Dead Boy Detectives

The Dead Boy Detectives
The Children's Crusade #1 (December 1993), featuring the Dead Boy Detectives. Art by John Totleben.
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics (Vertigo)
First appearance	The Sandman #25 (April 1991)
Created by	Neil Gaiman Matt Wagner
In-story information
Alter ego	Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine
Abilities	incorporality, intangibility

The Dead Boy Detectives are fictional characters that have appeared in comic books published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. They were created by writer Neil Gaiman and artists Matt Wagner and Malcolm Jones III in The Sandman #25 (April, 1991).

The characters are the ghosts of two dead children, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, who, rather than enter the afterlife, stay on Earth to become detectives investigating crimes involving the supernatural.

The characters were created by Gaiman and Wagner during the "Season of Mists" storyline in Sandman #25. In this story their origin is given as the two characters meet for the first time.

The story and characters are clearly a macabre spin on two genres of British children's fiction - boarding school literature and teenage detective stories.

Gaiman revived the characters in the Children's Crusade Vertigo's first and only crossover event which ran through all that year's Vertigo annuals that were published between December 1993 and January 1994. Gaiman wrote the two Children's Crusade bookend annuals which prominently featured both characters and first gave them the official title the "Dead Boy Detectives". The characters also appeared in a The Books of Magic short story in Winter's Edge #3, written by the then current writer Peter Gross.