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

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 The Books of Magic short story in Winter's Edge #3, written by the then current writer Peter Gross.

[1] In 2001 they received their own four-issue mini-series Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives by writer Ed Brubaker and penciller Bryan Talbot.

In this story it is revealed that they have been studying the school's library books and films (mostly children's adventure fiction) in the hopes of learning how to become detectives.

This storyline connects to various other Vertigo title characters, such as Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Black Orchid.

In the 2001 limited series Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives, the two ghosts investigate the mystery of why and how numerous corpses of homeless children had begun washing up on the shores of the Thames.