The Hound of the Baskervilles, Oxford World’s Classics (2023)
One complete novel, a moor, a curse, and a beginning, middle and end.
If you only read one Holmes, read the one that is a whole novel and a ghost story at the same time.
You want one complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and you would not mind if it were a little frightening.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the novel as published, with Darryl Jones’s introduction on its supernatural-versus-scientific tension, its colonial background and its folklore landscape.
Changes: nothing in the text; the apparatus adds a note on the text, a bibliography, a chronology and explanatory notes.
Whose story is it?
Watson’s, for long stretches — Holmes sends him to the moor alone, and the book is better for it.
How much time does it ask?
224 pages.
Oxford World’s Classics, second edition, 9 June 2023 — introduction by Darryl Jones.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Read free — Project Gutenberg · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
Common questions
Is The Hound of the Baskervilles a good first Sherlock Holmes book?
Yes, if you want a complete novel rather than short stories. It is 224 pages in the Oxford World's Classics edition, it works on its own, and Holmes is offstage for long enough that Watson carries much of it.
More versions: The Complete Novels and Stories, Bantam Classics (two volumes) · The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford World’s Classics (2025) · The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger