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

314 Pages·2021·4.791 MB·English

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

CRIME FILES
The Detective’s Companion
in Crime Fiction
A Study in Sidekicks
Edited by
Lucy Andrew
Samuel Saunders
Crime Files
Series Editor
Clive Bloom, Middlesex University, London, UK
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has
never been more popular. In novels, short stories and films, on the
radio, on television and now in computer games, private detectives
and psychopaths, poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gang-
sters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination,
and their creators a mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files
is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning
readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detec-
tive fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, from detective fiction to the
gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial
investigation, is explored through clear and informative texts offering
comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14927
·
Lucy Andrew Samuel Saunders
Editors
The Detective’s
Companion in Crime
Fiction
A Study in Sidekicks
Editors
Lucy Andrew Samuel Saunders
University Centre Shrewsbury University Centre Reaseheath
University of Chester University of Chester
Chester, UK Chester, UK
Crime Files
ISBN 978-3-030-74988-0 ISBN 978-3-030-74989-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74989-7
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For mum, from Lucy
For Emma, from Sam
Praise for TheDetectivesCompanion
’
inCrimeFiction
“Thedetective’ssidekickisanintriguingandfascinatingcharacterincrime
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
bycritics.SamuelSaunders’andLucyAndrew’sground-breakingvolume
addresses this absence, offering rich, original and highly readable chap-
ters on one of crime fiction’s most well-loved yet at times elusive figures.
Rangingfromhistoricalcontextualisationtothemostrecentportrayalsin
thegenre,andencompassingfictionaswellasadaptation,theessaysinthis
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
“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 collec-
tionofessaysisessentialreadingforanyoneinterestedinthefigureofthe
sidekickincrimewritingfromthenineteenthcenturytothepresentday.”
—Clare Clarke, Assistant Professor of English,
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Step Forward, Sidekicks 1
Samuel Saunders and Lucy Andrew
2 ‘One Fixed Point in a Changing Age’: Reframing
the Sidekick 17
Michelle D. Miranda
3 ‘Passed by Unnoticed’: Surveillance and the Street
Urchin in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone 41
Oriah Amit
4 ‘…Always with the Inspector’: The Reader as Sidekick
in Mid-Victorian ‘Detective Literature’, 1845–1887 59
Samuel Saunders
5 ‘You Have a Grand Gift of Silence, Watson’:
Reinventing Agency in Twenty-First-Century
Adaptations of Dr. Watson 81
Annette Wren
6 ‘A Look of Doglike Devotion’: Hercule Poirot’s
Stooges and Foils 101
J. C. Bernthal
ix
x CONTENTS
7 FindingtheFemaleSidekickintheLordPeterWimsey
Novels 121
Sally Beresford-Sheridan
8 ‘Pretty, but Not so Pretty…’: Marlowe’s Female
Sidekicks and the Domestication of Hard-Boiled
Detective Fiction 147
Alexander N. Howe
9 The Anti-Sidekick: Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander,
Double Consciousness and the Subversion
of the Sidekick in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins
Mysteries 167
Nathan Ashman
10 72 Votes: Theorizing the Scapegoat Sidekick
in Batman: A Death in the Family 189
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 215
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 237
David Bishop
13 Mooncakes and Squashed Fly Biscuits: Otherness
in the Wells and Wong Series 261
Alice Nuttall
14 Sherlock’s Legacy: The Case of the Extraordinary
Sidekick 283
Dominique Gracia
Index 305
Notes on Contributors
Oriah Amit is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los
Angeles. Her dissertation examines the relationship between narrative,
futurity, and the expansion of the security state in late Victorian and
Edwardian novels.
Lucy Andrew isaSeniorLecturerinEnglishLiteratureandProgramme
Leader of B.A. (Hons) English at University Centre Shrewsbury, part
of the University of Chester, where she 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 (Palgrave, 2017) and co-editor of Crime
Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes (UWP, 2013) with Catherine Phelps.
Nathan Ashman isaLecturerinCrimeWritingattheUniversityofEast
Anglia and the author of James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction (Lexington
Books, 2018). His research spans the fields of crime fiction, contempo-
raryAmericanfiction,andecocriticism,withaparticularspecialisminthe
works of James Ellroy.
Sally Beresford-Sheridan is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of
Waterloo. Her research focuses on women’s British detective fiction of
theinterwaryears.Sheexamineshowthelanguageofthese‘middlebrow’
texts, in conjunction with advertising and publication history, created
reading communities amenable to cultural change in Dorothy L. Sayers
and Agatha Christie.
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