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.