The Six Napoleons

Someone in London is breaking into houses, ignoring the silver, and smashing small plaster busts of Napoleon Bonaparte. Lestrade brings the case to Holmes with the air of a man who has seen everything and is still surprised. The vandalism seems senseless, until one of the break-ins ends in a violent death, and then it stops being funny. Lestrade is convinced the answer lies in the Italian quarter and wants to point the Yard's resources there. Holmes, as usual, would rather look at the one address nobody is excited about: Chiswick. He rarely fights the obvious theory head-on; he simply goes where it cannot follow.

What Holmes has spotted is that the busts all come from the same maker, and that the smashing has a purpose: the man doing it is looking for something hidden inside the plaster. The trail runs through Morse Hudson's shop, a journalist called Horace Harker, and a knot of Italians who know more about the busts than they let on.

David Carson directed, from John Kane, John Hawkesworth and Conan Doyle. Eric Sykes brings his mournful comic timing to Horace Harker, Colin Jeavons is at his best as a Lestrade being proven wrong in public, and Emil Wolk's Beppo is a proper little villain. Marina Sirtis, not yet on the Enterprise, plays Lucrezia, and Gerald Campion, Vincenzo Nicoli, Steve Plytas and Vernon Dobtcheff keep the Italian quarter crowded.

The solution, when it comes, is a gem. A thief hid something valuable inside one of six identical busts. And the killer, poor soul, has to break every one of them to find it. It is the sort of case that makes Holmes look like a magician and the rest of us feel like Lestrade. The killer's method is patient and faintly comic, which is exactly the combination Conan Doyle liked, and the episode plays it with a straight face.