Princeton University Press has started a new series called Writers on Writers which thus far includes Phillip Lopate on Susan Sontag and C. K. Williams on Walt Whitman. The most recent entrant had its genesis when a fifth-grade boy was reading under the covers during a thunderstorm with some sweets and an Orange Crush.
“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” I shivered with fearful pleasure, scrunched further down under my thick blanket, and took another bite of my Baby Ruth candy bar, as happy as I will ever be.
The Hound of the Baskervilles “left its teeth marks in me and seriously aroused my then still slumbering passion for reading”; it was “the first ‘grown-up’ book I ever read—and it changed my life.” This last claim is not the exaggeration it might seem since the boy grew up to become the scholarly literary journalist Michael Dirda.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s storytelling genius is no magic lozenge to turns every child into a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, but Dirda is, as he recognizes, only one of many whom the almost vampiric bite of a Conan Doyle tale has turned into a rabid reader. (I can attest to the permanent effects of early Holmes exposure: I surreptitiously read “The Speckled Band” tucked inside my geography book in gradeschool, and I still have hazy knowledge of South America and a compulsion to check the ceilings of bedrooms.)
The story Dirda tells is, in a
