The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Simian Method
In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Conan Doyle gives us not the familiar pair of Holmes and Watson, but a less stable and more revealing trio: Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith, an energetic capuchin monkey whose residence at Baker Street is never satisfactorily explained. Holmes refers to him only as “one of my irregulars, though of the arboreal division,” and leaves the matter there.
Watson dislikes him immediately. The feeling is mutual. Watson regards the monkey as an affront to the dignity of detection; Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith regards Watson as a slow rival with accessible waistcoat pockets. Holmes, who is amused by anything that produces evidence, encourages both just enough to make the rivalry permanent.
The case begins in the usual way, with Dr. Mortimer bringing to Baker Street the legend of the Baskerville curse: the ancestral tale of a monstrous hound haunting the family line, and the recent death of Sir Charles Baskerville on the lonely Devonshire moor. Holmes receives the narrative with dry composure. Watson receives it with skepticism tinged by literary excitement. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith receives it by stealing Mortimer’s walking stick, climbing onto the mantelpiece, and examining the bite marks in the wood with an air of medical authority.
The outrage proves useful. Holmes observes that the monkey is not merely playing with the stick, but sniffing it repeatedly and recoiling from a patch near the handle. Mortimer explains that the stick had accompanied him to Baskerville Hall. Holmes files away the fact. Watson, engaged in recovering the stick without surrendering his dignity, misses the point.
Soon Sir Henry Baskerville arrives from overseas, heir to the estate and possible next victim of the family curse. The famous boot episode follows, though now in a more chaotic form. Sir Henry loses not one boot but two, and a third is discovered beneath the breakfast table in the temporary possession of Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith. Watson accuses him of tampering with evidence. The monkey, wounded in his professional pride, throws a spoon at him. Holmes merely notes that the animal has selected the older boot, not the new one, and that the distinction may be of consequence.
Watson and Sir Henry go down to Dartmoor, accompanied — to Watson’s unconcealed dismay — by Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith. Holmes remains in London, or appears to. Watson therefore imagines himself chief investigator on the moor, charged with observation, correspondence, and protection. The monkey holds a different view. He interrupts Watson’s reports, steals his pencil, and once adds a black pawprint to the margin of a letter, which Holmes later calls “the most suggestive portion of the communication.”
At Baskerville Hall, the atmosphere is all ancestral gloom, suspicious servants, wet weather, and large portraits of men who look as if they deserved whatever happened to them. Barrymore the butler and his wife move about with heavy secrecy. Sir Henry grows increasingly attached to Miss Stapleton, whose brother is protective, nervous, and too interested in the affairs of the estate. The moor itself broods magnificently: bleak, treacherous, beautiful, and full of cries that may be animal, human, or legendary.
Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith enjoys Dartmoor immensely. Unlike Watson, he is not troubled by Gothic atmosphere. He likes fog, rocks, sudden noises, and any landscape in which a gentleman may fall into a bog. He develops the habit of vanishing into the gorse and returning with objects no one has asked him to find: a torn glove, a bit of candle, a bootlace, a dead beetle, and once a sandwich belonging to Inspector Lestrade, though Lestrade has not yet arrived.
Watson dismisses most of this as theft. Holmes, reading Watson’s letters from his concealed position on the moor, does not. He recognizes that the monkey has no theory and therefore no prejudice. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith does not believe in curses, family legends, romantic attachments, the testimony of country gentlemen, or the reputations of naturalists. He believes in smells, movement, fear, food, and the suspicious behavior of men who pretend not to be hiding things. This makes him, in one limited but important sense, the best detective in Devonshire.
The investigation reaches its deadlock when Holmes has identified much but not enough. Stapleton is suspicious; the legend is being exploited; the hound is not supernatural. Yet the practical chain remains incomplete. Where is the animal kept? How is it directed toward Sir Henry? How has the villain converted family superstition into a working instrument of murder?
The answer comes not from Watson’s revolver, nor from Holmes’s violin-trained logic, but from Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith’s long campaign against Watson’s dignity. In a fit of competitive malice, the monkey steals Watson’s boot and races across the moor. Watson pursues him, shouting in a tone he later edits out of his account. Holmes follows with greater composure and observes the monkey stop near an abandoned mine working, where he begins furiously rubbing Watson’s boot against a patch of stained sacking hidden beneath the brush.
There lies the clue. To the monkey, the place reeks of the same scent that clung to Sir Henry’s missing boot. Holmes understands at once. The stolen boot was no accident; it was the means of giving the hound Sir Henry’s scent. The sacking bears traces of the animal’s confinement, and nearby are remnants of the phosphorus used to give the creature its infernal glow. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith, unable to interpret a footprint, telegram, alibi, or family tree, has followed the case by its true path: scent to boot, boot to hound, hound to Stapleton.
The final pursuit unfolds in fog and terror. Sir Henry walks the appointed path. The hound emerges, enormous, luminous, and horrible enough to shake even Holmes’s rational nerves. Watson fires. Holmes fires. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith, acting less from strategy than from indignation, drops from a low branch directly onto the beast’s back, shrieking with such force that the wounded animal veers from its course and exposes itself fully to Holmes’s shot.
Watson later describes this intervention as reckless. Holmes calls it “imperfectly reasoned but admirably timed.” The phrase irritates Watson for years.
Stapleton’s guilt is revealed: the false identity, the manipulation of Sir Henry, the theft of the boot, the hidden hound, the phosphorescent horror. Yet the proud architecture of Holmes’s solution contains one simian keystone. Without Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith’s theft of Watson’s boot, Holmes might still have solved the matter, but not so swiftly, and not with such damage to Watson’s self-regard.
The tale closes at Baker Street. Watson attempts to write the case in a manner that preserves professional dignity. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith repeatedly steals the pages in which Watson appears most heroic. Holmes, reviewing the draft, remarks that the monkey’s editorial instincts are severe but not wholly unsound.
The capuchin, wearing Sir Henry’s recovered boot like a helmet, sits by the fire with the serene expression of one who understands that detection is not always a matter of deduction. Sometimes it is scent, timing, appetite, and choosing precisely the wrong object to steal from precisely the right man.
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Interview with the Author, Chat GPT 5.5 Thinking.
After writing the 3 essays, i had Chat enumerate 10 best tips for literary satire and for literary parody. I then asked it rewrite an additional version of each with those considerations.
I think the Orwell essay is the best of the three, because the monkey is not merely an inserted comic object; he becomes a perfect comic solvent for Orwell’s own themes. Down and Out is already about hunger, class performance, filth beneath elegance, and the collapse of polite illusion. A capuchin monkey with a press badge, bogus or semi-bogus academic authority, and a talent for exposing dirty plates is absurd — but it is absurd in exactly the same direction as the book’s seriousness.
The Marx essay is probably the richest intellectually. It has excellent satirical targets: credentialism, journalism, domestic poverty, Engels as loyal financier, and the gap between abstract systems and immediate appetites. The monkey works beautifully as “living metaphor”: commodities, capital, primitive accumulation, surplus biscuits. Its only challenge is that Marxian satire can become too conceptual if overplayed; the monkey has to keep pulling it back into the room, onto the desk, into the inkpot.
The Holmes essay is the most naturally plotted and probably the easiest to enjoy as a story. The monkey has a real detective function: scent, boot, hound, Stapleton. It has the cleanest machinery. Its challenge is different: Doyle parody is such a polished clockwork form that the monkey must disrupt it without making Holmes look foolish. The best joke there is that Holmes remains Holmes, but the monkey briefly becomes a better empiricist than Watson.
The hardest to write wittily was Marx, because the danger is either too much theory or too much monkey business. Orwell gives the monkey an almost automatic satirical job. Holmes gives him a plot job. Marx requires balancing household farce, intellectual history, Engels, poverty, and political allegory without turning the essay into a lecture wearing a tail.
So, dessert ranking: Orwell best overall; Holmes most entertainingly engineered; Marx most ambitious and most delicate.
