The Hound of the Baskervilles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Penguin, £4.99 ISBN 014043786X

English literature's most famous dog celebrates his 100th birthday in 2002, and during the century since his creation, Sherlock Holmes's four-legged foe has acquired the stature of a modern myth. The Hound of the Baskervilles has been filmed eight times, starring detectives as diverse as Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Peter Cook and Ian Richardson. An illustration from its earliest incarnation, as a serial in the Strand Magazine, decorates the walls of Baker Street Tube station. And yet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might never have written his best-known novel if it hadn't been for our awful British weather.

Conan Doyle's varied CV made Sherlock Holmes look almost ordinary. He introduced skiing to Switzerland, invented the naval life jacket and persuaded the army to adopt steel helmets. He played both football and cricket for his country, and once even took the wicket of W G Grace. In 1901, he returned from South Africa, where he had been working as a field doctor in the Boer war, and went to Norfolk to recuperate with the journalist Fletcher Robinson, who later edited Vanity Fair. They were there for the golf, not storytelling, but one day it was too wet to play, and Robinson passed the time by telling Conan Doyle an ancient yarn about a hound that haunted Dartmoor. Conan Doyle was enthralled. The pair's next excursion was a walking holiday on Dartmoor, where Conan Doyle had set an earlier Holmes short story, "Silver Blaze". Here, he was so inspired by this local legend that he resurrected Holmes, whom he'd killed off eight years earlier, in The Final Problem, at Switzerland's Reichenbach Falls.

Today, Sherlock Holmes is a popular epitome of classic Englishness, but what's most remarkable is how far removed he is from our conventional idea of Victorian values. He is the sort of indolent layabout that do-gooders deplore. He mainlines cocaine. He has no job. He never works from nine to five. "He was usually very late in the mornings," reveals Holmes's Boswell, Dr Watson, "save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night." Such brief bursts of hyperactive effort are separated by far longer spells of depressive inactivity. "Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?" asks Holmes in The Sign of Four. He has no wife and no children. The only relation with whom he has any contact is his older brother Mycroft, who is even more indolent, yet even more brilliant, than him. Conversely, Watson, who personifies all the virtues that contrast so vividly with Holmes's vices, is a pedestrian dullard.

Holmes's favourite pastime is inscribing his initials in the wall of his drawing room with bullets from his revolver. If you were his neighbour you'd probably call the police, or the social services, or both. Heaven knows what havoc he wreaks on Watson's married life. And yet, despite Holmes's character flaws, or perhaps because of them, Conan Doyle's detective endures. Among all the fiction published that same year, only the Just So Stories, written by another Strand contributor, Rudyard Kipling, have ever had anything like the same impact on the national psyche. So what gives Conan Doyle such staying power?

As John Fowles observed, Conan Doyle solved the intrinsic incompatibility of dialogue and narrative, what Fowles calls the conflict between what the reader wants and what the writer wants. This music-hall double act of Holmes and Watson, wise guy and fall guy, wit and stooge, gives The Hound of the Baskervilles a running commentary that propels its plot forward far faster than long-winded Dickensian description. As Fowles points out, this technique is not so much novelistic as dramatic. Conan Doyle is a modernist, anticipating the radio play, the screenplay, even the strip cartoon. "This is real writing from which we can all draw a lesson," declared Graham Greene.

Greene was right. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a brilliant book, without a spare word, as deftly constructed as a sonata. The short stories are perhaps more accomplished studies in pure detection, but the beast gives this tale an elemental element that Holmes's more empirical adventures lack. Each chapter ends on a perfect hanging cadence, yet the tale's driving force is the vivid personality of its hero. Conan Doyle knows Holmes as intimately as a method actor, and gives him all the idiosyncrasies of a living individual. A pulp fiction detective would love or hate all the arts with the same passion - Holmes adores his violin but entertains crude notions about painting. He is even indifferent to the fundamentals of astronomy.

Holmes was inspired by a real person - Dr Joseph Bell, who taught Conan Doyle medicine, and to whom he dedicated The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. "The precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation of minor differences is the real essential factor," wrote Bell. "Eyes and ears which can see and hear, memory to record at once and to recall at pleasure the impression of the senses, and an imagination capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken chain or unravelling a clue." He was discussing medical diagnosis, but he could have been talking about Holmes himself.

Holmes pioneered the analysis of tobacco ash, and the use of plaster of Paris for preserving evidence. The Chinese and Egyptian police use his cases as official training textbooks. In fact, there is only one thing about Holmes that is completely unrealistic. You can see Dr Bell's old home, at 2 Melville Crescent in Edinburgh, but you will search in vain for the rooms where Holmes used to live: 221b Baker Street may be the most famous abode in London letters, but as troops of disappointed Japanese tourists will tell you, no such address exists.

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