Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years-killed of in another story-when Arthur Conan Doyle decided to bring the famous detective back for a new story that he told friends was turning into "a real creeper". The tale about the chilling re-animation of a curse haunting the Baskerville family since Medieval times, wherein a supernatural beast stalks the gloomy moors, would be the most sensationally successful of all the Holmes stories, and a century later, it is still the most thrilling of them all. Full of moody atmospherics, suspicious characters, and dramatic discoveries, The Hound of the Baskervilles also shows off something often overlooked about Doyle: his wonderful prose. Presented here as it first appeared in The Strand magazine in 1901, this great mystery still strikes many as the best ever written.