Natalie talks about what it’s like working for Adrian Monk in my latest "Natalie Blog" on the USA Network’s MONK site. Here’s an excerpt:
I’ve been reading a lot of mystery novels lately — Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Spenser, stuff like that — trying to get a handle on this whole "being a detective" thing.
Based on those books, and my experience working with Monk,
here’s what I’ve learned: Whatever makes someone brilliant at solving
murders is going to make life a living hell for everyone around them.That’s especially true with Monk. You can’t truly grasp the
magnitude of his anxieties and phobias unless you experience them every
single day and, God help me, I do.
This was a witty way to point out Monk’s place in the pantheon of great detectives — and Natalie’s place in the pantheon of sidekicks.
You could probably divide them up between relatively crazy detectives who need relatively sane sidekicks (Monk, Wolfe, Holmes, Poirot) and relatively sane detectives who need crazy (no relative about it) sidekicks (Spenser, Easy Rawlins).
Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said, “I’ve experience many terrible things in my life and some of them have actually happened?”
Perhaps this is why Columbo worked alone. Nobody could stand to stay with him.
I guess the cigar smoke might get obnoxious after a while.