Letter to Fletcher Robinson (The Critic)
This article was published in may 1902 in The Critic.
It announces the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, and includes a manuscript letter from Arthur Conan Doyle to Bertram Fletcher Robinson (dated 26 january 1902).
Article
In reviving Sherlock Holmes and writing a new story around the exploits of that magician among detectives, Dr. Conan Doyle undertook a dangerous thing, but in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" he has succeeded in making as thrilling a story as the one that Mr. Gillette has embodied in his play. I understand that THE CRITIC's esteemed contemporary, The Bookman, will devote its May number almost exclusively to the laudation of Dr. Doyle and his detective stories. It is said that the reading of these stories is the absorbing passion of the senior editor of The Bookman, and that when a new number of the Strand arrived with an instalment of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in it he shut himself up in a room with his pipe and the magazine and denied himself to all visitors until he had read the story. I can easily understand one banishing himself with a copy of the complete story in his hand, but not with the scraps that are printed from month to month. It seems to me that "The Hound of the Baskervilles" is a book to take and finish in a reading. Certainly no one can take it up without reading to the end — and woe betide the person who interrupts him.
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The Critic (may 1902, p. 391) -
The Critic (may 1902, p. 392)
