Rupert Holmes, on Creating a Victorian-Flavored Escape in Upstate NY, Makes for a Favourite Novel
In 1884, the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle published a novel called The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first in what would be a series.
The original work was an original work of fiction, inspired by the real-life story of famed detective-magician Harry Houdini.
But The Hound of the Baskervilles also helped shape the world of the “detective story” as we know it today.
And now, more than a century after the book’s publication, Robert Hudson, a Brooklynite who was born to an English mother and Romanian-born father, has written his own “Hound of the Baskervilles.”
On a recent afternoon, Hudson, 86, sat on a small couch in his living room in a New England townhouse that was once part of the Benedict Arnold estate. He has spent every day for more than five decades now, sitting on the same couch in the same house for more than 50 years.
Hudson, a retired professor of English, was born in Brooklyn, and he wrote his first novel during his residency at Stony Brook University in upstate New York.
He returned to New York City in 1949, during his studies at New York University. He received master’s and doctorate degrees at Brooklyn College, but then went to graduate school in Michigan.
He taught at the University of Michigan and at Barnard College in New York City.
He published his first book, a short story, in 1966, and followed it up with two more novels, one of which was also a short story, and two collections of short stories.
Hudson wrote the first of four books of stories based on his popular Conan Doyle novel, in 1974 — The Baskervilles, which is an original work, and was originally serialized in three separate issues of Alfred Hitchcock