Detective Assistants

In many detective fictions, there always been a companion by the side of the detectives. Sometimes, they act as the narrator, and shoulder the task of showing the detectives’ legendary deed of solving the case to the public. And at other times, they will act as the assistants to help the detectives do some investigation. Dupin and the narrator “I”, Holmes and Dr. Watson, Father Brown and his friend the once-bandit Flambeau, Poirot and his assistant Hasting, the list of the combination of detective and his or her assistant is too numerous to mention one by one. The assistants are the ideal listeners of the detectives. The detectives will tell them their understanding, deduction and analysis about the cases in time. What’s more, the inferior

Watson for example, readers are forced to accept the limited viewpoint of Watson whose dullness delayed the process of revealing the mystery. Many a time, it is Dr. Watson who pointed out the doubts in the hearts of the average readers. Nobody knows the truth except the detective himself. Thus the mystery is maintained, until the detective solve it at the end of the story. Many detective story writers treats the assistant characters as “implied readers”. The detective writers wish their readers to be as adorably stupid as the assistants. But the readers are unwilling to meet those expectations. When the readers mock at the simple-minded assistants, they are scratching their head over how to find the truth by themselves. The tug of war between the writers and the readers are thus launched. One end of the string is the writers who try to pull the readers in the direction of the stupid assistants, while at the other end of the string is the readers who try to liberate from the constraints of the assistants. In this way, the the detectives’ friends and assistants are a functional character, which can help in building suspense and arousing the reading

Although those police officers own more discourse power in the mainstream society, the detectives always despise their ability of case-solving. The police, like those police officers from the Scotland Yard in the Adventures of Holmes, and the detectives have a connection of contradictory and interdependent. The detectives often accept the invitation of the police to investigate. While at the same time, the detectives would provide the police some clues “in charity”, and rendered the police as gainers who reap where they don’t sow. In some hard-boiled detective fictions, the police are not only ignorant and incompetent, but also violent and corrupt. Usually, the criminal gangsters share a close relationship with those police officers. They represents the social darkness and unfair. In The Long Goodbye, the police turned the fact upside down to cater the need of a multi-millionaire, by making false evidence, and commit perjury. Those mercenary polices have contrasted strongly with the righteous