Throughout The Hound of The Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle uses effective characterization, through the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to lure the readers in to the novel, and keep them in suspense with the complex plot that only Holmes himself seems to be able to understand. Doyle describes Holmes as " tall and lean obsessively clean using his cold, incisive, and ironical voice." When he hides in the Grimpen Mire, he not only arranges for supplies of food but for daily clean clothes and opportunities to bathe. Holmes' voice carries with it a certainty projecting quality that every word he speaks is the cold hard truth. A "brilliant" (5) thinker obsessed with the intellectual aspects of criminal detection. Holmes is set up as a sort of super mastermind of all events surrounding the case. He is always two steps ahead of the reader, and three ahead of Watson. He is able to distinguish tobacco by smell, and even with the smallest of glimpses get a perfect image of any suspect. For example when the taxi cab is spotted trailing Holmes, and it speeds off, Holmes is able to make out the cab number only after a split second look over a long distance. "My dear Watson, clumsy as I have been, you surely do not seriously imagine that I neglected to get the number? 2704 is our man." (Doyle-39) In his "ironical" voice, he has not only managed to reveal that he has the cab number, but is also able to show up his superior detective skills. "[Holmes] displays his love of the chase; he is delighted that the villain is, like himself, brilliant, because he takes joy in the contest that the villain's schemes provide" (Beetz 1987). Although it leads to a dead end, ending with Holmes finding out the passenger was impersonating him, just gets him more intrigued about the case, and pushing him further to solve it.
             Holmes, from the beginning of the novel, is characterized as ...