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?
