To be honest, the Baskerville story does have a good portion of the story where Holmes is offstage, but I believe the author makes up for it rather well.
Before I get into the story I wish to inform the reader that I will not be quoting or referring to scholars who have studied the story much more than I. Rather, I will be focusing on Doyle’s story, his words, plotting, and setting.
Let me start with the beginning of the story, set in London c. 1889. Here is Holmes at his best from reconstructing Dr. Mortimer from his walking stick to some other great detective work; the warning letter to Sir Henry, the missing boot, trailing Sir Henry on the street, and the questioning of the cabman. All good stuff. This section also has the lengthy legend of the hound and the details of Sir Charles’s death.
Now we come to the middle section which I estimate to be about ⅜ of the story. In lieu of Holmes’s absence, Doyle fills Dartmoor with a fine cast of characters, Dr. Mortimer and Sir Henry (whom we have already met). Watson says this about Sir Henry.
… how true a descendant he was of that long line of high-blooded, fiery, and masterful men. There were pride, valour, and strength in his thick brows, his sensitive nostrils, and his large hazel eyes. If on that forbidding moor a difficult and dangerous quest should lie before us, this was at least a comrade for whom one might venture to take a risk with the certainty that he would bravely share it.
Of Dr. Mortimer we know little, save for the fact that he is married, likes to dig up old skulls, and knows the details of Sir Charles's death.
There is the naturalist, Jack Stapleton, … was neutral tinted, with light hair and grey eyes,… who exhibits … extraordinary energy and speed …
… and there is his sister [Beryl], who is said to be a young lady of attractions. … she was darker than any brunette whom I have seen in England—slim, elegant, and tall. She had a proud, finely cut face, so regular that it might have seemed impassive were it not for the sensitive mouth and the beautiful dark, eager eyes. With her perfect figure and elegant dress she was, indeed, a strange apparition upon a lonely moorland path.
Another interesting pair is the dark, somewhat morose Barrymores, John, the watchful husband who suspiciously prowls the Hall late at night, and sad wife who was heard crying in the night. He was a remarkable-looking man, tall, handsome, with a square black beard and pale, distinguished features. And his wife Eliza. She is a heavy, solid person, very limited, intensely respectable, and inclined to be puritanical. The Barrymore family and the Baskervilles go back generations.
Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, is an elderly man, red-faced, white-haired, and choleric. His passion is for the British law, and he has spent a large fortune in litigation. He fights for the mere pleasure of fighting and is equally ready to take up either side of a question, so that it is no wonder that he has found it a costly amusement. He is sometimes burned in effigy by villagers. Frankland is learned in old manorial and communal rights. He keeps a watchful eye on the moor with the telescope perched up on the roof of Lafter Hall.
The escaped convict lends a malevolence to the mystery. Selden committed a murder of peculiar ferocity … and the wanton brutality …. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. His appearance lived up to his reputation. ... an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages ... How could anyone feel safe on the moor?
Laura Lyons appears as a mysterious tragic character whom we discover more than half way through the story. She is another female character of extreme beauty. Her eyes and hair were of the same rich hazel colour, and her cheeks, though considerably freckled, were flushed with the exquisite bloom of the brunette, the dainty pink which lurks at the heart of the sulphur rose. Afterwards, Watson modifies his assessment. There was something subtly wrong with the face, some coarseness of expression, some hardness, perhaps, of eye, some looseness of lip which marred its perfect beauty.
So there are our characters, all suspicious and hiding some deep, dark secret, but there is one more character, perhaps the most important of all, and that is the moor itself. Doyle’s description of the landscape is so vivid, that the moorland practically takes on a life of its own. Or, as Watson writes, The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. The moor is crucial in setting the mood and I do not believe the author ever duplicated it as well in any of his Holmes stories.
Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream.
Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.
... we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir.
Our wagonette had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering.
The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline.
It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing.
Baskerville Hall itself created a certain ambiance that lent a certain gothic foreboding.
Through the gateway we passed into the avenue, where the wheels were again hushed amid the leaves, and the old trees shot their branches in a sombre tunnel over our heads. Baskerville shuddered as he looked up the long, dark drive to where the house glimmered like a ghost at the farther end.Sir Henry uttered: “It’s enough to scare any man.”
… we found ourselves, large, lofty, and heavily raftered with huge baulks of age-blackened oak. In the great old-fashioned fireplace behind the high iron dogs a log-fire crackled and snapped. Sir Henry and I held out our hands to it, for we were numb from our long drive. Then we gazed round us at the high, thin window of old stained glass, the oak panelling, the stags’ heads, the coats of arms upon the walls, all dim and sombre in the subdued light of the central lamp.
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