The Pick of a Bad Lot

Abstract

A week or so after moving into 221B Baker Street, Watson observes that his fellow lodger Sherlock Holmes receives visits from ‘many acquaintances, and those in the most different classes of society’. Among these visitors, Watson is introduced to a ‘little sallow, ratfaced, dark-eyed fellow . . . who came three or four times in a single week’ (Study, 17). This is a Mr Lestrade, whom Holmes later reveals to be ‘a well-known detective’ who ‘got himself into a fog recently over a forgery case’ (20). Lestrade would go on to appear, or at least be mentioned, in a further twelve stories, making him the most frequently trans-textual character in the saga apart from Holmes and Watson themselves, and possibly Holmes’s landlady Mrs Hudson.