Characters / The Canon
Inspector Lestrade
Inspector, Scotland Yard — tenacious as a bulldog, wrong as often
“We're not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are proud of you.”
At a glance
The profile
G. Lestrade — the first initial is all the canon ever grants — is the Yard made flesh: energetic, brave, procedurally sound, and imaginatively bankrupt. He arrests the obvious man with total confidence, and when the obvious man proves innocent he has the professional good sense to fetch the amateur who embarrasses him. Holmes calls him and Gregson 'the pick of a bad lot' and works with him for decades anyway.
His finest moment is not an arrest. At the end of The Six Napoleons, after watching Holmes produce the Borgia pearl from a smashed plaster bust, Lestrade speaks for the whole Yard: they are not jealous — they are proud. Holmes, who can shrug off emeralds and kings, has to turn away. Persistence, it turns out, earns what brilliance cannot.
In the canon
A Study in Scarlet
1887
Watson meets Holmes, and a corpse in an empty Brixton house — RACHE scrawled in blood — opens the first case: a revenge trail reaching back to Utah.
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
1891
A son stands over his murdered father, and the dying word "rat" points to Ballarat — footprints and a grey cloak clear the obvious suspect.
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
1903
A young solicitor inherits from a client found burned the same night; a thumbprint that appears overnight proves too much, and a smoke-out finds the living corpse.
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
1904
Someone is smashing plaster busts of Napoleon across London; the sixth holds the black pearl of the Borgias — pattern, not madness.
The Adventure of the Second Stain
1904
A statesman's letter could mean war; a bloodstain that moved and a floor that didn't put the document back where it started.