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

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

Lovely. This is one of my favourite stories.

[debriswoman]

Nicely put:-)

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Definitely the perigee of Lestrade's relationship to both Holmes and Watson, after his rocky start in STUD.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Definitely Lestrade's best moment in Canon.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Lovely take on one of my favorite lines.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I love those details: thought he was a charlatan peddling detective quackery and Young constables use his methods and get better results.

It makes sense that Lestrade would be suspicious of an 'amateur' at first - who wouldn't be? And I really like the idea that it isn't just a case of Holmes and his work being accepted by the Yarders - Holmes' methods have actually been embraced by the younger detectives as the standard way of doing things.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

I also love Katie Forsythe's take on this story, The Lucky One (http://www.liquidfic.org/luckyone.html).

[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.