Invisible Ink no 312: Detective double acts

Ever since Conan Doyle created Holmes and Watson, writers have chronicled the adventures of paired investigators. The reason is expedience; it’s hard to have a lone detective talking to himself or herself.

A sidekick, preferably a ninny, gives a detective someone to play off against.

Some didn’t quite take off, such as Agatha Christie’s Mr Satterthwaite and Harley Quinn, an upper-crust Englishman and the vaguely supernatural Quinn, prone to appearing and vanishing at will.

The former Daily Mirror reporter James Tucker came up with the Harpur and Iles books, starting out when he was 56, and they benefit from the seasoning of experience. There are 30 novels so far.

The married team of Frances and Richard Lockridge was probably inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s only Nick and Nora novel, which became six “Thin Man” films, when they created the married detectives Pam and Jerry North, who eventually landed their own television series.

William and Audrey Roos did something similar, developing a pair of smart New York sophisticates bouncing plenty of witty banter back and forth as the bodies pile up. Two once-famous but now lost mystery writers teamed up to create a pair of memorably offbeat characters.

Craig Rice (a woman) and Stuart Palmer have all but vanished, which is a shame because they created the scarecrow-like teacher Hildegarde Withers and her hard-living sidekick John J Malone.

The couple appeared in six novellettes (a fashionable long-short story length in the 1960s) collected into one volume, People vs Withers and Malone, and 14 novels, in which Miss Withers gets a new sidekick.

The mysteries are whacky and oddball but deserve re-publication. The prolific Rice once wrote a novel using her own children as sleuths.

Not all detectives are human. Lilian Jackson Braun came up with reporter Jim Qwilleran and his two smart Siamese cats, who somehow manage to help him solve crimes.

Surprisingly, their cases are well-written and fun. Lawrence G Blochman came up with one of the most unusual pairings; Dr Coffee and his Hindu assistant Dr Mookerji were the very first forensic detectives.

The creation of double-acts was a game everyone could play, even P G Wodehouse, who of course had already created Jeeves and Wooster but briefly turned his hand to a case featuring Oakes and Snyder, which hinges on an impossible poisoning in a locked room. In this, Wodehouse reined in his natural sense of the absurd to create a proper detective story, Death At The Excelsior.