DOCTOR WATSON, IN THE CONSERVATORY, WITH A CHAIN SAW

by Rob Lopresti

If this piece seems familiar it means that 1) you subscribed to MURDEROUS INTENT MYSTERY MAGAZINE in 1999 and 2) your memory is excellent. Congratulations.

A while ago I heard Earl Emerson, one of my favorite mystery writers, speak in my local bookstore. Earl coined a phrase that night that made me like him even more. He referred to a certain type of character in mystery fiction as the “Sociopathic Sidekick.”

The traditional sidekick, of course, is a staple of the mystery, going all the way back to the anonymous narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s Arsene Lupin stories. His job was to tell us how brilliant the hero was, engage in sparkling conversation, and investigate ineffectually.

But in recent times a new sidekick has developed. This fellow, the Sociopathic Sidekick (or, appropriately enough, the SS) doesn’t do mainstream investigating. He gets called in during emergencies to watch the hero’s back or kick the frosting out of bad guys.

(In movies it is different, of course. The sidekick’s role in current flicks seems to be dying horribly, thereby justifying the hero’s vengeful mayhem.)

While there may be earlier examples of the SS (aren’t there always when you declare you have found the original of something?) the first I can find is Hawk in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. Hawk first appears in my favorite of the series, Promised Land, where he seems to be a bad guy not too different from many others Spenser faced before and after. But Spenser allows him to escape from the cops which results in Hawk helping him out later in the book. After that they are BFF in novel after novel.

If you are an ethical private eye, as Spenser tries to be, it is very convenient to have a pal who doesn’t clutter his life up with such details. For example, in Early Autumn a bad guy keeps hiring people to kill Spenser. When the hero goes up against the villain he simply surrenders. Being the good guy Spenser can’t kill a guy who won’t fight but he knows that tomorrow the whole sending-killers routine will start again.

Hawk, on the other hand, has no such compunctions and is happy to apply a little lead therapy to the situation. .Such are the joys of having a Sociopathic Sidekick.

The big picture

It is worth noting that Spenser is white and Hawk is black. Parker was a former English professor and was no doubt familiar with the famous essay by Leslie J. Fiedler which demonstrates that one of the basic motifs in American literature is the friendship between a (somewhat-civilized) white male and a (less-civilized) male of different ethnicity. Consider Leatherstocking, Ishmael, and Huck Finn, to name the white half of three such pairs.

(Of course, that pairing goes back far beyond American Literature. Jacob and Esau doesn’t really count since they never became friends, but the match of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is even older.)

One could argue that the oppression Hawk has experienced justifies or at least explains his looser moral code. Sometimes the justification comes from a different kind of experience. In Robert Crais’s novels about Elvis Cole, for example, SS Joe Pike is a Vietnam veteran.

However, my favorite SS is a different fettle of kish. In Harlan Coben’s books sports agent Myron Bolitar is assisted by his best friend, Windsor Horne Lockwoode . Win, whom one character aptly labels “Myron’s psychotic tonto,” is a smart, wealthy, attractive, WASP financial analyst. His hobby just happens to be killing bad guys as painfully as possible.

Before I end this I have to return to Earl Emerson. His novels about private eye Thomas Black feature a character who is almost a parody of the SS. Snake has the requisite fast gun and loose morals but the herp winds up rescuing him more often than the other way around.

I’ll leave it to the doctorate students to decide what the evolution from Dr. Watson to Hawk says about society and literature. But apparently these days the man who walks the mean streets needs meaner backup.

Another thread from the web

I’m sure you all know about Wikipedia, but have you heard of Wiki racing? I just read an article about it as an exciting new trend and a friend of mine says her high school kids have been doing it for three years.

Here’s the idea. Pick any two pages on Wikipedia. Say: AUTOHARP and DASHIELL HAMMETT. The object is to get from one page to the other in the fewest number of links by clicking on the hotlinks which takes. You wouldn’t think those two have much in common, but here’s the route I found: AUTOHARPS were created by people form GERMANY which started WORLD WAR II which included the ALEUTIAN ISLANDS CAMPAIGN, which was fought by, among many others DASHIELL HAMMETT. Three degrees of separation.

You can play this game at a site called Wikispeedia,which sets up games and keeps track of the best scores. And here’s the cool part: the information scientist who set up the website uses the results to see how people do research on the web. This was the basis for his master’s thesis.

From a school game to scholarly publication in one degree of separation. I love it.