Access to this page has been denied because we believe you are using automation tools to browse the website. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes a full panoply of supporting characters. A character who’s arrogant and full of himself needs a character to keep him from taking himself too seriously, maybe whats a side dish acerbic coworker or a mother.
You might want to show a hardboiled police detective’s softer side by giving him kids or a pregnant wife. The most important supporting character in many genres, though, is the sidekick. Virtually every mystery protagonist has one. Rex Stout’s obese, lazy, brilliant Nero Wolfe has Archie Goodwin—a slim, wisecracking ladies’ man. Carol O’Connell’s icy, statuesque, blonde Detective Kathy Mallory has garrulous, overweight, aging, alcoholic Detective Riker. Parker’s literate, poetry-quoting Spenser has black, street-smart, tough-talking Hawk.
Mystery protagonists and their sidekicks are a study in contrasts. Sidekicks are the yin to the protagonists’ yang. The contrast puts the protagonists’ characteristics into relief. For instance, the thickheaded Watson makes Holmes look smarter. The place to start in creating a sidekick is with the profile you developed of your sleuth, so think about what kind of opposites will work.
This is not the villain, but a good-guy character who drives your sleuth nuts, pushes his buttons, torments him, puts obstacles in his path, and is generally a pain in the patoot. It might be an overprotective relative or a know-it-all coworker. For Sherlock Holmes, it’s Inspector Lestrade and his disdain for Holmes’ investigative techniques. In the same vein, Kathy Reichs’ forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan has a tormentor in the person of Montreal police sergeant Luc Claudel. Their sparring is an ongoing element in her books. In Monday Mourning, Brennan finds out Claudel is going to be working with her on the case. Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology.
Conflict is the spice that makes characters come alive, and an adversary can cause the protagonist all kinds of interesting problems and complicate your story by throwing up roadblocks to the investigation. An adversary may simply be thickheaded—for example, a superior officer who remains stubbornly unconvinced and takes the protagonist off the case. Or an adversary may be deliberately obstructive. For example, a bureaucrat’s elected boss might quash an investigation that threatens political cronies, or a senior reporter may fail to pass along information because he doesn’t want a junior reporter to get the scoop. In developing an adversary, remember it should be a character who’s positioned to thwart, annoy, and generally get in your sleuth’s way.