Inspector Lestrade

aka: The Lestrade

Once again, the trained, professional police officer can't compete with a high school student.

"Aaah! It's that confused detective!"

— Maya Fey (on Dick Gumshoe), Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

A character who is long on observational acuity and a bit short on connecting the dots. Named after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Inspector Lestrade, who would always attempt to solve the case before Sherlock Holmes could, and always failed miserably. Where an Amateur Sleuth is involved, this character is nearly always a police officer because the Police Are Useless.

A good Lestrade, especially a self-aware one, can still be a valuable resource to their great detective, doing much of the legwork and research, as well as being a companion who has the legal authority to make arrests. Lestrade himself often acted like this in the later Holmes stories. A Lestrade might also be capable of dealing with most standard crimes, and only calls in the protagonist when he's confronted with something especially unusual that would be a better use of the protagonist's talents. An unhelpful one may become an Obstructive Bureaucrat, and one with a chip on his shoulder about the Sleuth being better able to do his job than he is. Particularly in earlier Holmes stories, Lestrade himself also had a bit of this in his character, though he got better with time: compare his portrayals in A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

A common act of Genre Blindness faced by the Lestrade is for them to over-confidently and prematurely declare that the case is open-and-shut; obviously the dead person committed suicide, or the obvious culprit was the one who did it. Of course, whilst they're busy putting their feet up or throwing the book at an innocent person, the Sleuth is almost instantly discovering the clues that prove that the Lestrade is way, way off base.

Compare Friend on the Force, Sleuth Dates Cop, The Lopsided Arm of the Law. Not to be confused with Inspector Javert or Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist. See also The Commissioner Gordon, if superheroes are involved.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Case Closed:
  • Most of the police officers are this, but specially Megure (pictured above). They're portrayed as competent at their job (a few stories start near the end of a successful investigation on their part, for example) — but Shin'ichi is just that much better than them, and Megure especially has the good sense to defer to him.
  • Kogoro Mouri can be this when he's not a Clueless Detective — usually this is when he's around but Megure isn't.
  • This series is notable in that virtually every criminal act the main character runs across includes an attempt to anticipate and reroute the police investigation (which rarely makes the majority of cases even in fiction). A consequence is that somebody has to demonstrate for the readers what conclusions said investigation is supposed to arrive at. There are a few cases in which it's acknowledged the police would have come to the correct conclusion (upon properly examining their collected evidence), just not as quickly. In instances where the police aren't handicapped by Occam's Razor and start out assuming a trick, they do rather better.
  • One hilarious aversion happens early on when Conan and the Detective Boys are chasing after a car of child murderers which Ayumi is trapped in. It turns out that those "child murderers" are merely actors and Megure has already arrested the real culprits during the meantime.
• Most of the cast of Death Note are this to L and friends, especially Aizawa in the final arc, who figures out that Light is most likely Kira, but can't find any good evidence against him. It's not like they are incompetent, it's just Light works on the Special Investigation Team, too. He manipulates them and he knows how to create perfect Red Herrings and other traps. For him, the police are actually still a threat.
• Occurs with moderate frequency in Detective School Q. Q's class is ordered by Dan to avoid revealing their status as members of DDS unless necessary, on account of the fact that the revelation will often change how people deal with them. As a result, many of the cases involve some inexplicably ignorant detective who's too quick to jump to the wrong conclusions and needs Q to set him straight. Naturally, this almost always only lasts up to the point where they reveal their identities.
• The Kindaichi Case Files:
  • Inspector Kenmochi is a rare example of a Lestrade who is savvy to this. After resisting Kindaichi in the series' first mystery, he is immediately won over and begins calling Kindaichi in to help him solve murders. He is quite aware that Kindaichi is going to solve everything while he just does the legwork, and he doesn't mind. Keep in mind that Kenmochi is a decorated police inspector, while Kindaichi is sixteen years old.
  • Kengo Akechi comes off as this as well, especially during his debut story arc. Arrogant and snobbish, he is an elite-level officer who often tries to compete with Kindaichi over murder cases. Despite their rivalry, however, there is a grudging mutual respect. He gradually grows out of this when he either starts arriving at the conclusion as fast as Kindaichi, if not slower than him but faster than everyone else in comparison, or gives supplementary explanation to the conclusion.
• In Pokémon: The Series, a couple of Officer Junsars/Jennys do false conclusions or are not capable of judging situations right until it's either already too late or already solved. Although, there are a lot of other Officer Junsars/Jennys who are actually quite competent.
• Sherlock Hound features Inspector Lestrade as an anthropomorphic dog, more exactly a huge mastiff. A Shout-Out to Lestrade's physical description in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as a small but strong-looking man who looked like a mastiff.
• Inspector Nakata from the Witchblade anime series. Can be excused due to the abnormality of the cases he faces, but all he can boast in-series is that he's a generally decent guy, not too shy to challenge big corporations, and can put up a bold front when things look ugly. However, he reaches the end of the trail only when put on it with a red herring and ultimately allows himself to be used as a blunt tool for office backstabbing. Not really a bad hound, but has neither the scent nor tenacity of Yusuke Tozawa, whom he calls "hyena".

Comic Books

• Tintin: If the founders of This Very Wiki had spoken French instead of English, this trope might have been called "Dupont and Dupond", or at least "Thomson and Thompson". Their sheer determination is unmatched, but they have a very tentative grasp of logic at best.
• Batman:
  • Some incarnations of Jim Gordon are this to Batman, particularly stories centered around Batman's early years.
  • Recently, Batman's gained another: Edward Nigma, a.k.a. The Riddler, who has (probably) reformed and is trying to use his fame as a villain to leverage a career as a detective. It hasn't gone well yet. At least one storyline has involved Batman and Nigma playing off each other, picking up tips.
• Ashley Swift in The Maze Agency. She is actually a skilled detective, but not quite as good as Jennifer and Gabe, and tends to let her rivalry with Jennifer get the best of her.
• The Mickey Mouse Comic Universe has Inspector Casey who especially in older comic books is often depicted as this towards Mickey Mouse: He's the incompetent detective who needs the help of master detective Mickey Mouse. Often Casey's boss, Chief O'Hara, even consults Mickey over Casey.
• In Noob, the Day in the Life of one of the players reveals him to be a police inspector. Before this, in the multi-media franchise the comic is part of, the police inspector's gaming avatar was for a long time best known as the guy who is dead-convinced that another player with little talent (but lots of luck) is actually an undercover elite player.
• Chlorophylle has Commissaire Bouclette. In "Zizanion Le Terrible", he rejects out of hand the heroes' suspicions, and the start of the book shows he's more concerned with finding "a culprit" than the truth.

Films — Animation

• Chief Grizzly in Hoodwinked! sees an Open-and-Shut Case of a hungry wolf threatening an innocent girl and her grandmother, but Det. Nicky Flippers digs deeper and uncovers a criminal conspiracy that they are all merely pawns in.

Films — Live-Action

• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • Jim Gordon becomes this for the Pruitt building sequence of The Dark Knight, as he failed to heed Batman's correct instinct that the Joker had another trick up his sleeve. If not for Batman's intervention, the hostages would have been unintentionally killed by Gordon's orders. In fairness to Gordon, he was also dealing with the fact that his family had been taken hostage by Harvey Dent, adding a lot of personal pressure to an already tense situation.
  • Foley in The Dark Knight Rises. During the stock exchange robbery, he actually orders the cops to go after Batman, not after those four guys who were shooting up the stock exchange with submachine guns.

Literature

• In Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin story "The Purloined Letter", the police officer takes on this role, completely cocksure that the titular letter cannot be in the house because he searched everywhere for it. As Dupin explains after he's solved the case, the officer's problem was that he could not imagine the actions of a person either smarter than or dumber than himself.
• Sherlock Holmes:
  • In the first novel, A Study in Scarlet, there were actually two such detectives (who were rivals between themselves): Tobias Gregson and the Trope Namer, G. Lestrade. It should be noted that Gregson didn't have many significant appearances again afterward, whereas Lestrade gets some bits of Character Development and often aids Holmes and Watson. Ironically, Holmes considers Gregson to be the smarter of the two. Watson later remarks in "The Red Circle" that while Gregson and the rest of the official police may be lacking in deductive skill, they are certainly not wanting in courage.
  • Inspector Athelney Jones, in The Sign of the Four and The Red-Headed League, and Inspector Stanley Hopkins, in several short stories.
  • A subversion: Inspector Baynes in Wisteria Lodge is the one official police officer who at the end of the story is praised by Holmes (and justly, as he turns out to have also found the correct solution).
  • Averted with Stanley Hopkins, who respects and even looks up to Holmes's methods.
  • Also, Inspector Martin of the Norfolk Constabulary in "The Dancing Men" is delighted to have Holmes' assistance upon learning that the murder victim was his client.
  • Inspector Gregory, who works with Holmes in "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" is also warmly praised by Holmes for his investigative ability, lacking only the imagination to imagine what might have happened in a particular situation, and act on that intuition.
• Agatha Christie:
  • Inspector James Japp for Hercule Poirot, though more so in the Poirot TV series than in the original novels. This is partly because the early Poirot stories, on which the series is largely based, followed the Sherlock Holmes pattern quite rigidly, with Poirot as Holmes, Captain Hastings in the role of Doctor Watson, and Inspector Japp playing the Lestrade part. However, it needs to be said that Japp is a really competent inspector who solved many cases on his own (as evidenced by his appearance in Tommy and Tuppence). It's just that compared to Poirot, nobody is as competent. Japp also never viewed Poirot as an obstacle. If Poirot is present at a scene, Japp will assume something big is up.
  • Christie also gave us Ariadne Oliver, a crime novelist and one of the first instances of an Author Avatar in fiction. While she mostly exists to comment on the public's taste in mystery books and allow Christie to gripe about some of her past choices (Oliver's fictional detective is from Finland, and she admits to knowing nothing about Finnish culture—which is just what Christie said about the Belgian Poirot), Ariadne also occasionally gets involved in sleuthing alongside the detective. She does have some skill in observation, getting people to talk to her and reveal incriminating information, and providing Poirot with insights he might not consider, which sometimes results in her helping to solve the crime in question. Oliver's bumbling nature and firm belief in "women's intuition", though, often prove more comic than useful.
  • Sir Henry Clithering, a recurring character in the Miss Marple stories and novels, is more of a subversion of the trope. As the former Commissioner of Scotland Yard, he's a brilliant detective who has solved international crimes, but he's rather out of his element when he comes to the mysteries of small-town St. Mary Mead. As such, he comes to genuinely rely on Miss Marple's knowledge of human nature to solve crimes, and genuinely respects her for her brilliant mind. The rest of St. Mary Mead's police force plays the trope straighter.
• Nero Wolfe:
  • Archie Goodwin functions as a Lestrade for Nero Wolfe. However, Archie is smart and quick enough to connect most of the dots, to the point where he often figures out where his boss is going with a case before the last chapter (deliberately refusing to share it with the reader until Wolfe reveals the solution, of course). But he isn't really bothered when he doesn't: "That's why we keep a genius around here."
  • Inspector Cramer is also an example. He also counts as an Obstructive Bureaucrat. Wolfe points out that for 99% of murders, Cramer is better suited to the job. Wolfe is only needed for weird stuff.
• Westman Block became this in Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. series. Justified in that, when Block joined the force, it was more concerned with keeping the city free of riots and the lower classes off the Hill than with actually solving crimes: Block didn't really have anyone to learn proper detective techniques from.
• The father of Encyclopedia Brown tends to fall into this trope, despite being the chief of police. His son can usually solve the case, though. Mentioned in the books that he can usually solve the case on his own and that it's only about once a month or so he needs Encyclopedia's help. Still not the best record, though.
• M.C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth murder mysteries feature Chief Inspector Blair who is a combination of this trope and the Sitcom Arch-Nemesis.
• M.C. Beaton's other Detective Agatha Raisin has P.C. Bill Wong, who's actually a pretty good Police officer. In Quiche of Death, he actually works out who the murderer is at the same time as Agatha and ends up saving her when she gets in over her head.
• Milo Sturgis fills this role in the Alex Delaware books by Jonathan Kellerman.
• The Lord Darcy story "The Bitter End" features a Clouseau Expy who grabs the Lestrade role in both hands. He's barely on the scene until he decides that because he can't see how the victim was poisoned, A Wizard Did It, and since Master Sean is the first wizard he encounters...
• In The Thrawn Trilogy, when Captain Pellaeon isn't being The Watson, he's the good type of this for the Grand Admiral. While he's observant and intelligent, he always comes to simpler conclusions. Thrawn always either overrides him or nudges him into seeing what really happened. By the time Pellaeon is an Admiral, however, his strategizing has become much more like Thrawn's. This has a lot to do with Pellaeon being as much Thrawn's protege as his Watson.
• In the Erast Fandorin story Murder on the Leviathan, French detective M. Gauche plays the role. Until, that is, he does find the true killer and blackmails them to keep it quiet.
• From Larry Niven's Gil the ARM stories.:
  • Gil (an ARM agent) does the real detective-ing, while a civilian detective story buff that knew the victim and suspect plays Lestrade. Gil recognizes the kid hoping for this trope to be true, but it's anything but.
  • In The Patchwork Girl, although technically the Moon is under UN and ARM jurisdiction Gil's still an outsider, and official detective work may interfere with his diplomatic duties. A Luna policewoman and the mayor's son share the role of Lestrade for this story, and Gil tags along behind them figuring things out.
• Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Gilks in the Dirk Gently series, who is smarter than Dirk thinks he is, seems to have good instincts for cases that don't contain the weird crap Dirk's involvement invariably heralds, but who once decided that a man who was beheaded in a locked room was a suicide trying to be difficult.
• In Dresden Files, Murphy from SI acts as a self-aware Lestrade in the books although later in the series she gets kicked off the police squad and is unable to act as this. She brings in Harry, resident wizard, for the craziest of the crazy cases SI is stuck with, while the police squad at Special Investigations is largely able to take on the more mundane magical crimes in Chicago.
• Detective Mallory is this to Professor Van Dusen in The Thinking Machine stories. Van Dusen seems to respect Mallory, regarding him as a decent, if plodding detective. Mallory varies between welcoming Van Dusen's involvement in his cases or regarding him as an irritating intrusion. While Mallory is quite capable of handling ordinary crimes, he is out of his depth in dealing with the 'impossible' crimes Van Dusen specialises in: either becoming totally flummoxed or simply arresting the most obvious suspect.
• Smaller & Smaller Circles: Attorney Arcinas of the NBI counts as one, and acts as a particularly unhelpful type too, at least in the beginning. He becomes slightly more helpful after the NBI Director tears him a new one for screwing up the investigation after he arrests an innocent man in his haste for fame. His "better" Lestrade moments come when he marshals official support to find the Serial Killer, under the priests' direction.
• Both Defied and Discussed in the second of the Daniel Hawthorne Novels, The Sentence is Death. Hawthorne's sidekick (a fictionalised version of author Anthony Horowitz) arrives at the crime scene hoping that the Detective Inspector assigned to the case will be the same one from the first book for reasons of this trope. However, it is a completely different DI, as there are so many of them (especially in modern-day London) and the chances of the same one being assigned to this case were just about zero.
• DCI Alexander Seawoll from Rivers of London is a downplayed example: He's an extremely good copper (he wouldn't be a DCI of the murder unit if he wasn't), but being a muggle he absolutely hates magic and magical crimes because it means having to put euphemisms for 'magic' down on too many official documents. He therefore tries to solve cases with as little involvement of The Folly as humanly possible. His temporary replacement from the second book, DI Miriam Stephanopoulos, is quicker to call upon the met's magical unit but still demands physical evidence that lets her nick people without having to explain to the judicial system that magic exists.
• Inspector Mackenzie of the Raffles stories is a subversion: since Raffles and Bunny are based on Holmes and Watson, Mackenzie seems to be the local Lestrade — however, he actually outsmarts and ruins the protagonists.
• Gosick: If Grevil de Blois weren't one of these, he'd be an Idle Nobleman. Luckily for him, Victorique is ready to play Holmes to his Lestrade... and the de Blois family is influential enough to make firing him awkward.

Live-Action TV

• When drawing all the comparisons between Sherlock Holmes and House, Dr. Cuddy most commonly fits the Lestrade role. She is a competent doctor but spends most of her time behind the scenes in the administrative role. Add into that the fact that in the first seasons, House kind of tricked her into doing his boring legwork and the modern "I hate you, but you're too useful to fire" relationship commonly seen in adaptations today. His team fits this to a lesser degree.
• Captain Leland Stottlemeyer for Monk. He's a competent policeman, but no match for Monk's skills, as he himself is quite aware. Unless he gets drunk. Take the first two letters of Stottlemeyer's first and last name, along with that of his junior associate Randy Deacon (renamed Disher after the pilot), and you get a shout-out to Lestrade: Leland Stottlemeyer + Randy Deacon = Lestrade
  • Randy himself, meanwhile, is also a decent enough cop, but his investigative skills leave a lot to be desired. In most episodes, he's portrayed as a comedic bumbler who jumps to conclusions so far-fetched that even Stottlemeyer can dismiss them out of hand.
    • Other episodes and the tie-in novels provide greater depth to Randy's character. He's excellent at typical police cases and clerical work, and in fact has an extremely high success rate in his department. It's just that when he's faced with the impossible situations that Monk so often runs across, his Cloud Cuckoolander nature kicks in, and he tries to find implausible explanations when logical ones don't seem to make sense (to give just one example: he once guessed that a suspect so obese that he couldn't walk got liposuction, went out and killed someone, then got "reverse liposuction" to become fat again).
• Psych has Carlton "Lassie" Lassiter, who serves as this. There's a bit of a twist, in that Lassiter is a rather competent detective and often comes close to solving the problem on his own, it's just that his rigidness and unwillingness to follow his hunches/gut instinct bogs him down.
• To some extent, FBI Special Agent Don Eppes with regard to his brother, Charlie, on NUMB3RS.
• Inspector Morse: Sgt Lewis for Morse. Lewis's "weakness" is that compared to Morse he has a private life, and he's more "people" orientated than Morse's fact focus.
• Lt. Columbo famously subverts this by looking like he is the Lestrade, although he himself would probably say otherwise.
• Ellery Queen:
  • Simon Brimmer in the 1975 adaptation. He is the host of a radio mystery series who fancies himself a real detective. He proves to have a knack for ferreting out useful information but always names the wrong person as the killer.
  • In the same series, the reporter Frank Flanagan will often try to beat the police to a killer. He too is invariably wrong.
• Cabot Cove's Sheriff Amos Tupper (and later Sheriff Mort Metzger) in Murder, She Wrote. In their defence, they're both incredibly competent in the day-to-day things a small-town sheriff would have to do.
• Jonathan Creek doesn't have a recurring Lestrade character, but individual episodes sometimes have one. One example is Inspector Gideon Pryke from "Black Canary", who like a good Lestrade spots several clues, impresses Jonathan by figuring out part of the case, but cannot solve it all himself^note Pryke does identify the correct culprit, but it takes Jonathan's skills to actually prove that they did it and resolve the bizarre circumstances around the crime. Pryke returns in "The Clue of the Savant's Thumb". Jonathan isn't quite a straight example, however, as the mysteries he gets roped into solving with varying degrees of reluctance involve hugely elaborate feats of misdirection, sleight-of-hand, or preparation^note Jonathan explains to Maddie in the first episode that nearly all of magic is about doing way more work than people are prepared to believe you would actually put in so that they jump to "Magic!" as the answer. Even the very best detective would struggle to unpick those... but Jonathan's day job is designing such tricks for a stage-illusionist, so arguably his role is as much "highly specialist CSI technician" as "consulting detective".

• Sherlock:
  • Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade is both a helpful, self-aware version of this trope, as well as being a Friend on the Force. The DVD commentary reveals that an important part of casting Lestrade was finding someone who the audience could believe would, if Sherlock Holmes did not exist, eventually solve the crimes on his own.
  • Anderson and Donovan play this trope straight, though.
• Elementary:
  • Lestrade's role is taken by his friend and rival from the books, Tobias (Thomas in the show) Gregson. In this iteration, his Friend on the Force status is heavily emphasised — he's the one who makes the arrests after Sherlock finds the bad guy, and always has police backup on hand for tough situations. Gregson himself isn't an idiot (you don't become a police captain by being one). There are a number of times he advises Sherlock on a case and turns out to be right. When Sherlock finally decides to come out to Gregson about his heroin addiction, Gregson reveals that he has known about it from the start (he doesn't bring in a "consulting detective" without doing a thorough background check).
  • Gareth Lestrade is introduced in season 2 and he's a deconstruction of this trope. The show reveals how damaging this kind of relationship would be when the secret of Lestrade's success (Holmes) left suddenly and Lestrade still craved the limelight but didn't have the skills to back it up. He is disgraced and laughed off the force when a case blows up in his face and he falls back to his fame-hungry ways after Sherlock solves the case for him. However, it should be mentioned that Lestrade is right about that particular case. He just doesn't know how the bad guy pulled it off.
  • There's also Detective Marcus Bell, who is assigned to most of the cases that Sherlock ends up being brought in. He doesn't particularly like Sherlock but learns to appreciate his input. He's also a fairly good detective in his own right and knows the streets of New York fairly well.
    • Both Gregson and Bell are subversions in that, unlike the source material, Sherlock holds both men in high esteem as detectives.
• Various characters of this type show up throughout the entire run of Doctor Who. In particular, UNIT's personnel typically fill both this role and the Men of Sherwood in the new series, often represented by The Brigadier. In a variation on this trope, UNIT is usually insistent on The Doctor helping them, whether he wants to or not, but often disagree with him on the proper course of action.
• The television adaptation of Cadfael splits the Lestrade role between Deputy Sheriff Hugh Beringar and his subordinate, Gilbert Prescotte. Beringar always arrests the most likely suspect, but having been himself subjected to Cadfael's investigative skills, is always willing to listen to the good brother and gives him leeway. Prescotte, meanwhile, always views cases as open-and-shut, resents Cadfael's interference, and tends to fall for the frame-ups that the real murderers construct.
• Agatha Raisin has DI Wilkes, who generally starts each case by telling Agatha to stay out of police business, comes up with entertainingly wrong theories of the crime that are gently debunked by Bill, and ends up making the arrest (and getting the credit) after Agatha has solved the crime.
• Inspector Ames in Colonel March of Scotland Yard usually fails to spot the intricacies of a case, ignores any incongruent evidence as inconvenient, and is always keen to arrest the most obvious suspect. However, he is willing to admit that March is usually right, and is the officer that March most relies on at the Yard.

Manhua

• Puppet: The aptly named Detective Lestrade is shown to be investigating the mysterious murders that have been happening around town. He immediately distrusts Leaves as he meets him, saying that he can't be trusted since he's not a human being, arguing that Bole could use him to do bad things. He is right to suspect Bole, but for the wrong reasons. Bole doesn't seem to have any intentions to use Leaves to do bad things, he is committing murders for Leaves' sake. Furthermore, his suspicions of Bole are unrelated to his search for the murderer, not connecting that they are one and the same.

Radio

• John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme: Spoofed in one Storyteller sketch, with Inspector Prout as the obviously wrong detective the investigating detective will then pour scorn on. Then it turns out Prout is actually a duchess in disguise as the inspector, and Prout was really pretending to be a butler. However, he still admits he has "literally never been right about anything" in his entire career.

Video Games

• Inspector Chelmey of the Professor Layton games fits this trope to a T. He jumps to conclusions regarding the second game's murder case, and Layton must set him straight. Chelmey apparently has a reputation for being a detective who gets solid results...Something the game notes as being a tad presumptuous about his abilities. In fact, his treating the matter as a murder at all casts doubts on his competence. You can't have a murder investigation without proof that somebody died, and non-medical personnel cannot legally declare someone to be dead unless the body is in pieces. So he is investigating a murder — and actually tries to arrest a man for that murder — without any evidence that a murder took place at all. This becomes especially clear at the end, where it is revealed that not only was there no foul play involved in what happened to the doctor, he hadn't actually died. He also plays this role in the first game. Except that he's actually the villain in disguise, who is trying to cover up his own "murder," so it's not actually him. Even so, the disguised villain portrays him remarkably well, minus one telltale flaw that has nothing to do with this trope.
• Sheriff George Woodman of Deadly Premonition is a no-nonsense guy who's pretty good at rounding up normal small-town criminal elements but is a bit outclassed when it comes to dealing with the outlandish murders that start occurring in his town. Or that's what he wants you to think...
• Dol Grenn in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. In particular, he arrests the Exile, Atton, and Kreia for destroying Peragus — to be fair, a dark side Exile might have done it anyway, but they still didn't create the circumstances that led to it. He would probably be more capable if he had the manpower he needed, a fact he laments. After it's cleared up, you can also get sidequests from him that consist of crimes that the security forces haven't been able to solve.
• The village in Hometown Story eventually gets saddled with two of them. One is trying to make it as a private detective, the other is the closest thing the village has to a police officer. The Player Character turns out to be better at resolving mysteries than both of them and is supposed to be a shopkeeper.

Visual Novels

• The Ace Attorney series have had their fair share of Lestrades:
  • Detective Gumshoe from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
  • Ema Skye in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice.
  • Shi-Long Lang fills a similar role in Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, though he switches between this trope and Inspector Javert.
  • Bobby Fulbright in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, though that's subverted later on.
  • With The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures being a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Tobias Gregson takes the role in the first game, and Lestrade (here Gina Lestrade) takes over for the sequel after having a supporting role in the first game. However, Gregson is not only eventually killed, but is revealed as a massive Dirty Cop and Detective Mole for The Conspiracy. Gregson is also the Lestrade equivalent in the in-universe Adventures of Herlock Sholmes series... and he's really not happy about those stories portraying Scotland Yard as mostly incompetent without the detective's help.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series: Despite being a Bunny-Ears Lawyer and mostly unpleasant human being, Detective Harvey Bullock is a competent detective and, in Commissioner Gordon's own words, a good cop. Despite (especially in early episodes) being convinced that Batman is bad news (and having a love-hate relationship with the Bats on the whole), he's willing to trust them to bring down threats in Gotham that he and the police (for whatever reason) can't handle. He's also able to actually arrest someone, which, legally, is something Batman can't do.
• In Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, a reanimated Sherlock is somewhat surprised (and perhaps dismayed) to discover that the head of Scotland Yard is a woman. More exactly, she's Beth Lestrade, a descendant of the original Lestrade he knew.

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