Stranger Than Fiction

January 2026

Crime-Fighting Rivals: Sherlock Holmes Vs. Scotland Yard

by Dean Jobb

Frederick Wensley was a Scotland Yard legend. He was twenty-two when he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1888, just months before the serial killer who became known as Jack the Ripper murdered at least five women. He was among the hundreds of bobbies seconded to patrol Whitechapel’s streets and he never forgot the “atmosphere of terror” in the downtrodden neighborhood. He nailed strips of rubber cut from bicycle tires to the soles of his boots to muffle the sound of his footsteps, in hopes of taking the fiend by surprise.

Wensley joined the Criminal Investigation Department in 1895 and was soon promoted to detective sergeant. By 1909 he was an inspector and had been awarded the King’s Police Medal for bravery and distinguished service. He took part in the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911, coming under fire during an armed standoff with burglars linked to the murders of three policemen. He was the bane of East End gangsters, so good at ferreting out information that one frustrated crook nicknamed him “Weasel” Wensley. In 1922 he became the CID’s first chief constable, taking charge of 800 detectives investigating crimes across London. The eminent British prosecutor Sir Richard Muir considered him “the greatest detective of all time.”

In 1931, two years after he retired, Wensley published Detective Days (released in the U.S. under the title Forty Years of Scotland Yard), a memoir that revisited his most famous cases and revealed his crime-fighting methods. In his day, detectives trained on the job and their instructors were the crooks they encountered and arrested. “I made it my business to study the ways of thieves and to know as many as I could,” he explained, including “some of the most dangerous rogues in London.”

Catching crooks required days of shadowing suspects, sometimes in disguise, and shivering in the cold for hours to stake out homes and businesses.To nab one gang of thieves in the act, Wensley watched their hideout from a railroad bridge as trains rumbled past, missing him by a couple of inches. There was little room and little need, Wensley stressed, for “flashing deductions” or “the exercise of pure reason.”

It was clear whom he had in mind—a fictional character whose formidable intellect, superhuman powers of observation, and lightning-fast analytical skills made London’s real sleuths look like pikers. Arthur Conan Doyle unleashed Sherlock Holmes on the world in 1887, the year before Wensley first donned a police uniform, in the murder-mystery novel A Study in Scarlet. When Scotland Yard detectives were “out of their depths,” Holmes brags in The Sign of the Four, a follow-up novel published in 1890, they made pilgrimages to Holmes’s digs at 221B Baker Street, seeking guidance from the self-proclaimed “last and highest court of appeal in detection.” To Wensley’s chagrin, the adventures of Conan Doyle’s sleuth had a profound impact on the image of London’s police in the Victorian Era.

“I’m a consulting detective,” Holmes tells his new roommate and future crime-solving partner, Dr. John Watson, at the outset of A Study in Scarlet. The police “come to me” when they’re stumped, he explains, “and I manage to put them on the right scent. They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight.” Among those seeking the Great Detective’s help was a “little sallow rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow,” as Watson describes him, who turned up at Baker Street as many as four times in a single week—Inspector G. Lestrade of Scotland Yard. “He got himself into a fog recently over a forgery case,” Holmes notes, “and that was what brought him here.”

Lestrade is the best-known Scotland Yard detective to appear in the Holmes canon—and the most derided. Another inspector, Tobias Gregson, summons Holmes to the scene of a murder that baffles both detectives—a man has been found dead in an abandoned house, with no apparent wounds and the word “RACHE” written on a wall. “It’s a queer case,” Gregson explains to Holmes, “and I knew your taste for such things.”

Lestrade and Gregson are “the pick of a bad lot,” Holmes tells Watson. “They are both quick and energetic, but conventional—shockingly so.” They chase dead-end clues as Holmes methodically untangles a tale of murderous revenge that spans two continents and several decades.

The Sign of the Four introduces a third inspector from the Yard. Athelney Jones dismisses Holmes’s crime-solving abilities as the product of luck rather than “good guidance” and mocks him as “Mr. Theorist.” By the end of the novel, however, after Holmes solves a puzzling locked-room murder, he’s a fan. “I never saw the case yet that he could not throw a light upon,” Jones confides to Watson. “He is irregular in his methods, and a little quick perhaps in jumping at theories, but, on the whole, I think he would have made a most promising officer.”

Conan Doyle continued to belittle his fictional Scotland Yard sleuths in the Holmes stories that followed. The hapless Lestrade returns in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” first published in The Strand Magazine in October 1891. “I find it hard enough to tackle facts,” he laments as Holmes outwits him again, “without flying away after theories and fancies.” He is just as befuddled in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” a missing-person mystery that appeared in The Strand the following April. “I can make neither head nor tail of the business,” he confesses. “Every clue seems to slip through my fingers.” As Lestrade’s men drag a lake in search of a body, Holmes locates the missing bride and reveals why she disappeared on her wedding day.

Lestrade’s incompetence stereotyped the Scotland Yard detective as a bumbling fool. The Holmes and Watson adventures are peppered with examples of the police overlooking clues, chasing the wrong suspects, or throwing up their hands and pleading to Holmes for help. Advertisements for The Strand stories touted Holmes’s ability to solve cases that “defied the best talent of Scotland Yard—a ‘talent’ for which he had a considerable amount of contempt.”

The real-life Lestrades, Gregsons, and Joneses of the Yard, incensed at being portrayed as slow-witted and inept, bristled when they read or heard the name Sherlock Holmes. Historians of the force record their resentment at being depicted as “inept bunglers with a chronic need for the help of a consulting detective,” and the impression that “fools flourished at Scotland Yard.”

The Police Review, a journal that catered to police officers, condemned Conan Doyle’s “sarcasm at the expense of Scotland Yard” and chided the author for “circulating mischievous popular fallacies” about the methods and competence of its detectives.

Over time, perhaps in response to the backlash, Conan Doyle toned down his super-sleuth’s criticism of Lestrade, who appeared in thirteen Holmes stories. In the Hound of the Baskervilles, published in 1902, Holmes describes him as “the best” of the Yard’s detectives. Two years later, in “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” Lestrade offers an olive branch. “We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard,” he assures Holmes. “We are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.” Conan Doyle himself had a change of heart. “My experience of British police,” he grudgingly acknowledged in a private letter written in 1917, “is that they are much more efficient than they seem.”

If Holmes had come to life and visited Scotland Yard, it’s unlikely Frederick Wensley would have lined up to shake his hand. He caught criminals and solved crimes in the field, not holed up in a flat like Holmes, scratching out tunes on a violin or firing pistol shots into a wall as he grappled with a puzzling case. “Pure reasoning is all very well, but the blood and bones of all practical detective work is information,” Wensley argued.

No detective in the real world could replicate Holmes’s feats of deduction and identify a criminal from “the scratches on a watch” or by examining “a piece of burnt matchstick.”

Wensley’s biggest beef was that the Sherlock Holmes stories made crime solving look easy. Take one baffling mystery, add a brilliant detective, sprinkle with a few clues and plot twists and, presto . . . case solved. How could Scotland Yard detectives compete with the dazzling feats of Conan Doyle’s hero?

“It is quite simple to fasten on some trivial but dramatic feature in a case and to present the facts on paper to show that upon it turned the solution of a baffling mystery,” Wensley griped in his memoir. “Not one fact but many go to prove the guilt of a criminal. The order in which those facts are collected is of small importance compared to adding them together so that a conclusion may be formed. It is in getting all the facts that a detective proves himself.”

Holmes did put in some of the legwork needed to solve crimes in the real world. He shadowed suspects, donned disguises, and compiled records on crimes and criminals. And his meticulous examinations of crime scenes and physical evidence—from cigar ash and traces of soil to fingerprints and boot prints—foreshadowed the forensic techniques we take for granted today.

While Wensley was no fan of Holmes, he cracked one case using Sherlockian powers of observation. A few days after finding a distinctive button at the scene of a break-in, he passed “a known criminal” on the street and noticed he was wearing a coat with identical buttons, but one. was missing. He arrested the suspect on the spot.

“The discerning detective is always liable to make a coup in the Sherlock Holmes manner,” he acknowledged. Case closed? Not in the real world. The button Wensley found had a shank on the back and the suspect, who was allowed to keep his coat, cleverly replaced the shank where the button was missing. At trial he produced the coat and asked the jury, “Did they ever see a button with two shanks?” The man was acquitted.

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Dean Jobb’s latest true crime book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue(Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a national bestseller in Canada. It’s the story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York City while planning and executing some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. Find him at deanjobb.com.