Wanted: deaf-and-dumb dog feeder

Abstract Edmund Wilson scored some easy points against The Hound of the Baskervilles in his amusing essay ‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’ It is not hard to poke holes in this most Gothic of the great detective’s cases. What is more interesting, perhaps, is to see Arthur Conan Doyle himself doing running patchwork on some of those holes, as they became apparent to him while writing and serializing his story in the Strand Magazine. The ‘gigantic hound’ of the title is built up in the reader’s imagination by the horrible legends attaching to it and by the fact that to see it is manifestly to risk death by heart attack (as happens with Sir Charles Baskerville). Holmes and Watson’s first physical encounter with the beast does not disappoint: