'The Hound of the Baskervilles' by Arthur Conan Doyle

I've been on holidays for the last week, and I used some of the extra time on my hands to polish off The Hound of the Baskervilles, which has been sitting unread on my shelf for a couple of years.  You shouldn't need me to tell you that it's a very good book, but it is.  This book is tight.  Every single thread of the plot is essential, and not one detail given is extraneous.  It's easily my favourite of the Sherlock Holmes stories that I've read.

What's striking, though, is that Holmes himself is barely in it.  He's there at the beginning, as the plot is being set up.  He comes in at the end to solve the mystery.  But for about a hundred pages in the middle he's absent, and we follow Dr. Watson's efforts to unravel the mystery.  It's a bold choice, but I feel that in a story of this length it was a necessary one.

It should be noted that most Sherlock Holmes adventures are short stories.  The Hound of the Baskervilles is a novel.  Not a long novel, but a novel nonetheless.  Getting rid of Holmes for a large stretch of the book was essential to maintaining that length and still keeping the character's integrity.  This may be stating the obvious, but Sherlock Holmes is smart.  Most of the time he solves his mysteries within twenty pages or so, and The Hound of the Baskervilles isn't that much more perplexing than other Holmes stories I've read.  If he'd been present, the story should have wrapped up in half the length, or else Holmes would have felt uncharacteristically stupid.  Doyle solved the problem deftly, by taking Holmes out of the equation and allowing the reader to piece together the details of the mystery along with Watson..

At first I was a little miffed at the absence of Holmes, but in retrospect I realise that it's the only way for the novel to have worked.  A writer doesn't always need his star attraction front and centre.  Sometimes what a story needs is for that character to stay in the background for a time, and let the story unfold without him.  It's something to especially consider when writing stories with hyper-competent characters.  Such characters can make life difficult for a writer, in that they can solve a lot of problems with little effort.  This book has taught me that moving them offstage for a while isn't necessarily a bad thing.