Holmes/Watson - the pairing as type or trope

[damned_colonial]

This post is riffing off wrabbit's suggestion in the discussion prompt gathering thread, which is still taking suggestions for new discussions if you have them.

Holmes and Watson weren't the first detective/sidekick duo, but they were one of the earliest pairs to achieve enormous popularity. Since then, similar pairings/duos have become a recognisable type in pop culture.

What are the distinctive traits of the Holmes/Watson pairing? Who are some of the more recent pairings/duos that draw on H/W? wrabbit mentions House and Wilson, of course, but it seems to me that the very common pairing of an exceptional/brilliant and possibly anti-social hero with a partner who's a stabilising influence or a source of exposition or both, owes a lot to H/W. There are plenty of detective duos, of course, especially on television. When wrabbit posted her comment I thought of Jim/Blair from the Sentinel (a police detective with an academic partner), and then last night, watching Hornblower with a friend, I realised that Archie is a bit of a Watson in a way: he exists in the TV canon to make Hornblower less solitary and internal and help the story move along, is Horatio's best friend with whom he shares everything, and is loyal and straightforward to Horatio's awkward brilliance. C. S. Forester didn't originally write Archie as a partner for Horatio in the book series, and Bush (who shows up later in the chronology of the series) doesn't fit the H/W pairing mold at all, but perhaps by the 90s when the TV writers came to develop Archie as Horatio's partner, that type of pairing had become more standardised?

H/W has also been called the archetypal slash pairing and the first slash fandom (btw, does anyone know whether anyone was actually publishing H/W slash in zines before Star Trek slash came along?) If the H/W pairing is a discernable "type", is that type inherently slashy or queer? How many H/W-influenced pairings have considerable slash followings?

Comments

[kindkit]

Who are some of the more recent pairings/duos that draw on H/W?

They're not much more recent, but definitely Raffles and Bunny, whose creator was not merely a Holmes fan but was ACD's brother-in-law. Bunny is a bit too hapless for the genius-wrangler part of the Watson role, and Raffles is much more socially capable than Holmes, but there are still similarities.

More recently I'd cite due South (Benton Fraser is clearly a Holmes figure; Ray Vecchio is more Watson-esque than his eventual replacement Ray Kowalski) and the Middleman (where the sidekick/audience stand-in is actually named Wendy Watson). And Jeeves and Wooster parodies the archetype, I think.

[damned_colonial]

I'm not sure I agree with your take on Jeeves and Wooster, but I'll have to ponder it.

From classic detective canon, I'd cite Poirot/Hastings, and Lord Peter Wimsey/Charles Parker or Peter/Bunter (particularly in the pre-Harriet canon -- and Bunter's reaction to Peter and Harriet's marriage is rather telling, I think.)

[kindkit]

Jeeves and Wooster can be read, I think, as a version of Holmes and Watson in which Watson is under the delusion that he's solving the cases more-or-less by himself, with just a little help from Holmes. Jeeves is very Holmes-ish in some ways--cerebral, reserved, emotionally unattached.

Bunter's reaction to Peter and Harriet's marriage is rather telling, I think

*weeps for heartbroken!Bunter* And now I'm imagining a scenario where Bunter turns to drugs for consolation; it's ALL YOUR FAULT that my brain has decided to make Bunter's fate even more unhappy than it canonically is.

More seriously, I think Peter and Bunter sort of split the Holmes role between them. Peter's got most of the crime-solving genius, but Bunter has the fastidious perfectionism, the detachment (from anyone who isn't Lord Peter), and the interest in forensic technologies (as opposed to LP, who approaches detection as a logic puzzle). And actually they split the Watson role too--Bunter is the genius-wrangler, certainly, and he literally keeps Peter sane in the early books, but on the other hand it's Peter who leaves him for a wife.

[wychwood]

Oh, man, Poirot and Hastings - I can't believe I forgot to mention them! I think Hastings is actually a source of some of the "Oh, Watson, he's so dumb" ideas people have, because he's so clearly a Watson character while also being offensively stupid.

[ilthit]

I was going to point this out. :D

I wouldn't say Hastings was OFFENSIVELY stupid. He couldn't figure out Poirot's case but, fair enough, neither could I. But Poirot definitely considered him too stupid to be a detective, and he was, and I agree that, along with film adaptations through the ages, Hastings may be one of the reasons for the "stupid Watson" idea.

[starlady]

Interesting that you cite The Middleman; I'm watching it now and loving it. Wendy is obviously the audience viewpoint character, but I'm not sure that the Middleman himself is that distant from the audience. He's good at his job, and a little hokey, but not what I'd call a a genius in need of a wrangler.

[kindkit]

*nods* I wasn't proposing it as an exact parallel; I don't think there are many exact Holmes/Watson parallels in other texts, but that may be because I have a resistance to reading characters as archetypes.