Baskerville: The Mysterious Tale of Sherlock's Return

By John O'Connell

'"I like the way your mind works," said Doyle. "We should work on something together. Pool our resources. What do you say?" I said I would enjoy that very much.' ---------------- When a young journalist, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, meets his writer hero Arthur Conan Doyle on a troop ship coming back from South Africa, he is delighted - especially when the creator of Sherlock Holmes suggests they collaborate on a 'real creeper' of a story. But the experience will prove traumatic for both of them. And when the result of their labours, The Hound of the Baskervilles, is finally published, it will be credited to one author alone. Based on real events, The Baskerville Legacy is a creeper in its own right: a thrilling, frequently terrifying exploration of friendship and rivalry, love and lust, ambition and the limits of talent. It takes us from the clattering heart of Edwardian London to the eerie stillness of ancient West Country moorland, where a treacherous mire might swallow a man in seconds…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Short Books Ltd
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781780720142

John O'Connell

John O’Connell is a former Senior Editor at Time Out and music columnist for The Face. He is now freelance writing mainly for The Times and The Guardian. He interviewed David Bowie in New York in 2002. He lives in south London.  

Reviews for Baskerville

[michael5rimmer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I like to get something Holmesian each Christmas, and this was 2011's offering.

Being a fictionalised account of the collaboration between Arthur Conan Doyle and Bertram Fletcher Robinson on The Hound of the Baskervilles, I did wonder as I read through quite how much was real and how much fiction. Fortunately, O'Connell provides an Afterword in which all is clarified.

So, an interesting book, which gets better in its second half, when Doyle and Robinson are scouting locations for The Hound in Dartmoor, Robinson's childhood home, and when the creative and personal tensions between them start to surface.

I liked the section dealing with Doyle's (lamentable) dabbling in Spiritualism, and his gullibility and self-deceit as presented in this book seems to be true to the accounts I've read in a couple of biographies.

O'Connell has made Robinson into an interestingly flawed character, which he states in the Afterword is probably far from the truth, but which carries the story forward.

A relatively quick read in a nicely bound volume.