"It's an ugly business, Watson, an ugly dangerous business, and the more I see of it the less I like it."

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.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.