The Boy Detective

Abstract

This entry focuses on the origins and development of the boy detective protagonist in various forms of Anglophone literature from the mid‐19th century to the present. In Britain, the boy detective first appeared in the “penny dreadful” The Boy Detective; or, the Crimes of London (1865–1866) as a middle‐class role model for boy readers, before becoming a recurring feature of Alfred Harmsworth's boys' story papers from the 1890s onward as a street urchin assistant to a middle‐class, adult detective. In the early 20th century, the boy detective featured in popular school stories in papers such as the Gem and the Magnet and moved into other hybrid forms in series fiction from the 1940s onward, merging with genres such as holiday‐adventure, historical fiction, and the supernatural. In the United States, the boy detective emerged as an independent hero in half‐dime novels and story papers from the 1880s onward before moving into popular series such as The Hardy Boys (1927–), Encyclopedia Brown (1963–2012), and The Three Investigators (1964–1990). The originally British adult detective/boy assistant tradition has flourished in American comics since 1940 in Batman/Robin narratives. While Robin begins as a firm role model for his young readers in 1940, recent incarnations of the Boy Wonder have become less idealized. The movement of the boy detective into American Young Adult fiction has continued this exploration of the morally ambiguous and potentially violent and criminalized nature of the modern boy detective.