#iirc i heard a bunch of the new ones are based on detectives

[columboscreens]

NEW COLUMBO REFERENCE IN MAGIC THE GATHERING (FINAL-WORD PHANTOM)

so i've heard! i continue to be fascinated seeing columbo remain so enduring that he finds his way into entirely new pop culture references

[himbo-the-clown]

Okay I've just finished the introduction (I've got the B&N "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" copy with an introduction by Christopher and Barbara Roden) and I already know so much more about Arthur Conan Doyle and also just general stuff.

- Apparently in the 2008 survey where they found out 58% of Brits thought Sherlock Holmes was a historical figure, 23% also thought Winston Churchill was fictional?? Makes me wonder how many Americans think some of the older or more "mythological" presidents were fictional...

- ACD apparently said his marriage to his wife improved his "imagination" and "range of expression" which is cute!

- He decided to write a detective story because he loved Monsieur Lecoq and C. Auguste Dupin so much, but iirc he also has Sherlock dismiss them as like...bad detectives. So good to know I'm well within tradition to have Beaumont know who Sherlock Holmes is and hate him with a passion

- Sherlock Holmes was based on one of his med school teachers?? There's a whole quote from ACD himself about it, it's pretty interesting!

- Watson's name was originally gonna be Ormond Sacker

- ACD got a bunch of rejections for A Study in Scarlet (the first SH story) including one publisher who said it was "both too short and too long" and one who straight up returned it without reading it 2 months later. The people who did publish it actually waited a year to publish it because "the market [was] flooded [that year] with cheap fiction." They gave him £25 for the copyright

- He wasn't going to write more Sherlock Holmes, but it had some success in America so he was taken out to eat by an agent. Oscar Wilde was there too. They were both asked to write something for the guy's magazine, and Wilde wrote Dorian Gray and ACD wrote the Sign of the Four

- Because he wasn't planning to write more stories after A Study in Scarlet, there's a bunch of continuity errors between it and the other stories because he didn't actually start fleshing Holmes and Watson out into real characters until the Sign of the Four

- Apparently when he was writing the early stories ACD didn't actually know that much about the layout of London? So he got all his info from a post office map?

- I feel like most people know ACD was a doctor (hence Watson being a doctor, as his self insert character) but apparently he was... Incredibly unsuccessful? Like really really unsuccessful. Which he said was "ideal" because it meant he could focus on writing while sitting in his empty office. Literally no one went to him when he opened his practice in London apparently. Also he allegedly got his own practice's address wrong in his memoirs so... That's something. Mood tbh.

- He wrote to his mother about killing Sherlock because he didn't wanna write more stories and distract himself from his true passion for writing historical novels, but she instead gave him a new plot to write (The Cooper Beeches)

- For some reason when the magazine he wrote for kept asking him for more SH stories he just....wouldn't say no? Instead he kept trying to find ways to get them to drop him? Which included asking for roughly 20x as much as he'd been payed for his other stories. But it backfired cause they agreed to pay him it

- He got legit hate mail for killing off Sherlock Holmes and allegedly even Queen Victoria was "not amused"

- After killing Sherlock, he heard about a legendary big black dog that haunted people in the country, and he decided to write the Hound of the Baskervilles. When he brought it up to his editor he said he could either do it at his usual wages with a random character or do it for around 4x as much as the last pay rise he'd asked for (when trying to get them to drop him) as a Sherlock Holmes story

This isn't really a bullet point but they also pointed out that one of the appeals of SH stories is that you know no matter what it'll all turn out well, and that's something I definitely wanna carry over with Beaumont Lockwood. I love stories where you know everything will be okay in the end!