by M. J. Trow
❖ The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade ❖
1891
‘Such as these shall never look
At this pretty picture book.’
It is 1891 and London is still reeling from the horror of the unsolved Ripper murders when Inspector Lestrade (that ‘ferret-like’ anti-hero so often out-detected by the legendary Sherlock Holmes) is sent to the Isle of Wight to investigate a strange corpse found walled up in Shanklin Chine.
But this is only the start of the nightmare. It is merely the beginning of a series of killings so brutal, so bizarre and, apparently, so random, that only a warped genius – and a master of disguise – could be responsible. Even when Lestrade pieces together the extraordinary pattern behind the crimes from the anonymous poems sent after each murder, he is no closer to knowing the identity of the sinister, self-styled ‘Agrippa’, the ‘great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man’.
It becomes a very personal battle and Lestrade’s desperate race to avert the next death in the sequence takes him all over the country, from London to the Pennines and back, resulting in a portfolio of suspects which covers the entire range of late-Victorian society.
❖ Brigade ❖
1893
‘And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade.’
There is a new broom at Scotland Yard; Nimrod Frost. His first ‘little’ job for Lestrade is to investigate the reported appearance of a lion in Cornwall, a supposed savager of sheep and frightener of men. Hardly a task for an Inspector of the Criminal Investigations Department.
Yet even as Lestrade questions a witness, a man is reported dead, horrifically mauled. Having solved that case to his own satisfaction, Lestrade returns to London and to another suspicious death and then another ... All old men who should have died quietly in their sleep. Is there a connection – is there a mass murderer at work?
Lestrade’s superiors discount his speculations and he finds himself suspended from duty, but that is a mere technicality to the doughty Inspector. He moves from workhouse to royal palace, from backstage at the Lyceum to regimental dinner in search of clues and enlightenment.
When can his glory fade?
❖ The Dead Man’s Hand ❖
1895
‘There was no 9.38 from Penge.’
Anon.
The London Underground Railway, in 1895, was described as ‘dark, deadly and halfway to Hell’. Only too true, for as the last train rattled into Liverpool Street, the one remaining passenger did not get off. How could she, when her eyes stared sightless and her heart had stopped?
There was another corpse at the Elephant in the morning, wedged between the seats like an old suitcase. And another had missed the late-night connection at Stockwell. What was left of her lay on the floor of the ‘padded cell’, her shoes kicked off in the lashings of her agony as she died.
There is a maniac at large and Inspector Lestrade is detailed to work with the Railway Police, something he needs a little less than vivisection. Heedless of warnings to ‘mind the gap’ and ‘mind the doors’, the doughty detective plunges through a tangled web of vicious deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London goes in fear of her life.
Who is the legendary Blackfriars Dan? What are the secrets of the Seven Sisters? Whose body lies at Ealing? Will the London Transport System survive, or will Lestrade run out of steam?
❖ The Guardian Angel ❖
1897/8
‘And a naughty boy was he ...’
He was in his forty-third year and knee-deep in murder. Well, what was new? Sholto Lestrade wouldn’t really have it any other way.
The first fatality in a series of killings which was to become the most bizarre in the celebrated Inspector’s career, was a captain of the 2nd Life Guards, found battered over the head in the Thames at Shadwell Stair, an Ashanti War medal wedged between his teeth. Lestrade’s next summons was to the underground caves of Wookey Hole where the demise of an Egyptologist – a scarab clamped between his molars – prompted the question; can a man dead for a thousand years reach beyond the grave and commit murder?
The further death from a cadaveric spasm of an enobled young subaltern whilst on picquet duty (this time a locket is his dying mouthful) forces Lestrade to impersonate ‘Lt Lister, Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry’ and into becoming a barrack-room lawyer of incisive command.
As the body count rapidly rises, Lestrade, constantly and relievedly touching base with his ‘family’, Harry and Letitia Bandicoot of the Hall, Huish Epsicopi, varies a volatile lifestyle with dinner at Blenheim Palace; a disastrous cycle tour ending in a night in gaol; a near-fatal trip in an air balloon; and masterful mediation in East End gang warfare on the Ratcliffe Highway.
Eventually, some seven cadavers later, things begin to fit into place and the final conundrum emerges; who or what is Coquette Perameles?
❖ The Hallowed House ❖
1901
‘Quid omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur.’*
Edward I
Britain has entered the twentieth century. Queen Victoria is dead and the Boer War rages on. Inspector Lestrade is called upon to investigate the brutal death of Ralph Childers, MP. It is but the first in a series of bizarre and perplexing murders that lead Lestrade around the country in pursuit of his enquiries.
The connection between the victims appears to be politics. Is someone trying to destroy the government? It would seem so, particularly when a bomb is found in the Palace of Westminster. But who is responsible? The Fenians? Or have the Suffragettes decided upon a more drastic course of action to further their cause?
During his investigations, Lestrade encounters some old and some new faces. Amongst the new ones are the brother and cousin of the late Sherlock Holmes who died eleven years ago at the Reichenbach Falls. But is Holmes really dead? Dr Watson doesn’t think so. Someone wants to keep Holmes alive and Lestrade is forced to tread the boards (playing himself) to discover the truth. And, as if things aren’t serious enough, the King is kidnapped just before his coronation.
Amidst all this, Lestrade is faced with the knowledge that his daughter is growing up not knowing who her real father is.
*Look it up on Google – do I have to do everything for you?
❖ The Gift of the Prince ❖
1903
‘Lang may your lum reek, Lestrade.’
Sholto Lestrade had never smelt the tangle o’ the Isles before Arthur, Duke of Connaught put him on the trail to the Highlands. Murder is afoot among the footmen on the Royal Household; a servant girl, Amy Macpherson, has been brutally murdered.
Ineptly disguised as a schoolmaster in his bowler and Donegal, with his battered old Gladstone, the intrepid Superintendent is impelled by a villainous web of conspiracy northwards to the Isle of Skye by way of Balmoral.
With the skirl of the pipes in his ears and more than a dram of a certain medicinal compound inside him, Lestrade, following the most baffling clues he has yet unravelled, takes the low road alone, save for the trusty yet mysterious Alistair Sphagnum in his twin-engined, bright red boneshaker. Narrowly escaping the inferno of Room 13 in the North British Hotel, Lestrade falls foul of The McNab of That Ilk and The Mackinnon of That Ilk and plays a very odd game of ‘Find the Lady’ in Glamis Castle.
Coming from Scotland Yard is no help at all to a Sassenach in trews and everyone is convinced it’s a job for the Leith Police. Threatened by ghoulies, ghosties and wee, sleekit beasties, Lestrade hears things go bump in the night before solving the case of Drambuie.
❖ The Mirror of Murder ❖
1906
Beyond the mountains of the moon ...
‘Right, gentlemen. Recapping by numbers.’ Superintendent Lestrade, in martinet mood, was driving his minions.
‘Murder One. Four victims, Captain Orange, late of the merchant service and his three nieces, when the harness of their trap broke on a downhill gradient near Peter Tavy, Devon.’
‘C
lues?’
‘A tall man seen near the Captain’s horse shortly before the trap left. He could have cut the harness.’
‘And?’
‘A broken mirror found in the Captain’s breast pocket.’
‘Murder Two, sir. Janet Calthrop, fell downstairs at King’s College, London, on the way to the boudoir of her lover. Tripwire across the stairs. Broken neck.’
‘Clues?’
‘One broken mirror found in said lover’s boudoir.’
‘Murder Three. Juan Thomas de Jesus-Lopez, honorary major in the Sixteenth Lancers; body found in a ruined lighthouse near Beachy Head.’
The clues accumulate; so do the mirrors and the murders ...
And the suspects.
‘Mirror, mirror on the wall,’ mused Sholto Lestrade. ‘Who’s the guiltiest of them all?’
He was to find out ...
❖ The Deadly Game ❖
1908
‘The Games a-foot’
Sherlock Holmes, pinched from Shakespeare
(who probably pinched it from Kit Marlowe)
The Papers call it suicide. The deceased’s father doesn’t. But when Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard investigates the death by duelling pistol of Anstruther Fitzgibbon, 27, son of the Marquess of Bolsover, his suspicions of foul play are immediately aroused.
One of Britain’s leading athletes, ‘nimbler than a wallaby on heat’, Fitzgibbon is the first victim in a series of murders which threatens to extinguish the exhilaration of the Olympic Games held in London that glorious summer of 1908.
As the capital plays host to an army of athletes from the Empire, Europe and the United States, international politics rears its ugly head; a respected German journalist is discovered with an ornate paper-knife embedded in his back. When a hurdler of the Ladies’ Team falls victim to her own bust improver (dubbed ‘the killer corset’) fingers are pointed in all directions and not least of Lestrade’s worries is that his leading lady’s husband is an American detective with a short temper and the physique of a brick privy.
❖ The Leviathan ❖
1910
‘To our wives and sweethearts – may they never meet!’
‘You’re promising me a peaceful one, eh? This Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ten? Let’s hope you’re right.’
Unfortunately, his men can’t fulfil Superintendent Lestrade’s wish. Nor can his daughter Emma, who moments later brings him news of a tragic boating accident involving members of her family. In fact, Lestrade’s lot is definitely not a happy one. He has a number of vicious murders to solve, including that of a man hanged in a church bell-tower; of a potential cross-Channel swimmer and of his old sparring partner, Dr Watson. Anarchists threaten the peace of Europe and the whole of the Yard is looking for ‘Peter the Painter’.
On top of all this, Lestrade is roped in to help with the plans for the coronation of George V. His daughter is in love; and Inspector Dew needs help with the disappearance of a certain Belle Crippen. And while Lestrade has his hands full, a violent London cabbie lies in wait for the Assistant Commissioner. A Mr Frederick Seddon is letting out the top flat of his house to elderly spinsters. And new bride Sarah Rose wanders forlornly around the National Gallery, waiting for George Joseph Smith.
❖ The Brother of Death ❖
1913
‘I cannot sing the old songs
I sang long years ago,
For heart and voice would fail me
And foolish tears would flow.’
Claribel
Recovering from a broken leg after his ignominious fall from the Titanic, Superintendent Lestrade goes to convalesce at the home of his betrothed, Fanny Berkley and her father Tom, the Chief Commissioner of Surrey.
It should have been a relatively peaceful time, apart from Lestrade’s lack of dexterity in steering his Bath chair, but an attempt on the life of his father-in-law (that kills the butler instead) makes him realise that a policeman is never really off duty. What is even more puzzling is the arrival of a letter which simply reads ‘Four for the Gospel Makers’ – and it isn’t the first Lestrade’s been sent.
So begins one of Sholto Lestrade’s most mystifying cases; a case that encompasses not only the present, but the past. Lestrade walks down Memory Lane to the time when he was a young and very naïve constable. He looks back on episodes in his career that never came to a satisfactory conclusion and that hold other clues as to who the sender of the letters is – because whoever it is, it is a cold blooded killer.
❖ Lestrade and the Devil’s Own ❖
1913
‘From his brimstone bed at the break of day,
A-walking the Devil is gone,
To visit his snug little farm, the earth,
And see how his stock goes on.’
Coleridge and Southey
‘Sholto Joseph Lestrade, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Mrs Millicent Millichip on January 13th last in the City of Westminster.’
Lestrade had never been arrested before. Neither had he faced the drop. But when a woman died in his arms in the middle of a London pea-souper, the Fates were stacked against him. Millicent Millichip, as it turned out, was not the only victim in a series of murders where the only clue was the Devil’s calling card. And the Devil struck in such diverse places as the croquet lawn of Castle Drogo, the theatre of war games on Hounslow Heath and the offices of Messrs Constable, publishers extraordinary, in Orange Street.
The condemned cell at Pentonville is a lonely place, even for a man with a loving family and powerful friends. But are they powerful enough?
❖ The Magpie ❖
1920
‘There was a Front;
But damn’d if we knew where!’
England in 1920 is a land fit for heroes. So why is one of those heroes found dead in a dingy London hotel? And why does his war record show that he has been missing, presumed killed in action, for three years?
The deceased is none other than the fiancé of Inspector Lestrade’s daughter and when her tears are dry, she sets out on a quest to find his murderer. And as always with Sholto Lestrade, one murder has a habit of leading to another; a second body turns up, linked to the first. How can a woman killed in an air raid in 1917, be found with a bullet through her head three years later?
When a succession of foreigners is murdered with the same tell-tale weapon, has World War Two started already? Can it be Hunnish practices? Or the Red Peril? Perhaps the Black and Tans?
A colourful web of intrigue unfolds as Lestrade and his daughter go undercover in the War Office, the Foreign Office, a film studio and at the Yard itself. When Lestrade’s daughter is kidnapped, the writing is on the wall. And the writing says ‘MI5’.
❖ Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus ❖
1922
‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Shelley
‘And death shall come on soft wings to him that touches the tomb of the Pharaoh ...’
The wings that retired Chief Superintendent Lestrade came on were those of a de Havilland Hercules, named Olivia. The archaeologist, Howard Carter, had made the discovery of the century in the Valley of the Kings, but all around him, men were dying: Lord Carnarvon, careless with his razor, fell prey to a mosquito bite; Alain le Clerk left the tomb in a hurry to die alone in the desert; Aaron G. String, the railway magnate, blew his brains out yards from the tomb’s entrance.
And so it was that Sholto Lestrade flew East to solve a riddle every bit as impenetrable as that of the sphinx. People remarked on the funny old Gizeh, in his bowler and Donegal, battling the elements against sand, revolting Egyptians and the Curse of the Pharaohs ...
But could he avoid the Kiss of Horus?
❖ Lestrade and the Giant Rat of Sumatra ❖
1935
‘So, Sholto, let me and you be wipers
Of scores out with all men, especially pipers!’
The original version of The Piped Piper of Hamelin by Robert Bro
wning
Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. And it took him back to the good old days, when coppers lived in station houses, that nice Mr Campbell-Bannerman was at Number Ten and Britain had the biggest empire in the world. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling!
Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth.
Will any of them live to tell Dew’s tale? The tale of a rat.
❖ The World of Inspector Lestrade ❖
Many readers of the Lestrade books wonder what is fact and what is fiction – and the author is delighted that they can’t always tell! So, for all the readers out there who have ever asked that question, here is the World of Inspector Lestrade. In this book, the lid is taken off the Victorian and Edwardian society in a way you’ve never seen before. Lestrade knew everybody, from Oscar Wilde in the Cadogan Hotel, to General Baden-Powell, cross-dressing on Brownsea Island, to the hero of Damascus, General Allenby – ‘you can call me Al.’ Have you ever wondered whether Howard Vincent, Director of the brand new CID really had a pet iguana? Find out inside.