Inspector Lestrade

Inspector Lestrade

Inspector G. Lestrade or Mr. Lestrade is a fictional character, a Scotland Yard detective appearing in several of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle used the name of a friend from his days at the University of Edinburgh, a Saint Lucian medical student by the name of Joseph Alexandre Lestrade. In "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", Lestrade's first initial is revealed to be G. Lestrade is described as "a little sallow rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow" in A Study in Scarlet and "a lean, ferret-like man, furtive and sly-looking," in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery". He was summarised by H. Paul Jeffers in the following words:

"He is the most famous detective ever to walk the corridors of Scotland Yard, yet he existed only in the fertile imagination of a writer. He was Inspector Lestrade. We do not know his first name, only his initial: G. Although he appears thirteen times in the immortal adventures of Sherlock Holmes, nothing is known of the life outside the Yard of the detective whom Dr. Watson described unflatteringly as sallow, rat-faced, and dark-eyed and whom Holmes saw as quick and energetic but wholly conventional, lacking in imagination, and normally out of his depth—the best of a bad lot who had reached the top in the CID by bulldog tenacity."