Introducing: The Book Club

0:03Hello, it is Richard and Marina and we have a very special guest today, don't we Richard? We do indeed. We are joined by, I don't know if you know the podcast, The Rest is History. Heard of it. Yeah. Dom Sandbrook from that show. Oh. You know him? The one who isn't married to Zendaya. Yeah. He has a new podcast. I absolutely love this podcast, by the way. Hello, Dominic. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's a big fan of the show. It's a big treat to finally come on. Well, I'm very excited to talk about The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is one of your ones coming up, I believe.

0:37Is that right? Yeah, it is. So a bit of background. Tabby and I worked on The Rest is History for a long time. And we used to bicker about books a great deal. So we did a few bonus episodes for The Rest is History Club. And you'll probably remember the scenes of people sobbing with joy in the streets, huge crowds assembling, just how much people enjoyed those episodes. so we then decided to roll it out as its own show which we've been doing for a few weeks and the hound of the baskervilles was always quite high on the list of books that we would do because i know joey your producer was slacking off the hound of the baskervilles in the email chain beforehand i mean he's a liability well it was an incorrect opinion i believe joey's a great man but he's not flawless no none of us is perfect richard and that's true joey let himself down with that because i think the hand of the basketballs is great i think it's the most popular sherlock holmes story for a very good reason because it's the blend of the the supernatural and the rational and i think that's the tension at the heart of it that people always really enjoy why did he not call your podcast bookbicker bookbicker yeah uh i just think the alliteration would be annoying okay well listen i've been in the business a long time but uh that's fine i think it's a ron seal title the book club no it's not the technical term it does what it says on the Tim you know what it's about it's a it's a people talking about books that's all it is but that you do with the hand of the basketball as well if I can do a link like that oh that's good and I'll tell you didn't he develop it slightly with like a newspaper man someone from the daily express at the time because it's so like those stories you know every summer there's a story that there's a panther on on the dartmoor or whatever it is like that and I'm always like oh my god this story is so ridiculous anyway let me have a quick look at it and about halfway done And I'm like, no, actually, no, because it, no, it could, it could really, there could really be one.

2:26And actually, I think that's what it is. But it's always a cat next to a tree, but the tree is smaller than you think it is. Yeah, yeah, the Beast of Bodmin. Yeah, but you think you'll like that. But then after a while, you start thinking, well, I don't know, maybe there's something in this. And I always feel that when I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles, that you start thinking, okay, of course, there's not some hellhound, at least, or the thing. And after a while, you're thinking, actually, maybe there is. I don't know. That's it. So you're dead right. Now, before I came on the show, I mentioned to you, to your horror, that this was like coming on North Norfolk Digital.

2:55And actually, it was born in North Norfolk. So Alan Partridge's hinterland, for those people who don't know. So Arthur Conan Doyle, he'd killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893. And then in 1901, he's on holiday with this bloke called Fletcher Robinson, who, as you say, is a journalist. And they went on a golfing holiday, I think at Cromer. And basically, it's pouring with rain or it's too windy. So they sit inside. They've got nothing to do. and Fletcher Robinson says, oh, would you like to hear a story about a big black dog on a moor? And he tells Conan Doyle this story. Now, Richard, as a man who makes a considerable amount of money from writing books, you'll enjoy this element of the story.

3:32Is the art for me more than that, Don? But go on. Of course it is. I realise that. But there must be a tiny part of you that enjoys the royalties. Anyway, Conan Doyle listens to this story and he says, oh, that's brilliant. And he writes to the Strand magazine, he says, which had always published Sherlock Holmes. and he says to the Strand Magazine, look, you know, I'd like to write you this story about a black dog on a moor. I can do it for X amounts of money and it's a lot of money. He says, or I could charge you double, but I could put Sherlock Holmes in it. That's good. They had to go and ask the directors of the magazine for permission to basically break their, you know, break their budgetary guidelines or whatever to give Conan Doyle all this cash.

4:09And then he sold it to America. And of course they said, yeah, brilliant. If you've got Sherlock Holmes in, we'll pay you loads. So is it a sort of prequel? because it's before without, I don't know if I'm allowed to do Sherlock Holmes spoilers. It does seem this stage that people being prissy about Sherlock Holmes spoilers is a bit ridiculous. But it's after he's died in the final problem and before he comes back. So is this a prequel? At the moment of this story, it's a prequel and you're sort of saying he's still dead, but this is something that happened earlier in his life before he decides to.

4:39Exactly. Because the beauty of having Dr. Watson tell the stories, you know, retrospectively, is that if Conan Doyle wanted, he could put in loads of old stories about Sherlock Holmes, couldn't he? So that's the way it works. He does this. It's a tremendous success. And then Conan Doyle thinks, maybe I could bring Sherlock Holmes back. Hence, you get the empty house and then the return of Sherlock Holmes and all of this kind of thing. So, yeah, it's a great moment in franchise revival. Yeah. This is almost multiverse. Yeah. Before he thinks, actually, anything can be anything. We'll just do whatever we like to bring the old gang back.

5:16Exactly. But it is because he'd been so enormously successful with Holmes, hadn't he? And you can absolutely understand why there comes a point where you think, I have to kill him because I am more than this. If you're Arthur Conan Doyle, you think, I am not Sherlock Holmes. I am a real man and I have real talents and I can write real stories. And Holmes has become bigger than he is. So you absolutely see why you would kill someone like that. Completely. But then you have a few more years of maturity and mortgage paying, I guess. and you do think, do you know what? Maybe it's great that I created someone who's bigger than me.

5:47Maybe this is the greatest thing I've ever done and ever will do and you bring him back. That's like Leonard Nimoy's two autobiographies, the first of which is called I Am Not Spock and the second of which is called I Am Spock. It turns out I was Spock all along. This is a very camp story though, isn't it? That's what I like about it. It's a gothic sort of camp. It's been done quite comedically. I mean, didn't Peter Cook and Dudley Moore do one? They did. Yeah, I think, well, I suppose the essential bromance is quite camp, isn't it? The two blokes living together, bickering over, like, Holmes has got a chemical experiment that goes wrong and he's playing his terrible violin and stuff.

6:25There's something, I mean, obviously online, you know, you can fall down a massive rabbit hole of the sort of Holmes and Watson fan fiction. Oh, it's huge. The longer the evening draws on, the darker and more disturbing that fan fiction becomes. Holmes-o-eroticism. yeah well there's a lot of that stuff there's a and of course goal hanger has its own homes and watson fan fiction because it does the sherlock and co podcast oh god i thought you were going to say that people are writing slash fiction about rory and allister and i was like i so need to i so need to read it okay sorry wow i'm actually the minute we're finished with this going to go and see if someone has done that the goal hanger multiverse fan fiction surely marina with micah richards and rory stewart that's what people want to see as as a writer particularly as a writer of serials what is my setup and when you've got something like the Thursday Murder Club I've got four people who are very very different to each other I've got four different voices I know everywhere I can go I can take whatever story you want to give me and I know that I have an engine that will take me wherever I want to go the envy I have for Conan Doyle here is exactly what you're saying which is he's got this unbelievable sort of omnipotent hero in the middle of this book who would become absolutely unbearable actually if you're just writing a story from his perspective.

7:38And then he's got this slightly more taciturn, junior kind of colleague who writes down all the stories. And that's the genius of it. Because any time Conan Doyle, as you say, when Fletcher Robinson, by the way, I love people from Victorian era with two surnames as their name. When he says, oh, there's this beast and it's on the moor, he immediately, he can start writing the first Watson chapter. he's got the voice he knows exactly what that is and he's got the juxtaposition between the two people any story can fit into that format i'm very envious of that that's such a lovely thing to have as a writer but you know the interesting thing though is that the way that it always works and it works this way in the hand of the baskervilles watson tells the story but holmes is off stage for the vast majority of the book so he's he's it's exactly as you say richard he's too potent he's too omniscient and too insightful and too powerful a character so you basically to have any narrative tension Holmes has to be in some mad disguise as a farmhand or something and shoved to the margins because otherwise he'll solve the case too early so that's and it reminds me a little bit we did another thing we did on the book club was the code of the Worcesters yeah P.G.

8:52Woodhouse and in that as well it's the same thing that Jeeves they have to find a way P.G. Woodhouse has to find a way to get Jeeves who's the kind of Sherlock Holmes and you know the sort of parallel to get him off stage to have him distracted by something so that the adventure can continue and then bring him on two chapters before the end to solve the whole thing and that's exactly what happens in the hand of the basketballs so much fiction is done like so much tv fiction or particularly comedy you think yeah even though the bosses are completely absurd we won't set it amongst the book it's got to be the middle management level yeah and that's why it works so well and there's there's an economic reason why Sherlock Holmes endures and is so enormous and that's of course because he's out of copyright yeah which means that anyone can make any version of any Sherlock Holmes story that they wish that is why there's so many movies why there's so many tv series you and I could do a a Sherlock adaptation if we chose to but unfortunately we're not as talented as Guy Ritchie which one would be Holmes and which would be Watson that's the question that's hung over the rest of his entertainment from the beginning no oh I think I think you know the answer to that I'm I'm so sub-Watson.

9:54And Marina is Holmes. No, no, I think you might. You're respectively Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson. Yes, there you go. Yeah, I'm Mrs. Hudson. You're absolutely right. You spotted that. I've got to say, I would love a deerstalker though. And, you know, the cape and stuff like that. So I think costume-wise, I would have to nab that particular one. Okay, listen, I'm very comfortable with that. All right. So without further ado, we're going to play you a clip from our episode of the book club on The Hound of the Baskervilles. And we hope you enjoy it.

10:25Yeah, no, it's a great book. I think it's a wonderful book. I don't think anyone listening to this will be surprised by saying this because it's a book that people feel very fondly about. Yeah, I think it's the combination. I know you I know we've talked about this, the combination of the coziness of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the familiarity of the formula, the fact that we're in safe hands with them, but also, as you say, the supernatural, sort of horrific mystery of the Hound on the Moors. I mean, that's something that really sticks in your mind. There's more action in this than actually Wuthering Heights.

11:00There is. Yeah, much, much more. So for people who haven't read The Hound of the Baskervilles and are sort of puzzled why we're so enthusiastic about it, we'll give a bit of the plot, won't we? But we won't give the end away. We are going to be incredibly disciplined in this podcast and not talk about the villain too much. We will not be revealing the identity of the murderer. So no spoilers for those who will be reading in the future. So we open far from these kind of creepy moors. We open in a reassuringly familiar scene. And that is 221B Baker Street, of course, as always, where the great Victorian detective Sherlock Holmes is in conversation with his loyal friend, flatmate, chronicler, helpmate, Dr.

11:45Watson. And so, I mean, everyone has heard of Sherlock Holmes. Everyone knows about Sherlock Holmes. But he is the most brilliant detective of his age. He's a genius. He's eccentric. And he has a kind of endearingly selective knowledge. So he knows everything about the different types of tobacco ash. But he doesn't know, didn't know, for instance, that planets revolve around the sun. Stuff like that. Which I think is such a clever little detail. And then Dr. Watson is the guy who narrates the story. and Dr. Watson was a former British army surgeon injured during the Afghan wars who goes to live with Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street and the two friends are in conversation at breakfast Holmes is putting Watson through this kind of slightly patronising test to see if he's kind of assimilated what Holmes calls his methods and Watson is trying to analyse the character of a mysterious doctor who's called earlier that day purely by studying his walking stick and he does this pretty well but you know not even nearly well enough to um to please Holmes who then kind of blows him out the water with his own takes or conclusions Holmes is unbelievably condescending isn't he yeah so um Watson is a bit embarrassed isn't he because Holmes has made a fool of him but that's basically set the tone perfectly it's reminded us of the the dynamic between them because as we shall discuss there has been a bit of a hiatus in the Sherlock Holmes canon.

13:13So this is the return of Sherlock Holmes after a long absence. And it is just classic Sherlock Holmes. Like it's everything you expect. Like the condescension, the way that Sherlock Holmes like picks extraordinary details out that no one else humanly would be able to. There's even a violin. It's just fantastic. So that has set the scene very nicely for the arrival of this guy, this anxious visitor who has come to consult the one man in London, the top consulting detective not just in Britain but in the world who can solve this most serious and extraordinary problem and this is uh he turns out to be a doctor and he's from Dartmoor and he is Dr Mortimer and Dr Mortimer has come to see Holmes because his friend Sir Charles Baskerville has been found dead on the grounds of his estate Baskerville Hall on the sort of fog-wreathed Moors of Devon.

14:08And Dr. Mortimer says, you know, in the newspapers, it was reported as just he died of natural causes. But I think something weird has been going on. My friend was running away from his house towards the Moors, which seems weird. And on his face was an expression of perfect fear. And around him, there were these footprints. And this is one of the most famous passages in the book tabby since you're the great uh dramatic uh performer would you like to read this excellent passage so it's this it's so good it's so good and just literal chills footprints footprints a man or a woman's dr mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered mr holmes they were the footprints of a gigantic hound a gigantic hound wow so the the guy who wrote the french lieutenant's woman john foals great novelist he um said that the title of the next chapter which is the problem must be the least read chapter title in all literature because basically people are so desperate to skip on to find out what happens next they ignore the heading at the top and they move straight on to the text and you are i mean when you see that the footprints of a gigantic hound you are hooked because it's the perfect, it's one of the things about the Sherlock Holmes story is there's always this element of the weird and the kind of a possibility of the supernatural or something utterly inexplicable.

15:36That's the hook that draws you in. Even at this moment, you know, the cogs are turning in Holmes' mind and he's probably figured it all out. Yeah. But of course we haven't. So then after this, Mortimer gives him this manuscript and we learn about the curse of the Baskervilles. And this is a legend surrounding the family in question of Sir Charles Baskerville in which an ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, was murdered by a gigantic hellhound who kind of came for him after Sir Hugo himself committed kind of a terrible crime against a young maiden. And the curse is said to have dogged the... Yeah, do you notice that?

16:12Yeah, that's it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm here for a reason. It's said to have haunted every Baskerville ever since, with several members of the family dying under strange circumstances. And Sir Charles lived in fear of this. He was terrified of them all. And then we are introduced to his nephew and heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, who in a very, very classic Sherlock Holmes way has travelled from America to take up his fortune and his estate. And he's, I find him quite an amusing character. He's a sturdy man with a pugnacious face, but alert, brave and practical. And there's this really funny moment when he and Watson have to rush out to confront a terrifying murderer living wild on the moors.

16:54And he's armed with nothing more than a riding crop. But that's because he's a hardy sort of stalwart soul who's been in North America, hasn't he? He's been in the US and in Canada. Yes. And so he's another, as you said, he's a very familiar figure in the sort of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle world of the sort of the guy who's gone out to the British Empire or to, you know, similar parts and has been outdoors. He's got a ruddy face. He's a man's man. He's young and he's vigorous and all this kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. But because of this, because he's young and vigorous, he is determined to live in the hall despite the warnings, despite the curse, despite the fact that Holmes himself fears for his safety.

17:36But then while still in London, mysterious things start happening. He sent this warning with words cut out from yesterday's times with only the word more written in ink. And it's as you value your life or your reason, keep away from the more. and then his boot mysteriously disappears from his hotel and you love this detail don't you this is the best part for you but again that's the kind of really weird bizarre detail that sticks in your mind so when you first read this as a child so I read this when I was I don't know um 10 or 11 or something and it's sort of a sort of abridged kids version and it really stuck in my mind that his boot had been stolen who would steal one boot now we find out the reason later on of course this is the kind of detail that Sherlock Holmes loves yes because he's able to now you know create the sort of put the puzzle together with the missing boot and the words cut out of the times and the mysterious hellhound and the curse and all of this kind of thing but interestingly at this point Watson says well I'm going to go off to Dartmoor with Sir Henry to find out what's going on but Sherlock Holmes doesn't go because there's a big blackmail case in London and he has to stay behind and deal with that.

18:48So Holmes, our hero, is taken out of the narrative, isn't he? Yeah, it's left to Watson to help Sir Henry and kind of solve the case and report back to Holmes everything that he witnesses. But they arrive now at the Moor and the house and this is really when we get into this kind of gothic, creepy, supernatural part of the book because it's a really gloomy, desolate place. Anyway, while there, they encounter a cast of characters who all kind of turn out to be suspects to some degree or another. So there's the hall's servants, the Barrymores. It turns out that Mrs. Barrymore's brother is this terrifying convict that's been on the loose and he's hiding on the moor.

19:29And the Barrymores are kind of, you know, protecting him. Do you know what you're not mentioning about the Barrymores? Wait, let me guess. I know you know, and you're not saying it just to be difficult. I've played Frank Barrymore in our sister podcast, Sherlock and Co. Yeah, it was a great performance. I'm the underkeeper. I was so hoping this wouldn't come up. Well, it has. Yeah, okay. So that's the least interesting thing about the Barrymores. Thank you, Dominic. But it's really interesting because this murderer being on the loose is kind of a red herring because we're kind of, at some point or another, kind of encouraged to think of him as maybe a suspect, as maybe like a force of danger, but actually not so.

20:11Or perhaps so. Anyway, then there's this naturalist, Jack Stapleton, and his appearance is oddly familiar. But he has, and he's obsessed with catching butterflies in the net. And he has a beautiful sister, Beryl, with whom Sir Henry quickly becomes infatuated. And Stapleton, her brother, is furious about this, disproportionately, really. And Watson kind of dislikes him from the first. And there's a lot of stuff about people's features in this the way your face looks the way your skull is shaped whatever yeah it says a lot about who you are um and then stapleton's sister the one that sir henry's kind of infatuated with is secretly warning sir henry and watson to get back to the safety of london you know there's danger here um and then there's another character mrs laura lyons she's a woman abandoned by her husband but she's also entangled in some way with the dead sir charles and this stapleton we don't know why so they're there with this strange sort of cast of characters There's all kinds of strange howling on the moors, eerie kind of nighttime howls.

21:12It's genuinely creepy, the howling, I think. It is creepy, completely. Watson is reporting back all the time his clues to homes in London. And then they find there's another man, there's a strange man on the moors. And they spot him, don't they? Or there's reports of him in the distance. In the moonlight, his silhouette. This sort of long, lean figure. Amazingly, Tabby, this turns out to be, Now, I bet you didn't guess this when you first read it. It's Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. Of all people. Extraordinary. So he's been here all along solving the case under our very noses. And poor Watson, who's been kind of writing.

21:48And, you know, large portions of the book are Watson's kind of journal. And Watson has been sending him these long, painstaking letters with every detail of the case. Turns out, like, never even needed them. Holmes had it in hand all along. Poor Watson. This is like me doing my own notes for these episodes. And then it turns out you've actually been doing them all along. I know. I know. It's always so sad. So Holmes says to Watson, you know, I know what's going on here. It's murder, Watson. Refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder. And then they hear the hound one night. They hear the terrifying howl.

22:23They hear a man screaming. Even Holmes, the great man of iron, you know, with his kind of iron will. And rational mind. Yeah. He's shaken to his very soul and they then stumble across the body of the latest victim. Well, if you want to find out who the victim is, the truth behind the hound, all of this kind of thing, we will come to this, won't we? We'll be exploring the story behind the Hound of the Baskervilles. We will. And particularly, there's going to be a lot of stuff. We're the book club, not the kennel club, but there's a lot of stuff about dogs. You've done a lot of dog-based canine research, Tubby.

22:58Yeah, exactly. we hope he's get sponsorship from crafts at some point

23:06well I hope you enjoyed that clip from our episode on the hound of the baskervilles and if you want to hear more and why wouldn't you please search for the book club wherever you get your podcasts