Why the greatest love stories are detective stories.
We don’t get to see much of Miles Archer , business partner to detective Sam Spade in John Huston’s 1941 classic. Archer shows up in the first scene, lanky and flashily dressed, foolishly ogling a potential client who is actually Brigid O’Shaughnessy , the ultimate femme fatale, using a fake name. In the next scene, he’s shot dead. Nevertheless, Archer plays a key role in the story’s denouement.
That’s partly Spade’s personal moral code speaking, but it’s also an abiding theme in crime fiction: the transcendent, almost mystical bond between detective partners. The latest season ofends with a shot of Ennis Police Chief Liz Danvers sipping coffee on the deck of a lakeside cabin while her onetime partner Evangeline Navarro can be glimpsed through a window, smiling at the other end of the deck.
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, the OG sleuth pairing, set the pattern. Watson initially served as a handy device for Holmes’ creator: a conventional man of action able to narrate the exploits of an eccentric hero who’d never bother to write them down himself. Together, Holmes and Watson turned 221B Baker St. into the site of a perpetual Boys’ Own adventure yarn, interrupted only by Watson’s brief marriage and the three-year period during which Holmes pretended to be dead.
According to hoary formula, detective partners must have contrasting but complementary qualities and temperaments—two incomplete individuals who form a balanced whole, the better to solve crimes. A sensitive intellectual must be teamed with an earthy pragmatist, a player with a family man, and so on. In American TV, the pairing is often cross-racial: Crockett and Tubbs in.
series—let’s just pass over the rudderless second season as an exception that proves the rule—the humorlessness of the series’ original creator, Nic Pizzolatto, has kept it from doing full justice to the subject. The true apotheosis of TV detective partnerships is, a cornucopia of workplace banter and bonding to which the numerous murder cases handled by the Baltimore PD often take a back seat.