The Hound of the Baskervilles Audiobook, Free

Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, and The Hound of the Baskervilles has been public domain for decades. Project Gutenberg carries the complete text as ebook #2852, so there's no cost standing between you and the story. The catch with any plain Gutenberg file is that it just sits there. Nothing reads it to you.

LoudReader handles that part. The novel is already in the app's built-in library of 70,000+ free Gutenberg books, so there's nothing to download or convert first, and no separate file to lose track of later. Open the app, search for it, press play. You can hear the voice before committing on the The Hound of the Baskervilles page, which has a rendered sample.

It has a real claim to being the best Holmes novel for exactly that. A family curse, a phantom hound heard howling across Dartmoor, and Holmes staying in London while Watson is sent alone to guard the new heir among escaped convicts and secretive neighbors, the story balances a rational detective plot against genuine Gothic dread and lets both possibilities stay open until the end. The moor itself, vast and mire-ridden, does as much work as any character in the book. It reads well after dark, and an audiobook is a natural way to take it in, since a voice narrating the fog and the howling in the dark does more of the atmospheric work than your eyes moving down a page.

Worth stating plainly. LoudReader's narrator is a synthetic voice, not a human actor. It's built from natural offline voices, generated live on your device as you listen, with no separate audio file created or stored. Holmes, Watson, and the moor's cast of suspects are all read in the same consistent voice, not performed as distinct characters.

If a full-cast dramatization with different voice actors matters to you more than getting the book for free right now, a commercial audiobook edition will do that better. What LoudReader gives you instead is the complete, unabridged novel, narrated on demand, with word-by-word highlighting tracking along the text as it reads, useful for keeping your place through Doyle's longer passages of scene-setting on the moor.

1. Get LoudReader from the App Store. Free, no account required.
2. Search the built-in Gutenberg catalog inside the app for The Hound of the Baskervilles. No file to find, no conversion step.
3. Press play. LoudReader is fully on-device and private, your library never leaves your device, so all 7 hours play without a connection once the book is loaded.
4. Want more Holmes after this one, or more free classics in general? The built-in Gutenberg catalog covers 70,000+ titles, far more than any single genre page could ever list, so the next book after this one is already in the same app.