The Detective's Companion in Crime Fiction, 1st ed. 2021
A Study in Sidekicks
Crime Files Series

Language: English

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The Detective's Companion in Crime Fiction
Publication date:
311 p. · 14.8x21 cm · Paperback

158.24 €

In Print (Delivery period: 15 days).

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The Detective's Companion in Crime Fiction
Publication date:
311 p. · 14.8x21 cm · Hardback

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.


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.

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.


Challenges the traditional view that the sidekick figure in crime and detective fiction has a small, generic role

Explores the changing representations and functions of the sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction

Offers a fresh perspective on the history and development of crime fiction