The Detective's Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in Sidekicks

by Lucy Andrew (Editor), Samuel Saunders (Editor)

Overview

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role—either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective’s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children’s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030749910
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/25/2021
Series:	Crime Files
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	311
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lucy Andrew is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Programme Leader of BA (Hons) English at University Centre Shrewsbury, part of the University of Chester, UK, where she teaches and researches children’s and young adult fiction, crime fiction and popular culture. She is the author of The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood (2017) and co-editor of Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes (2013).

Samuel Saunders is a researcher of nineteenth-century crime and detective fiction, popular fiction and Victorian print culture, and is currently also HE Teaching and Learning Coach for University Centre Reaseheath, University of Chester, UK. He received his PhD in English from Liverpool John Moores University in 2018. His first monograph, The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction, appeared in 2021.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Step Forward, Sidekicks, Samuel Saunders and Lucy Andrew.- 2. “One Fixed Point in a Changing Age”: Reframing the Sidekick, Michelle D. Miranda.- 3. “Passed by unnoticed”: Surveillance and the Street Urchin in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Oriah Amit.- 4. “…always with the Inspector”: The Reader as Sidekick in Mid-Victorian ‘Detective Literature’, 1845-1887, Samuel Saunders.- 5. “You have a grand gift of silence, Watson”: Re-Inventing Agency in Twenty-First-Century Adaptations of Dr Watson, Annette Wren.- 6. “A Look of Doglike Devotion’”: Hercule Poirot’s Stooges and Foils’, J. C. Bernthal.- 7. Finding the Female Sidekick in the Lord Peter Wimsey Novels, Sally Bernadette Beresford-Sheridan.- 8. “Pretty, but not so pretty…”: Marlowe’s Female Sidekicks and the Domestication of Hard-boiled Detective Fiction, Alexander Howe.- 9. The Anti-Sidekick: Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, Double Consciousness and the Subversion of the Sidekick in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Mysteries, Nathan Ashman.- 10. 72 Votes: Theorizing the Scapegoat Sidekick in Batman: A Death in the Family, Kwasu Tembo.- 11. “I’m gonna be the best friend you could ever hope for—and the worst enemy you could ever imagine.”: Frank Miller’s All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder and the Problem of the Boy Sidekick in the Twenty-First-Century Superhero Narrative, Lucy Andrew.- 12. “World’s long on academics, Morse, but woeful short of good detectives”: Lewis, Hathaway, and Endeavour; The Changing Roles of Colin Dexter’s Sidekicks, David Bishop.- 13. Mooncakes and Squashed Fly Biscuits: Otherness in the Wells and Wong series, Alice Nuttall.- 14. Sherlock’s Legacy: The Case of the Extraordinary Sidekick, Dominique Gracia.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The Detective's Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in Sidekicks provides a welcome and long overdue corrective to the lack of high-quality and detailed scholarship on the complex and changing figure of the detective's sidekick. With impressive breadth and scope, this collection of essays is essential reading for anyone interested in the figure of the sidekick in crime writing from the nineteenth century to the present day.” (Clare Clarke, Assistant Professor of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

“The detective's sidekick is an intriguing and fascinating character in crime fiction. However, although this complex and evolving character raises many critical questions in regards to gender, genre and the politics of representation, the sidekick has hitherto been relatively underresearched by critics. Samuel Saunders' and Lucy Andrew's ground-breaking volume addresses this absence, offering rich, original and highly readable chapters on one of crime fiction's most well-loved yet at times elusive figures. Ranging from historical contextualisation to the most recent portrayals in the genre, and encompassing fiction as well as adaptation, the essays in this companion are certain to appeal to a wide range of readers and interests. Students, academics and researchers of crime fiction and popular culture will want to add this book to their list of essential reading.” (Charlotte Beyer, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, University of Gloucestershire, UK)