We continue our week of exploration of all things Sherlock Holmes in honor of his 125th anniversary last week by taking a look at my favorite Holmes novel “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. It is the third of four crime novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. The book was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902. In 2003 the book was listed on the BBC’s The Big Read poll of the UK’s best-loved novel. I have read the novel and seen almost all of the available movie and television adaptations. I love the Basil Rathbone version, in eerie black and white, but the Hammer version starring Peter Cushing is actually more faithful to the original text. The story is set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England’s West Country and tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound. And for every stone that Holmes overturns to try and solve the mystery another question arises.

I thought about this novel in the context of the recent news comings and goings of Wal-Mart and its ongoing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) imbroglio. As reported by the FCPA Blog, in an article entitled “Wal-Mart’s latest FCPA disclosure (November 2012)”, the company disclosed in its Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 15, 2012 that its internal investigation of its foreign subsidiaries had expanded into “Brazil, China and India.” It was not clear from its 8-K filing whether this was the internal investigation initiated after the New York Times (NYT) April 22 story about allegations of corruption and bribery coming out of its Mexico subsidiary or if this was a part of the investigation began in spring 2011 as a relatively routine audit of how well its foreign subsidiaries were complying with its anti-corruption policies.