Today’s word of the day, thanks to Webster’s Dictionary, is sandbag. I’m going to skip the formal definitions, which you can probably figure out, and just right to the informal definitions:

to set upon violently; attack from or as if from ambush;

to coerce or intimidate, as by threats;

to thwart or cause to fail or be rejected, especially surreptitiously or without warning.

Samuel Beeton was a British publisher famous for two things. The first was a book that his wife actually wrote and compiled called Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a book which was immediately popular and continues to be available (https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Beetons-Book-Household-Management/dp/1510760253/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UNOCN0PQ05L4&keywords=mrs.+beetons+book+of+household+management+unabridged&qid=1669939215&sprefix=Mrs.+Beet%2Caps%2C136&sr=8-1). The other was a story he published on this date in 1887.

Among the books that Beeton published, he also published an annual called “Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a paperback magazine stuffed with stories, poems, sketches and anecdotes that appeared annually between 1860 and 1898” (https://www.onthisday.com/articles/how-the-first-sherlock-holmes-story-was-sold-for-a-song), and in 1887 he published the first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet.”

Over the next forty years, Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, published 56 more short stories and four novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-headed League,” and “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes and his chief nemesis, Moriarty, fall over a waterfall while fighting, seemingly to their deaths. Conan Doyle killed off his famous detective because he was tired of writing the stories and wanted to say his mind and his pen for more serious literary output. He wrote about it in his diary and in a letter: “’I must save my mind for better things,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Problem).

But the outcry among his fans was so great that he had to create a resurrection and write more.

Holmes was not the first literary detective, but he is probably the most popular. According to Wikipedia, “Guinness World Records has listed Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history, with more than 75 actors playing the part in over 250 productions” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Novels), not counting numerous stage versions.

But beyond the popularity, Conan Doyle’s detective set the pattern for future literary detectives. He is a loner, with very few personal relationships. He uses deductive reasoning and focuses on the available evidence. He’s an amateur or at least independent (there is another crime fiction subgenre called police procedural). And his relationship with the police is not usually very good because, being less intelligent and less successful at solving complicated crimes, they are jealous of him. Furthermore, many of the constabulary are just downright incompetent, though I do not remember any who were acted in a criminal fashion.

Maybe art does not always follow life. Not all cops are incompetent and corrupt, though I certainly know at least one who is terribly corrupt, far more than anything Sherlock Holmes ever had to deal with. The kind of cop who would happily sandbag innocent citizens if he felt like it.

The image today comes from an Auto Freak article advertising Sherlock Holmes 3, with Robert Downey, Jr., a movie which has not yet made it to the theaters (https://autofreak.com/sherlock-holmes-3-release-date-cast-plot-and-everything-you-need-to-know/31876/).