The detective is obsessive, brilliant, and unconventional. He/she is willing and able to solve the cases that no one else can, often by working outside the mainstream structure and methods. He is presumptuous and insensitive, has few friends, and often offends or alienates people. He does not seek fame and fortune, but simply wants to solve the mystery, and often lets others take the credit (leading to a grudging respect from other detectives, who otherwise regard him as reckless). He indulges an addiction when he is not working on a case.
His partner, an educated professional, is intelligent, trustworthy, and conservative. He/she is a conventional thinker, perceptive but unable to follow the detective’s methods. Nonetheless he trusts the detective implicitly, and is willing to assist despite being in the dark about the true nature of the mystery. He does the talking when empathy is required, and will try to mollify those the detective offends. He is often called on to distract or placate the police to prevent them from interfering with the detective’s investigation. He does the paperwork, and acts admirably when bravery is needed.
Together, they fight crime.
I’ve just described:
Holmes and Watson
Mulder and Scully
House and Wilson
Who else? Bonus points for listing the detective’s addiction.
Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings
C. August Dupin and the unnamed narrator of the story (which, of course, predated Holmes).
The Old Man in the Corner and the Lady Journalist. The Old Man solves the mystery from his corner in the tea shop (though he does talk about visiting the crime scenes and trials)
Mr. Linley and Smithers in “The Two Bottles of Relish” by Lord Dunsany (he was probably parodying Holmes and Watson).
Poirot could arguably be described as “addicted” to obsessive neatness and symmetry, and in fact if the character were created nowadays he would probably be interpreted clinically as suffering from OCD.
The OCD-plagued detective Adrian Monk in the eponymous TV series could be considered a modern black-comedy reworking of Poirot (as Dr. House was of Sherlock Holmes), with his nurse Sharona Fleming acting as his sidekick.
The basic trope is the sidekick serves as the stand-in for the readers. He asks the questions the readers are wondering and the hero explaining things to the sidekick serves as exposition.
From Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy fantasy/mystery stories, Lord Darcy and Master Sean O’Lochlainn are pretty close; unsurprising since they are in part a Holmes/Watson homage.
It also allows the author to delay the explanation till the reveal at the end. The protagonist Watson (and thus the reader) sees the same clues as Holmes, but isn’t privy to his internal knowledge and deductions.
Interesting that you describe Monk as based on Poirot. I’ve only seen the show once or twice, and assumed it was a direct Holmes homage, particularly given Sharona’s medical qualification.
Pardon my ignorance, as I haven’t read much of Conan Doyle’s original Holmes stories, but were there any other real (if inferior) detectives? The police in the films always seem to be portrayed as thugs or bullies, with never an original thought among them. They don’t seem to investigate at all, just simply arrest the most convenient suspect.
Inspector Lestrade, primarily. In the stories he’s eventually described as competent, though too conventional to solve Holmes’s cases.
The movies invariably ruin the minor characters. The Guy Richie ones are reasonably faithful with Holmes and Watson as films go, but Lestrade, Irene Adler etc are caricatures. The Basil Rathbone ones are worse, they reduce Watson to bumbling comic relief.
“Police detective and another police detective” seems a stretch, unless they match some of the other attributes (you may be right, I’ve never seen that one).
Deliberate homages usually throw it some clues like an addiction for Holmes, a medical background for Watson.
NCIS seems to play with multiple Holmes/Watson pairs:
Gibbs (coffee) and Ducky (medical background)
Abby (caffeine) and McGee (writer)
“Crime fighting duo” is too vague by itself.
Interesting. Don Quixote might fit, in an ironic way. What makes Sancho Panza fit the Watson archetype?
A reverse of sorts? Sancho Panza showed that he was almost as good as a “Holmes” when being the ruler and judge of Barataria, a fictional ínsula (“isle”). And throughout the tale Sancho is usually the voice of reason, even if he was a little ignorant.
Don Quixote was mad as a hatter.
As for the OP, Edgar Alan Poe with his Murders in the Rue Morgue was one of the first to come with the archetype with C. Auguste Dupin and his “Watson” the narrator of the few tales of Dupin and his friend. AFAIK the “Watson” was not ever named.
Because I had just looked at tonight’s TV listings before reading this, the first thing I thought of was Jane and Lisbon of “The Mentalist.” The only thing that doesn’t fit the OP to a tee is that Jane has an obsession, rather than an addiction.
As tellyworth noted, in the books the Scotland Yard detectives Lestrade and Gregson are not totally incompetent, if far inferior to Holmes. But I think Inspector Stanley Hopkins, a fan and more-or-less protege of Holmes, comes closer than either to counting as another “real detective”.
ETA: Oh, and so does Inspector Baynes of the uniformed police force.