Join Dr Lucy Andrew and Sam Saunders as they discuss their forthcoming research project, A Study in Sidekicks: The Detective’s Assistant in Crime Fiction, which will explore the significance of the sidekick across a wide range of crime narratives from the 19th century to the present day.

Sam will consider the role of the reader operating as the sidekick figure in mid-Victorian‘detective literature’. The ‘narrator sidekick’, made famous by the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin short-stories (1841-45), was replaced by the reader in the mid-1800s, as the genre was designed to allow readers to experience the criminal. As disinterest in this grew towards the fin-de-siècle, the narrator sidekick began to reappear, in the form of characters such as Dr John Watson.

Lucy will discuss the phenomenon of the boy sidekick, from Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street Irregulars to Batman’s Robin, with particular emphasis upon contemporary texts which problematize these adult detective/boy assistant relationships, such as Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk (2011) and Frank Miller’s graphic novel, All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder (2005-8).

Lucy is Lecturer in English Literature and Programme Leader of the English degree at University Centre Shrewsbury. Her research specialisms are in children’s and young adult literature and crime fiction and her first monograph, The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. She has also published on Veronica Mars, Harry Potter and supernatural detective fiction for young readers and is the co-editor of Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes (University of Wales Press).

Sam is a third-year PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is researching the role of the 19th century periodical press in the construction, evolution and reception of crime and detective fiction between 1861 and 1887. He has previously written for the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and has articles awaiting publication with the Wilkie Collins Journal and Law, Crime and History, a special issue of which he is also currently co-editing.