The heart attack, Holmes determines, was brought about by the sudden appearance of a large hound, similar to that in a story about a Baskerville family curse. Holmes and Watson are called in to investigate the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, a wealthy squire who has died of a heart attack on the moor. Instead it becomes a story about all “that we were never destined to know,” as Watson muses while looking out upon “the huge morass” of Grimpen Mire.Īll fans of detective fiction are familiar with the plot of Hound of the Baskervilles. The Hound of the Baskervilles is no longer a tale of triumphant ratiocination. Rather than clarifying, Bayard’s criticism plunges the reader further into the mist and morass of the moor. But when you start to multiply solutions, the result is less satisfaction and more disquiet.

If Conan Doyle does not know what is happening in his own book, then who does? Bayard says that the goal of detective criticism is to work out “more satisfying” solutions. It clears up textual inconsistencies and makes new clues and new solutions appear through the illuminating light of reason.īut detective criticism also introduces doubt. Like detective writing, detective criticism revels in its own puzzle-box mechanisms it reveals secrets hidden even from the (supposedly) all-seeing author. “The aim of this method is to be more rigorous than even the detectives in literature and the writers who create them, and thus to work out solutions that are more satisfying to the soul,” Bayard explains in his most famous work of detective criticism: Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Re-opening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles (2008). That’s also the joy to of Pierre Bayard’s virtuoso “detective criticism.” Bayard has written a number of books of criticism in which he rejects the solution offered by famous detective novels, and instead makes the case that a different murderer was responsible for the deaths of Hamlet’s father, or of Agatha Christie’s Roger Ackroyd.

The hound of the sherlock holmes