Welcome to Street Prophets Thursday Coffee Hour. This is an open topic thread so help yourself to the goodies and sit a spell and let us know what is new with you. I am huge fan of mysteries. I have noticed that the characters I like most are the sidekicks. As a child I watched the Lone Ranger and my favorite character was Tonto. As I grew older I found that I liked the sidekicks better than the heroes.
I love Sherlock Holmes but I must admit that I find Watson to be the more interesting character. I think that the stories themselves would have been boring if we did not have the character of Watson. Sherlock Holmes himself was really irritating as a character. He was almost a caricature rather then a character. With out the humanizing presence of Watson the stories would be unreadable. In the couple of stories where Watson did not appear the stories lack the spark of humanity.
I just finished the Mrs. Jeffries series. My favorite characters are the elderly but feisty Luty Belle Crookshank and her butler Hatchet. Luty Belle is an American with a fondness for blunt speaking, bright colors, and her trusty Colt 45. Hatchet is the prim and proper English butler with a fascinating background. They are just more fun to read about than the main detective Mrs. Jeffries.
In Carolyn Hart's Annie and Max Darling Death on Demand series I enjoy the main sleuths but the sidekicks are more colorful. Max's mother Laurel appears to be a space cadet but there is a shrewd intelligence there. These stories have as their feisty old lady the very proper Southerner Miss Dora.
I think heroes have a disadvantage in that they need to conform to what the public feels a hero should be which is mostly Superman and "truth, justice, and the American way". They get to be rather boring sometimes. Sidekicks get to be more human and more interesting.
So who are your favorite sidekicks? What is new with you? And of course what's for dinner? We are having Sweet and Sour Pork over Fried Rice.