In later life, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859shy;-1930) revealed that the main inspiration for Sherlock Holmes (the greatest detective never to have lived) was Joseph Bell, his old teacher at Edinburgh University's medical faculty, whose methods of minute deduction and objective analysis informed Dr. Conan Doyle's own career as (among other things) an "eye specialist". A surgeon named Watson, as warm-hearted as Bell was austere, supplied the template for Holmes's loyal friend Dr. Watson. In Conan Doyle's parallel career as a writer, though, begun as a student, he repeatedly probed what a later collection called "Tales of Twilight and the Unseen": his earliest surviving story was about a "Haunted Grange" (1878), while his final works from the 1920s include a series of tracts promoting Spiritualism and the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden. InThe Hound of the Baskervilles(1902), written exactly midway through his career, Conan Doyle resurrected his great "specialist in crime" shy; and dramatized a lifetime's obsession with the supernatural. Joining him in the ancient and treacherous landscape of the Devonshire Moors are a cast of gentleman scientists: as well as his faithful chronicler Dr. Watson, we meet another medic, Dr. Mortimer, a self-confessed "dabbler in science"; the lawyer Frankland, an amateur astronomer; and the Darwinian butterfly-collector Stapleton, whose mania for logical classification rivals Holmes's own. But that is only half the story. For what can rational science do to help Sir Henry, the new incumbent of Baskerville Hall, escape the ancestral curse of the phantom Hound that has claimed his uncle's life? Why are the servants behaving so strangely? And who is the mysterious figure glimpsed through Frankland's telescope? This atmospheric graphic novel adaptation byIan EdgintonandI.N.J. Culbardshy; the team behind this series's acclaimedPicture of Dorian Grayshy;will keep you guessing...