The Hound of the Baskervilles to see the opera "Les Huguenots" starring Jean de Reszke. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this story shortly after returning to his home Undershaw from South Africa, where he had worked as a volunteer physician at the Langman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein at the time of the Second Boer War. Conan Doyle had not written about Sherlock Holmes in eight years, having killed off the character in the 1893 story "The Final Problem". Although "The Hound of the Baskervilles" is set before the latter events, two years later Conan Doyle would bring Holmes back for good, explaining in "The Adventure
The Hound of the Baskervilles of the Empty House" that Holmes had faked his own death. He was assisted with the plot by a 30-year-old "Daily Express" journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson (1870–1907). His ideas came from the legend of Richard Cabell (d.1677), of Brook Hall, in the parish of Buckfastleigh, Devon, which was the fundamental inspiration for the Baskerville tale of a hellish hound and a cursed country squire. Cabell's tomb survives in the village of Buckfastleigh. Squire Richard Cabell lived for hunting and was what in those days was described as a 'monstrously evil man'. He gained this reputation for, amongst other things,