The Hound of the Baskervilles

Chapter by chapter

A structural map of the novel — the shape of the case, not its text. Read the full work free at Project Gutenberg.

1. Ch. 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes A visitor's forgotten walking-stick lets Holmes and Watson trade deductions about its owner before the man himself arrives. 🎩 The surprise: Holmes lets Watson read the stick first, praises him, then gently corrects every error — teaching the method by contrast, and by his own quiet superiority.
2. Ch. 2: The Curse of the Baskervilles Dr Mortimer reads out the seventeenth-century manuscript of the hellhound that ran down the wicked Hugo Baskerville on the moor. 💡 Lesson: Holmes weighs the legend coolly against the facts, refusing to let a ghost story stand in evidence — the rational frame held ready against the gothic.
3. Ch. 3: The Problem The modern fact behind the legend: Sir Charles found dead of terror, and near the body the footprints of a gigantic hound. 🔍 Method: Holmes seizes on the detail Mortimer almost held back — that Sir Charles had stood waiting at the gate, and that the prints were a hound's and some distance from the body.
4. Ch. 4: Sir Henry Baskerville The heir arrives in London to find an anonymous warning pasted from newsprint, and a brand-new boot stolen from his hotel room. 🔍 Method: Holmes reads the warning note like a document — words clipped from that day's Times leader, the address written in a hotel, a faint scent of jessamine — deducing an educated, hurried sender and a woman nearby.
5. Ch. 5: Three Broken Threads A bearded man shadows Sir Henry from a cab, and Holmes's London leads run out one by one. 💡 Lesson: even Holmes hits dead ends; rather than force them, he sends Watson to Dartmoor as his eyes and works the case unseen.
6. Ch. 6: Baskerville Hall The party reaches the brooding hall on the fog-bound moor, with an escaped convict loose in the dark somewhere beyond the windows. 💡 Lesson: the setting does half the storyteller's work — Doyle lets dread and isolation build before any evidence, because atmosphere is a tool.
7. Ch. 7: The Stapletons of Merripit House Watson meets the mild naturalist Stapleton and his striking "sister", and learns to fear the Grimpen Mire that swallows ponies whole. 🎩 The surprise: the harmless butterfly-hunter and his sister will prove the hidden engine of the whole case — the danger wears the blandest face on the moor.
8. Ch. 8–10: Watson's Reports & Diary Told through Watson's letters and journal: the Barrymores signalling into the night, the sobbing in the house, the convict on the tor, and a second, unknown watcher out on the moor. 🔍 Method: with Holmes seemingly absent, Watson conducts the real investigation and files the evidence — the reader ranks the suspects alongside him, in real time.
9. Ch. 11: The Man on the Tor Watson tracks the mysterious second man to his stone hut among the ancient dwellings and lies in wait to confront him. 🎩 The surprise: the stranger living rough on the moor is Holmes himself, who has been there in secret all along — the novel's great reveal, and the pay-off for his "absence".
10. Ch. 12: Death on the Moor A body is found broken at the foot of the rocks, dressed in convict's clothes — but it is not the convict. 🎩 The surprise: the dead man is wearing Sir Henry's cast-off wardrobe; the hound was set on the wrong scent, and the intended victim is still alive by pure chance.
11. Ch. 13–14: Fixing the Nets / The Hound The trap is baited with Sir Henry crossing the moor alone; in the fog the great hound is shot down mid-leap, and Stapleton flees and vanishes into the mire. 🔍 Method: Holmes strips the demon to chemistry — a real, half-starved dog daubed with phosphorus to glow — and the "impossible" beast becomes something that can be shot.
12. Ch. 15: A Retrospection Back in Baker Street, Holmes lays out Stapleton's concealed Baskerville descent and the inheritance scheme behind the whole haunting. 💡 Lesson: the hell-hound was always a human motive — greed — dressed in a family legend engineered to stop a weak heart without leaving a mark.