I listened to The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie at work last week and had a thought: of all of the detecting duos of fictional history, there is a pattern that emerges. On the one hand, you get the brilliant one, the art-forger-cum-informant, the mentalist, the Mr. Holmes, and on the other hand, you get the F.B.I. agent, the police detective, or the military doctor. The sidekick in each scenario happens to have some sort of military or police credentials, is good with firearms, and has the patient doggedness to run down all the mundane details that the Amazing Sleuth can’t be bothered to deal with. This person also has to have a degree of patience to wait for his or her partner to do the big reveal, and perhaps play an unwitting part in that reveal.
Consider Monsieur Poirot and Colonel Hastings: Poirot gets all of the accolades (and rightly so), while Hastings later compiles the summary of the cases in his memoirs. What struck me is that Poirot repeatedly calls Hastings shortsighted for clearly missing the obvious, but also congratulates him for stating the apparent, something that often leads Poirot to the solution to the mystery. More than that, it’s Hastings who is narrating these stories: he is letting us know in the clearest terms the outer limits of his mental abilities.
Poirot wouldn’t let just any old idiot hang around him, so that means that Hastings is in some sort of sweet spot of intelligence: not smart enough to compete, but intelligent enough to keep up most of the time. And let’s not forget, he has to be humble, in order to put down his experiences in such a frank manner, casting himself in a sometimes unfortunate light.
In short, if you wish to be the sidekick to a maverick detective, you have to be:
I think I will take another career path.
P.S. I also listened to David and Goliath by Malcom Gladwell. It’s a great book, I just don’t have anything to say about it, except that Goliath probably had gigantism rather than acromegaly, as with acromegaly your bones fuse together and grow wider; with gigantism, the bones keep growing in length.
(All that did was make me feel smart, and I’m not taking it back. If you’d like, you can now have the knowledge that this brainy woman is going to clean out her bathroom sink’s drain, which has some sort of black goo living in it. I know. Gross. Time for bleach and Q-tips!)
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