The novel starts as Mr Holmes receives a ciphered letter from his informant, one of the trusted people of the sinister Professor Moriarty. The key to the cipher never arrives – apparently the Professor is starting to suspect his underling – so Holmes has to use deduction to read the letter. But he succeeds. A certain Mr Douglas of Birlstone is in danger. And just as he and Dr Watson finish deciphering the mysterious document, Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard enters to announce “that Mr Douglas of Birlstone Manor House was horribly murdered last night”.

Needless to say, Sherlock Holmes undertakes to solve the mystery of his death, so the whole company departs to Birlstone as soon as they finish discussing Professor Moriarty.

Sherlock Holmes succeeds – and not quite in the way we’d expect. Still, when he unravels the mystery, we find out that it has been only the first half of the novel. In the second half the author takes us to the USA of twenty years before, the days of Mr Douglas’s youth, when he was called McMurdo and joined a sinister gang named “The Scowrers”. The gang kept a whole town of Vermissa in terror ruthlessly murdering everyone who stood in their way and always getting acquitted in court. The gang was closely connected with the Eminent Order of Freemen, and McMurdo soon became the Bodymaster’s most trusted man and possible successor. But long before it could happen, a craching blow was delievered to the Scowrers from where they didn’t expect it.

These days we would have called them “the Mafia”, but back then this word meant one particular society in Italy rather than all crimilal societies organised in the same way. But they are no less scary – and the way Conan Doyle describes their organisation, discipline and cynical disregard for the lives of people who were not members of the same gang almost froze my blood. But I wanted to finish the novel if only to find out what would happen to McMurdo and the girl he loved.

The final chapter binds everything together, just as the formidable Professor Moriarty reminds us once again of his presence from behind the scenes. This novel, sadly, has no happy end, but such is life… I’m still glad I’ve read it. Once again, as I always do with detective stories, I’m carefully avoiding spoilers, so those of you, my readers, who haven’t read “The Valley of Fear” yet could do it with all the interest and excitement it deserves.

Ha! Wish I knew! Well, it’s written in Sir Arthur’s amazingly musical English, which, though easy to read, is so charming, old-fashioned and soothing. I have read books by the same author unrelated to Mr Sherlock Holmes and his investigations; I don’t think they are written anywhere as well as the Sherlock Holmes series. I might be biased, being a huge lover of the detective story genre — but that’s neither here, no there. “The Hound of the Baskervilles” stands out even among other Sherlock Holmes stories, and no wonder it has been filmed so many times, especially in the UK, where two different directors did two different films with the same name in 1982 and in 1983 (which means they were working on them almost at the same time) — not to mention all the others, ranging from 1921 to 2002! All those directors and producers must have been sure of success.

Is it due to the natural attractiveness of large animals (similar to the effect dinosaurs have on us)? Is it due to the austere and somewhat sinister charm of the moor, described by the author with such precision that you don’t have to go to England at all, let alone Devonshire, to feel it? Or did Sir Arthur actually surpass his own genius while writing this masterpiece?

It grabs the reader’s attention from the start — with the scary legend of the past — and keeps it till the very end. It contains just the right mixture of action, mystery, love and humour to make sure the reader isn’t going to be tired. It makes us worry beyond words, when Sir Henry’s life is so endangered by the fog that Holmes, Watson and Lestrade barely manage to save him in the last moment, thus turning the novel almost into a thriller — but an old-fashioned, mild one. Still, I don’t know why I’m so attracted towards this particular book.

I should add a few words about the 1981 year’s film shown on TV several times since in my country. It’s quite close to the original plot — as close as a film can get — but with a few charming additions to make it more TV-like. Barrymore, with his unforgettable “Porrige, Sir!”, has made his way into our folklore immediately, becoming part of our proverbs and jokes. This was catering to the common stereotype, of course — we all know the English eat porrige all the time, don’t we? — but it was funny nevertheless. Every boy in our class was talking about nothing else but “The Hound of the Baskervilles” at the time when it was on TV for the first time.