Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles

By Pierre Bayard

A playfully brilliant re-creation of one of the most-loved detective stories of all time; the companion book no Holmes fan should be without.

Eliminate the impossible, Holmes said, and whatever is left must be the solution. But as Pierre Bayard finds in this dazzling reinvestigation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, sometimes the master missed his mark. Using the last thoughts of the murder victim as his key, Bayard unravels the case, leading the reader to the astonishing conclusion that Holmes - and, in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle - got things all wrong: The killer is not at all who they said it was.

Part intellectual entertainment, part love letter to crime novels, and part crime novel in itself, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong turns one of our most beloved stories delightfully on its head. Examining the many facets of the case and illuminating the bizarre interstices between Doyle's fiction and the real world, Bayard demonstrates a whole new way of reading mysteries: a kind of "detective criticism" that allows readers to outsmart not only the criminals in the stories we love, but also the heroes — and sometimes even the writers.

Reviews for Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong:

"The author of the intriguing Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? which revealed that Agatha Christie got the identity of the killer wrong, tackles another classic. Here he looks at Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles, reexamining the facts and concluding that, based on the evidence presented in the novel, Holmes fingered the wrong culprit. The most intriguing thing about the book is that Bayard bases his conclusion that Holmes got it wrong on a close reading of the novel and a sharply reasoned appraisal of the characters' actions and Holmes's own interpretations of them. This is a fascinating approach to literature (fans of Jasper Foorde's Thursday Next novels will be thrilled), and readers familiar with the Holmes canon will see that Bayard, like Holmes, is also capable of clear-headed reasoning and intuitive leaps. By asking readers to look at The Hound of the Baskervilles and its hero from a new angle, Bayard rewards them with a new appreciation of the story, its hero, and its creator.—David Pitt, Booklist