The DC comic about two English boys who delay a meeting with the Grim Reaper to solve mysteries as ghostly gumshoes is getting a Netflix adaptation.
The Dead Boy Detectives first appeared in The Sandman #25 (April 1991) and were created by veteran comic book creator Neil Gaiman.
The series follows the detective adventures of Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine. Rowland was a normal kid attending a centuries-old English boarding school until the day when Hell opened its gates. Evil teachers and students from the past were released, allowing them to return to Earth. In death, most of them went about re-committing the foul deeds they had done in life.
One of those released was Edward Paine, a boy horribly murdered at the school in 1916. He had been sent to Hell where he was stalked in a corridor by a shadowy creature for decades. Paine befriended Rowland and helped him to survive the spectral horrors that had been unleashed. Eventually, Rowland was killed, but the two boys’ friendship continued. Now ghosts, they chose to spend years reading pulp-adventure fiction at the school library to learn how to become detectives. They get their first case when a young girl hires the duo to investigate Flaxdown, a small English town where every child has disappeared.
On screen, the Dead Boy Detectives showed up in a single episode of HBOs Doom Patrol, where they had set up a successful investigation firm. The episode did not go into their backstory.
Filming for the Netflix show wrapped in early April 2023. The Dead Boy Detectives release date is TBC, but We Got This Covered will keep you updated when we know more.
