Many of Neil Gaiman's characters and storylines stand out vividly in my memory. The Dead Boy Detectives, for whatever reason, do not.

I remember their characters, first appearing in Gaiman's groundbreaking The Sandman comic-book series, but I don't remember much about them. So I came into the Netflix series without expectations or preconceptions.

But from the very first scene -- involving Wilfred (Chris Pereira), a mad ghost from World War I -- I was hooked. A brief visit by Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste, reprising her role from the excellent Sandman series on Netflix) was amazingly well handled. (Of all the personifications of Death I have experienced in fiction, Gaiman's is by far the best and the one I most hope to find waiting for me many [many!] years from now.) It's a testament to good writing and acting that this scene in particular sticks with you long after the series has ended.

But the focus is, of course, on the detectives, and our two dead boys are Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri). Their next case involves a possessed psychic, and that's how we meet Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson), who ends up joining their agency.

Crystal's involvement leads them to accept the case of a missing girl in far-off Washington state. There, they meet the quirky butcher Jenny Green (Briana Cuoco), the sprite-possessed anime fan Niko Sasaki (Yuyu Kitamura) and the sinister, child-stealing witch Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon). Meanwhile, the boys' shenanigans draw the attention of the Night Nurse (Ruth Connell), whose job in the afterlife is to find "misplaced" dead children who have not gone on to their eternal reward.

Since Edwin's reward was Hell (through no fault of his own, he was an unwitting sacrifice), he has no desire to be found. Charles, on the other hand, simply doesn't want to move on.

What might have been a brief visit to America is prolonged by several factors, key among them the involvement of the King of Cats (Lukas Gage). Since they're stuck in town anyway, they take on several cases during the show's eight-episode run (so far -- a second season has been confirmed).

Dead Boy Detectives is a lot of fun, although the series also has moments of genuine menace. There's also a fish-out-of-water element to the story ... there are dead among the living, a live psychic among the dead and, perhaps even more jarring, Londoners in the Pacific Northwest.