Small Episodes, Big Detectives

Small Episodes, Big Detectives A genealogy of Detective Fiction and its Relation to Serialization MA Thesis Written by Bernardo Palau Cabrera Student Number: 11394145 Supervised by Toni Pape Ph.D. Second reader Mark Stewart Ph.D. MA in Media Studies - Television and Cross-Media Culture Graduate School of Humanities June 29th, 2018 Acknowledgments As I have learned from writing this research, every good detective has a sidekick that helps him throughout the investigation and plays an important role in the case solving process, sometimes without even knowing how important his or her contributions are for the final result. In my case, I had two sidekicks without whom this project would have never seen the light of day. Therefore, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Toni Pape, whose feedback and kind advice was of great help. Thank you for helping me focus on the important and being challenging and supportive at the same time. I would also like to thank my wife, Daniela Salas, who has contributed with her useful insight, continuous encouragement and infinite patience, not only in the last months but in the whole master’s program. “Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 2 Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 4 1. Literature Seriality in the Victorian era .................................................................... 8 1.1. The Pickwick revolution ................................................................................... 8 1.2. Causes for the rise of Victorian fiction ........................................................... 10 1.3. Outcomes ........................................................................................................ 15 1.4. Crime fiction in the Victorian Era .................................................................. 16 1.4.1. Origins ............................................................................................................ 16 1.4.2. Form and structure .......................................................................................... 19 2. Written detective fiction in the Twentieth century ................................................. 22 2.1. The Golden Age.............................................................................................. 22 2.2. Hard-boiled fiction ......................................................................................... 25 3. Detectives on television: the first years .................................................................. 30 3.1. Golden Age Television detectives in the Network era ........................................ 32 3.1.1. Columbo and Seriality ............................................................................ 34 3.2. The hard-boiled influence: noir detectives ..................................................... 40 3.2.1. Film noir ......................................................................................................... 40 3.2.2. Noir Detectives on Television’s Network era ........................................ 42 4. Detectives on television: Multichannel Transition and Post-Network era ............. 44 4.1. Golden Age Television detectives in the Multichannel Transition and Post- Network era (1980-) ................................................................................................... 45 4.2. New ‘noirs’ ..................................................................................................... 48 4.3. Nordic noir .............................................................................................. 49 4.4. Domestic noir ......................................................................................... 50 4.5. Serialization and domestic noir in HBO’s Big Little Lies...................... 52 5. Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 61 6. Works cited ............................................................................................................. 64 “Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 3 Introduction In the last five or more years, asking to a known or unknown other what series they are currently watching has become as common as talking about the weather or any other conversation starter. Although series and serials have existed for years, our social interactions around what we watch (or don’t watch) have risen due to the diverse supply of streaming portals and the vast stock of content that these venues offer. However, serialization is far from being a novel form of entertainment. In fact, as far as popular mass entertainment is concerned, it’s a cultural practice that started in the 19th century with the serialized novel, which appeared “just when new technology needed to consolidate a mass audience in order to prove its viability” (Hayward 21). Hence, as Kelleter argues, serialization should be understood as a “practice of popular culture, not a narrative formalism within it” (Media of Serial Narrative 15), that we might find in other popular culture expressions such as comics, cinema, and even digital games. Following Jennifer Hayward’s idea that “serialized novels, comic strips, and soap operas all appeared at or near the inception of their respective medium, and all were used explicitly to increase its consumption” (2), this thesis aims to demonstrate how detective fiction’s entanglement with serialization has historically served this same purpose and continues to do so even in the most recent television portals landscape. By developing a genealogy since the first print instalments of the Victorian period in the Nineteenth century, to the post-network era of television, this research looks towards three main objectives: firstly, to study the origins of modern serialization practices from an historical perspective that takes into account the technological, industrial and social causes that led to its birth. Secondly, to trace how detective fiction has been related to serialization from its early days up to recently released television detective series. Thirdly and finally, to relate serialization practices from the past with current trends as a way to understand the current industrial, economic and aesthetic practices that surround television serialization through a historical lens. Thus, in the first chapter, I track down the origins of serialization by describing the historical backdrop which allowed the rise of this practice in the Victorian period. Hence, the reader will find an account of the different causes and developments that favor the upsurge of serialization, while drawing connections with current practices from the “Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 4 television industry of the twenty-first century. Additionally, the second part of this chapter traces the historical origins of crime fiction, which was also born during the nineteen century. I’ll take a close look at its structure which ( I will argue throughout this research) is closely entangled with the serialization practices. In the following chapter, I moved on to the twentieth century where two kinds of detective fiction emerged, namely the British “Golden Age” detective in the UK and the Hard-boiled fiction that appeared between 1920 and 1930 in the United States. Thus, this chapter offers an account of the Golden Age and the Hard-boiled detectives, highlighting their differences and their relation with serialization. On the third chapter, I trace the televisual detectives of the network era (1950- 1980), contextualizing them within the former traditions of the genre exposed in the previous chapter. Moreover, since it is the first chapter in this project that deals with the televisual form, aspects such as the mise-en-scène are taken into consideration, adding to the account on industrial practices. Additionally, to exemplify the concepts discussed in this section, a close analysis of a popular television detective series, namely Columbo, sheds light on how serialization works in a network-era detective show. The fourth chapter of this thesis gives an account on the several subgenres that have arisen in the last years of detective television, starting from the multichannel transition to the post-network era, in other words, from the late 1980 till our days. In the process, this section goes further in the theoretical concepts of serialization developed in previous chapters and traces how they have evolved during the last years. Finally, this chapter offers a close reading of HBO’s Big Little Lies to illustrate how the mentioned theoretical concepts come into play. The election of David E. Kelley’s series as a case study is related to the fact that the show is a television adaptation of a novel which belongs to a popular contemporary sub-genre of detective fiction, namely domestic noir, that has an interesting approach to serialization and is an interesting example of the evolution of the televisual detective, as I plan to demonstrate. It is important to stress the fact that this is by no means a perfect chronology or an account of the evolution of detective fiction since it is impossible to do such a thing because of the own nature of the genre. As Cooke states, “there is the danger of giving “Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 5 the impression that history unfolds teleologically, with a linear trajectory which develops from ‘primitive’ beginnings towards a state of complexity and ‘sophistication’” (3). Thus, as I stated earlier, this is a genealogy of

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