Watson, Doctor Watson

Sidekicks, partners, bosom buddies, and dastardly duos are often found in literature and movie format. So many famous crime-fighting twosomes come to mind:

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote de la Mancha and his squire, Sancho Panza

Tarzan and the Apes (later, Jane) in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s graphic novels (weren’t the bad guys always trying to capture the chimpanzee?)

Batman and Robin; Attila and the Huns; Gene Autry and Gabby Hayes;

Genghis Khan and grandson Kublai (generations apart but both riveted on world domination)

 Rizzoli & Isles; Stephanie Plum & Lula; Simon and Simon; Hart to Hart; ah, the list goes on.

Sherlock Holmes has his ‘man Friday’ (reference to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe intentional.) Dr. Watson, the quintessential sidekick to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, is narrator of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures. Watson does not fill the role of leg-work man like Nero Wolfe’s Archie or the “muscle” of Stephanie Plum’s Lula. When he attempts to detect, in the presence or unexpected absence of the detective, the efforts fall short with, in his own words, “indifferent success.”

Did Dr. Watson remain with Mr. Holmes all those years, even after he married, for the exhilaration of knowing the game was afoot?