Sunday Spotlight - Dead Boy Detectives

Originally from the pages of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, the Dead Boy Detectives have previously had graphic novels written about them, and also appeared in the massive crossover Vertigo had, before they decided not to do those any more. Now, Edwin and Charles, the Dead Boy Detectives, have their own on-going series that has recently been released in trade paperback.



Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland are dead. They both died at the boarding school St. Hilarion's – Edwin in 1916 and Charles in 1990. However, Death was a little busy at the time, and so both boys lingered on, travelling the world as ghosts. To occupy their time, they formed a detective agency – the Dead Boy Detectives. Sometimes they find missing cats, sometimes lost objects. But now they've stumbled onto a much bigger case – they foiled a daring art theft and managed to save Crystal Palace, the teenaged daughter of two prominent celebrity artists. Unfortunately, Crystal saw them and realises that they must be ghosts (she's quite taken with the idea, in fact). She decides to head to St. Hilarion's to investigate further. Edwin and Charles follow, well aware of the horrors that lurk in St. Hilarion's halls, since those are what killed the boys so many years before. Now, they must try to protect Crystal – and possibly discover the truth about their own deaths along the way.

I'll admit to being a fan of the concept of the Dead Boy Detectives since I first saw them in Sandman. Two ghostly boys meandering through the afterlife and solving crimes? It's the Hardy Boys with ectoplasm! When I learned that the artist would be Mark Buckingham, I was sold on the new series. I love Buckingham work on Fables, and he brings the same level of quality to this book too. He melds the fantastic and the mundane superbly, making him a great choice to bring Toby Litt's story to life. Speaking of the story, it has a great mix of “boy's own adventure” coupled with some really dark horror themes that work well with the shared universe of Sandman. Edwin, Charles and Crystal don't bother disbelieving that the spirits, demons and magic they face is real – it's clearly real, so they better just get on with it. The adventures themselves follow the classic children's adventures; they're almost Enid Blyton, sometimes, but with a heavy dose of visceral horror.

This isn't a book for everyone. Sandman fans might find it too light, and younger fans could find the horror aspects a little too frightening – there's a couple of sequences of Edwin and Charles returning to their dead bodies that have been illustrated in beautiful detail by Buckingham, but that makes them incredibly confronting. It works wonderfully as a nostalgia-filled adventure, but I think the main appeal will be to those in their mid-teens, around the same age as the characters. The story develops nicely and introduces some good friendship drama along with the mysteries (ghostly and otherwise) that the characters must solve. It's definitely a series that I'm going to keep reading.

Dead Boy Detectives is available now.

Dead Boy Detectives vol. 1: Schoolboy Terrors – 9781401248895 - $16.99 – 160 pages