“My Watson to Your Holmes”: Rewriting the Sidekick

After years of treating Doctor John H. Watson as a faithful but not-that-clever friend and chronicler of Sherlock Holmes, recent revisions finally offer a character closer to Doyle’s version. Since each reworking of the great detective calls for a reworking of the diarist doctor, this paper aims to analyse contemporary Watson’s counterparts – literary: Carole Nelson Douglas’s Irene Adler has her Penelope Huxleigh, Neil Gaiman’s consulting detective his “S_ M_,” and cinematic: Gregory House has his James Wilson, and the Whitechapel DI Chandler his Edward Buchan. Each rewriting retains some features of the canonical sidekick through which the new character reflects on the original.