Six Napoleons: Come Down Tomorrow

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Title: Six Napoleons: Come Down Tomorrow
Author: gardnerhill                        
Word Count: 60                     
Rating: G
Warning: None
Summary: He wasn't exaggerating.

***

I'd dismissed him at first, thought he was a charlatan peddling detective quackery.

But I've been too close for too long, seen that light in his eyes when he puts it all together. Uncanny fire.

Young constables use his methods and get better results; us oldsters stopped complaining.

He'd never become a copper. But we'd welcome him in a heartbeat.

Comments

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

I can just imagine late Victorian London full of flim-flam street artists like card-sharps promising to track down the Ripper or some such criminal where the police failed, the sort of people Dickens wrote about so eloquently. So Lestrade's dismissal at first would be completely understandable.

We're still using Holmes' methods - it was in Canon stories that fingerprinting was first postulated, and pouring plaster into footprints to get shoe sizes, and using chemistry to analyze bloodstains. Better than marching out, rounding up the usual suspects, and bludgeoning confessions out of them.