I'm reading Great Expectations and it's so much better than I thought it would be! Like all the other things I've never read or seen for reasons general cultural ubiquity, the original article is far richer and more surprising than the weak 'get a load of Miss Havisham still in her wedding dress - is she nuts or what?' stuff that has filtered down. The whole story so far is gloriously bonkers. The quote below is from a scene about 1/4 of the way through - there has been a violent crime and nobody knows who did it. Eventually some police come and, well - I like the way he writes it. They seem like characters who could easily support their own weekly police procedural show, and they're just in the book for one paragraph! Based on the "knowing and reserved looks" alone, I think they could give David Sunglasses Caruso on CSI: Miami a run for his money.
The Constables and the Bow Street men from London--for, this happened in the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police--were about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obvious wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood about the door of the Jolly Bargeman, with knowing and reserved looks that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.
