations. Lewtrenchard Manor, for example, lacks the wooded avenue that leads to the entrance (although it does have a lovely trail flanked by beeches that leads from the side of the house to the river); there are no bogs nearby and one doesn’t catch a glimpse of Dartmoor from the windows, contrarily to what happens in the novel. If however, one opens The Hound of the Baskervilles at the description of the house: “the centre was a heavy block of building from which a porch projected…….From this central block rose the twin towers, ancient, crenellated, and pierced with many loopholes. To right and left of the turrets were more modern wings of black granite. A dull light shone through heavy mullioned windows”, the similarities are immediately discernible. And once inside, one can’t help but notice “a fine apartment, ……large, lofty, and heavily raftered with huge baulks of age-blackened oak. In the great old-fashioned fireplace behind the high iron dogs a log-fire crackled and snapped. Then we gazed round us at the high, thin window of old stained glass, the oak panelling,……the coats of arms upon the walls”. As for the first floor, where the guest’s rooms are, here is “a long chamber with a step separating the dais where the family sat from the lower portion reserved for their dependents……A dim line of ancestors, in every variety of dress,……stared down upon us and daunted us by their silent company.” Lewtrenchard Manor dates back to 1600. During the reign of Henry III it belonged to the Trenchard family, and then passed to the Goulds as from 1626. In 1700 part of the building was demolished and part of it was rebuilt. When it came into Reverend Baring Gould’s possession, in 1872, he decided to restore the house to its original shape. Having no confidence in architects, he directed the works himself, and the result was a somewhat eclectic mansion that combined Elizabethan, Bavarian and mediaeval styles. When Conan Doyle went to Princeton, in Devon, Gould was the undisputed authority in local history, as well as a strenuous defender of the parish community. He published 130 books during his lifetime, and fathered 16 children. He composed hymns and wrote novels and stories; he pursued his interests in theology, archaeology, history and local folklore. When Watson talks with Stapleton (the fiend in the novel) about the Neolithic remains found in the area, Conan Doyle is availing himself of the research carried out by Baring Gould (later proven incorrect: modern archaeologists attribute those remains to the Bronze Age). As for the pony that is swallowed in the mire, again with Watson and Stapleton as witnesses, Doyle had in mind Gould’s novel Guevas The Tinner, where that unlucky fate befalls a steer. The novel also contains the description of a wolf tied to a chain and left unfed to make it ferocious, and to which a phosphorescent substance gives a terrifying nocturnal glow... Of course Reverend Gould himself collected tales and legends that were part of the local folklore. The story of a wild hound coming out at night to terrorise the Devon area was well known. Conan Doyle had first heard it from Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a young reporter he had met in South Africa during the Boer War. Doyle and Robinson sailed together from Capetown to Cardiff on board the steamship Briton, and later spent a golfing vacation together at Norfolk, on the west coast. That is when the story of the Baskerville hound began to take shape. But leaving aside sources, borrowings and calques, it the atmosphere of the setting that makes Conan Doyle’s novel a work of art. A stroll around Lewtrenchard Manor or a drive up to the Dartmoor National Park are sufficient to plunge one back into a damp and foggy atmosphere surrounding a wild and ragged landscape, lined by brooks and marked by rocks, boulders and caves alternated with lakes and marshes. Although the region has undergone many changes during the past century due to reclamation works, drainage and the reconversion of land for agricultural use, and the more dangerous features such as quicksand areas have eliminated, the sense of solitude has remained. The nature of the place is distant and unwelcoming, with an individual character of its own – it is unfriendly, and seems to keep the passing visitor under observation, as if ready to strike out at the first sign of uncertainty or the first false move. In the evening, while I am at the manor observing the remains of a small chapel, an enormous shadow looms up in front of me. I have a start, but the shadow is my own, enormously amplified by the light slanting down from one of the turrets. I wisely decide to head towards the house. At the door I am greeted by the hound of the Baskervilles with a lick on the face. Before going to bed I’ll ask Holmes for his deductions on the matter.
(trad.Interpres-Giussano)