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 detective fiction and its relation to serialization. As such, it is “motivated not by a historical concern to understand the past… but instead by a critical concern to understand the present” (Garland 373).

In his 1977 essay called “Nietzsche, genealogy, history”, Michel Foucault states that genealogy is defined by two moments, namely, descent (Herkunft) and emergence (Entstechung). Thus, as Zeffiro states, “genealogy is concerned neither with an ontological beginning (descent), nor a final end (emergence)” (250), instead a genealogical approach “traces the descent and emergence of concepts, ideas, and institutions (250). Then, instead of looking for specific origins, genealogy aims to describe “the erratic and discontinuous process whereby the past became the present: an often aleatory path of descent and emergence that suggests the contingency of the present and the openness of the future” (Garland 372). For that reason, when describing how detective fiction has been related to serialization up until nowadays, in this research the reader will inevitably find many examples that do not follow a perfectly consecutive order since the evolution of genres and cultural practices is a mingled process that not always moves linearly forward. Take for example two detective series, namely Elementary (CBS, 2012-) and The Killing (AMC, 2011–2014). The first one premiered on 2012 and the latter one year earlier, however, the genealogical origins of the first one can be traced back to an older era of television due to its formal characteristics, namely the network era, as opposed to the origins of The Killing (AMC, 2011–2014), which draws upon a more ‘recent’ kind of detective fiction, namely Nordic noir. The above illustrates how, as Kelleter argues, “serial aesthetics does not unfold in a clear-cut, chronological succession of finished composition and responsive actualization. Rather, both activities are intertwined in a feedback loop” (“Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality” 13).

To convey this genealogy, I have used two methodologies, that is to say, literary research and textual analysis. The first one will be useful to create a historical background as well as a theoretical framework that present a wide array of concepts used to describe serialization. The second one, namely, textual analysis will allow me to illustrate how the theory is put into practice.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 6 This research deals with literature almost in the same proportion that it does with television, however, I would like to position this research in the field of television studies since it uses the first to deal with the theoretical frames and concepts that we need to understand the second, that is, television (de Valck et al. 10). Although not explicitly, it also humbly suggests the importance of revisiting previous forms of popular culture production as a way to understand the current practices.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 7 1. Literature Seriality in the Victorian era

Many authors refer to the nineteenth century in a romantic manner, arguing that it was a time of “near-idyllic union of high and low culture” (Hayward 6) where the serial novel “[earned] increasing popularity” (David 1). Moreover, authors in serialization studies state that “[s]ince the nineteenth century, serial narration has been a preferred mode of popular storytelling” (Loock 5). However, these kinds of assertions shed little if no light at all on the issue of why and how this phenomenon came into being. Therefore, in this chapter, I plan to describe the main historical reasons that allowed the serial to be born and trace the main genealogical connections between the distribution systems for the novel in the Victorian era and the twenty-first century internet-based distribution systems for television.

1.1. The Pickwick revolution

The novel in parts was born during the nineteenth century Britain, and more specifically, during the Victorian era. As David states, “[Queen] Victoria's coronation in 1837 signals the official inception of the literary form that we now designate the Victorian novel, just as her death in 1901 marks its official demise” (David 1). Before this era, the prices were too high for the regular citizen. As Sutherland proves, in 1790 the price of a novel was approximately 3 shillings a volume, however, by 1820, due to the universal price and tax rises that Napoleonic wars brought about, the novel reached the half-guinea per volume mark; in other words the retail price was four times as high (Victorian Novelists and Publishers 11). Novels were published in a three-volume form, or ‘three- decker’, which was “the central method of circulating new fiction in book form” (Finkelstein 12). According to Finkelstein, the publisher Archibald Constable was one of the first to publish fiction in this format, “charging ten shillings and sixpence per volume for his three-volume editions of Walter Scott’s historical romances in the 1820s” (21). Selling for the price of half-guinea per volume, a complete three-part novel cost a guinea and a half1, which was “many weeks’ income not just for laborers but also for lower middle-class clerks, servants, governess, and other wage-earners who were literate”

1 £1 was equivalent to 20 shilling. A guinea is £1 1s. (shilling).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 8 (Bowen et al. 15). As a matter of fact, that equals £103,41 by 2017 currency (UK National Archives). Not surprisingly then, editions were kept small since they were considered a luxury (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 12).

Archibald Constable, who controlled the right of literary goldmines such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Edinburgh Review, “collapsed with nearly a quarter of a million pound worth of debt” (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 10) due to an excess in his expenses. Inevitably, these events brought upon a risk-averse position within the publishing industry of the time. Thus, according to different authors, between Constable’s bankruptcy in 1826 and Chapman and Hall’s innovation of the monthly installment with Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers ten years later, relatively few novels emerged as worth reading (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 12; Rodensky and Garside 23).

This stagnancy period would last till 1836. According to Sutherland, editors Chapman and Hall had the idea in February and by April the first serial part of Charles Dickens The Pickwick Papers was circulating (Victorian Fiction 87). Although before Dicken’s first installment there were a couple of experiments with serialization, Pickwick made a tremendous difference by publishing original material in serial form as opposed to splitting up an already published novel, like Colburn’s Modern Novelist series (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 21). Although it started slow, even below the break-even point and Chapman and Hall were about to discontinue the serial, Dickens convinced them to continue by “reducing the number of illustrations from four to two and increasing the letterpress from twenty four to thirty two pages” (Bowen et al. 13). These changes had to do mainly with printing technicalities, but brought about interesting aesthetic possibilities for episodic narration, namely, the possibility to “accommodate longer development, character and dialogue as well as plot” (Bowen et al. 14). Moreover, it also helped to lower the prices: if a volume of a three-decker was sold at thirty-one shillings and six pence, a copy of Pickwick was sold for only 1 shilling (or 12 pennies). This was an unprecedented price-drop for original fiction.

After the fourth number, the sales of Pickwick began to rise. Patten describes three advantages that became apparent with serial publication, namely, habit, reviews, and periodicity. For example, Chapman and Hall insert “notices in the newspapers and

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 9 journals towards the end of each month reminding the public that the next installment was forthcoming” (Patten 15). Patten furthermore describes how reviews stimulated more buyers and periodicity made fiction appropriate for advertising. “As early as the third number, Chapman and Hall were inserting notices of their other publications, and permitting other advertisers, possibly for a small fee, to have their printed circulars stitched in” (Patten 15).

Although the arrival of serialization “by no means threaten[ed] the three-decker” (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 24), it did bring about an important change in the publishing industry. Moreover, there is extended consent among scholars (see Feltes; Hayward; David) acknowledging Dicken’s 1836’s creation as the first serialized novel. Nevertheless, ‘Pickwick’ and the following Victorian novels did not emerge in a vacuum as they are the result of new conditions that facilitated the production, distribution and consumption of fiction.

1.2. Causes for the rise of Victorian fiction

Among the causes that enabled the rise of serialized fiction during these years, there is certain consensus about technology, circulating libraries, collective reissue and magazine serialization (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 20). Moreover, Hayward adds others such as the implementation of certain advertisement techniques that I plan to analyze in the following pages.

Different authors (Finkelstein; Hayward 22; Childers) seem to agree that the technology associated with industrialism of the time had a major role in the future of the Victorian novel. As Childers states, “a neat separation of industrialism and the novel is nearly impossible in the years between 1832 and 1867” (78). Although the printing industry had long existed, the nineteenth century marked “the period in which this process was mechanized, automated, and made many times faster” (Taunton). Moreover, the development of the steam-powered rotary press, along with new methods of mechanical paper producing process and the lifting of war-time economic restrictions, reduced the cost of paper (Rodensky and Garside 22). As David Vincent illustrates, “a penny would buy a 250-word broadside in the 1840s, a 7,000-word songbook by the 1860s, a 20,000- word novelette by the 1880s, and by the 1890s an unabridged version of a classic text”

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 10 (quoted in Price 40). As communication and transportation systems such as postal services, railways and metal ships arose, so did an entire generation of readers (Price 46) that was a key factor in newspaper distribution which, by the time, was “becoming a national medium” (Sutherland, Victorian Fiction 89)2.

Accordingly, thanks to an expanding railway, the national postal system improved (Law and Patten 146). In 1848, on the recommendation of Rowland Hill, the British postal office set up the ‘Book Post’, aiming to encourage the circulating libraries of the time (GB Printed Matter Rates 1848-1968). Originally, one unmarked book was allowed in each package, “but this was soon relaxed in order to encourage the transmission of second-hand books” (Colclough 241). As a consequence, “by 1870 the number of packets sent by the book and patten posts (…) was nearly 300 million” (Colclough 241).

During the Victorian era, the so-called circulating libraries were a key part of book distribution. Before public libraries existed thanks to the Public Libraries Act of 1850 (Price 50), circulating libraries had spread by the thousands across Britain, “at their worst, they encouraged idle gossip, scandal and insufficient effort at reading” (Glasgow 420). However, in 1842, Charles Edward Mudie began to lend books in his stationer's shop in Southampton Row (Griest 105), which would soon become “Mudie’s Select Library” and would spread throughout the country. For one single guinea a year, subscribers were entitled to take out one book at a time and “another guinea allowed them to borrow as many volumes as they wanted” (Glasgow 421). For the public, thus, Mudie was a benefactor, since “for less than the price of a new novel one had English fiction at one’s disposal” (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 27). Mudie worked as a library but he had a big impact on the publishing industry. For example, of the total of 3,864 novels that Bently sold in 1864, Mudie bought fifty one percent of his entire production (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 25). Thus, due to their market power, both Mudie and his main competitor W.H. Smith acted as curators of the content they offered in their libraries, excluding books for moral reasons and manipulating the English market for novels” (Glasgow 421). As Griest argues, “[n]o longer would the head of a

2 Interestingly, while literary rates were kept on a fix 53% from 1650 to 1820, by 1880 they raise to 76%.(Roser and Ortiz-Ospina)

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 11 Victorian family need to waste his time scanning circulating library works to see whether they were suitable for his daughters” (106).

It is important to note how the circulating libraries from the Victorian era stand as an ancestor of other distribution outlets of the twenty century, namely the now extinct video rental stores. As Varian and Roehl argue, both the circulating libraries and its video successors were born with the same idea in mind, namely to allow consumers to access goods that they could not afford otherwise (3). Drawing upon historical accounts, the authors list certain similarities such as the importance that the size of their inventory had for the success of the business, the role of erotic content to drive clients, as well as their influence in the growth of the purchase market in each case, which allowed readers and video viewers to buy copies of their favorite goods (11).

However, the circulating libraries seem to have much more in common with what we might consider the twenty-first century descendent of video rental stores, that is to say, internet-distributed television portals such as Netflix and Amazon Video, due to their revenue model and their role in the production of content3. Firstly, both circulating libraries and the internet-distributed television portals, like Netflix, are based on a subscriber-funded revenue model that, as Amanda Lotz argues, relies on the bundling of media in a catalogue as a way to attract a mass of subscribers (Portals 37). As opposed to video rental stores that charged a fee for every VHS tape or DVD disc that their clients took home, the subscriber model of both circulating libraries and television portals allow its subscribers to access the amount of content they want without paying more than the monthly or yearly fee –in the case of the libraries–, thus giving their clients the opportunity to consume a vast array of content. Secondly, since their brand depends on their catalogue, there is an important part of their business that deals with the curation of their offer in order to attract more subscribers (Portals 13). Accordingly, a key role in

3 In the following pages I will use the word portals to refer specifically about services such as Amazon Video, Netflix and others defined as “intermediary services that collect, curate and distribute television programming via internet distribution” (Portals 7). I use ‘portals’ as opposed to other acronyms in television industries like OTT since the latter fail to offer an account of the specific affordances of content providers such as Netflix. Additionally, some definitions are very unspecific, going as far as locating sites like Youtube and Netflix on the same category (Strangelove 9).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 12 some of the media companies mentioned above is the Content Acquisition manager, who is responsible for the selection of the content that will be part of their catalogue, similarly to Mudie and W.H. Smith, who acted as curators of content for their libraries and made very specific request to publishers. However, in the specific case of portals they take advantage of their own algorithm, or what Lotz calls “the positive properties of filter bubbles” (Portals 26), to gain insight on their subscribers tastes and to acquire content from other right holders or fund original content for their catalogue (Portals 40) which fulfills their subscribers tastes, gives them more information about them (Adalian) and, at the same time, influence the production industry. Regarding the latter, the way in which portals have influenced the production of audiovisual content enormously resembles how Mudie influenced the “structure and complexity of the novel form” (Taunton).

Going back to the advances produced by the circulating libraries, Mudie’s competitor, W.H. Smith, allowed the birth of an interesting innovation that was very important for the rise of fiction during these years: the collective reissue. As the railway allowed travelers to move from rural areas to the city, they became an important place for reading. Thus, in 1848 William Henry Smith started his famous franchise of railway stalls (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 30) which originally sold newspapers and by 1862 had “moved from being the leading newspaper agent of Britain to monopolizing bookstall operations in almost all of the English railway stations” (Finkelstein 23). However, W. H. Smith ventured into the publishing market, “issuing in conjunction with Chapman and Hall from 1854 onwards, two-shilling paperback novels for sale in his railway stalls” (Finkelstein 25). In contrast, Sutherland accounts that even earlier than 1854 –in 1847– Chapman and Hall announced their ‘Cheap’ edition of Dickens novels for 1,5 d per part and 3 s. 6 d. the complete novel. As Finkelstein states, these reprints were “made cheaper by the fact that the titles had gone out of copyright and no royalties had to be paid” (Finkelstein 25). Moreover, they were very effective advertisement venues.

As stated earlier, advertisement played an important role for both publishers and circulating libraries. Colclough accounts how Bentley spent £63 7s 6d4 in 1857,

4 £63-pound 7shilling 6 pennies.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 13 advertising Anthony Trollope’s novel The three clerks (1857, which made £74 9s 7d of profit for its publisher in the first year (242). Likewise, “Mudie’s Select Library” constantly advertised extensively about its latest arrivals using a rhetoric of distinction that used terms such as “’the best New works’, ‘Works of permanent interest and value’, and ‘the HIGHER CLASS of FICTION’ (emphasis added by the author, Roberts 9). Moreover, the term "Select" in his title, according to Griest, “formed the keystone of the arch which supported Mudie's great business” (106), in a similar way as HBO has advertised its content with the phrase “It's not television it's HBO” differentiating from its competitors since the 1990s.

Finally, in this account of the causes for the rise of Victorian fiction, the emergence of magazines and journals is an important aspect of the serialized novel. In the late fifties and early sixties Dickens, Bradbury, Smith, Macmillan’s, Bently and others, established magazines with circulations of up to 100,000 copies (Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers 37). Moreover, according to Law and Patten, in 1870s the periodical boom was sustained more strongly in the magazine than the newspaper or parts sectors (161). Between 1876 and 1896 the number of British newspaper titles increased by only 43% to 2,355, whereas magazine titles more than tripled to 2,097 (Law and Patten 161). As Finkelstein states:

“Serialized fiction was consumed by all classes, though in different formats, ranging from high-quality monthlies (Blackwood’s Magazine and the London Magazine), mid-century middle-class literary publications (Cornhill Magazine, Temple Bar, and Macmillan’s Magazine), late-century ‘illustrated’ magazines (The Strand, Scribner’s Magazine), mass-circulation weeklies and monthlies (Household Words, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Tit-Bits)” (Finkelstein 21).

It was without a doubt a magazine age. Moreover, Turner quotes the British Christian Observer which argues near 1860 that “[o]ther books are but little read in comparison with the monthly or weekly serial. The short article and condensed review, to occupy scraps of time, and make reading a thorough relaxation is the rage now” (16). Additionally, Allen argues that the Victorian fiction market was crowded, to a point where serial instalments from competing novels were often published on the same day, which according to The Athenaeum “fatigued critics and readers” (Allen 37).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 14 According to Law and Patten, by 1860 if a major novelist wrote for a serial issue in a magazine, the series was later turned into a three-decker. Thus, they argue, “[t]he extent to which migrating to the canonical volume format raised the cultural status of serialized fiction has not yet been thoroughly assessed” (Law and Patten 152). Interestingly, they seem to agree with Mittell’s argument that the cultural legitimacy of novels during this century was gained when they were bound as a collectable object, which he will then apply to television series (Mittell, Complex TV 37).

1.3. Outcomes

As technology allowed changes in the production process and distribution of texts during the Victorian era, it also brought upon a new paradigm in the political economy of the publishing industry. Publishers began to take an active role in the creation of books (Hayward 22) as the nature of author-publisher relations started changing to accommodate the increasingly “complex nature of copyright and serialization negotiations” (Finkelstein 27). What Law and Patten have called print-capitalism, which is to say, in Marxist terminology, “the shift from petty-commodity-text production to commodity-text production” (Law and Patten 147).

Moreover, Feltes suggests that editors Chapman and Hall should be recognized as the model for the “new publishers of industrial capitalism”, for unlike previous publishers, it was them who had the original idea for Pickwick and, more importantly, they also owned the means of production (12). In other words, there was a shift from a “category of commodity producers who possess the means of production necessary to produce commodities" (Bernstein) to a capitalist system with a “turn towards specialization” (Feltes 5). Capitalism, Feltes asserts, determined the relations in the book production sector (4) and created a kind of firm that “organized its market by means of the literary reviews, commercial travelers, prospectuses and catalogues” (Feltes 5).

As Hayward states, “nineteenth-century novels served multiple functions for readers acclimatizing themselves to a rapidly changing world” (29), providing information, educating readers as to how to act in social situations and, more importantly, it introduced “disparate classes to each other, showing the increasingly juxtaposed ‘two

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 15 nations’ how others actually lived and thus, helping to promote mutual understanding and to catalyze social change” (Hayward 30), as we can see in several Dickens novels.

It is important to note that the industrial revolution moved people from the countryside to the big city and urbanization concentrated them, making them share “nothing but poverty and profound alienation” (Hayward 32). Thus, as Hayward argues, for Raymond Williams what emerged from the mid-nineteenth century novel is a sense of community, a reason to talk and discuss with neighbors and co-workers. For Williams, the novel “is one medium among many in which men seek to master and absorb new experience by discovering new forms and rhythms, grasping and so constructing the stuff of social change in the living substance of perceptions and relationship” (Eagleton quoted on Kanwar 54).

1.4. Crime fiction in the Victorian Era

As I have shown in the previous pages, the novel during the nineteenth century Victorian Era was the result of different social and technological changes. However, in the following pages I will address another by-product of that era, namely, the mystery fiction novel. With this purpose in mind, I plan to briefly trace the origins of the genre and, more importantly, illustrate how it entangles itself with serialization as a way to understand modern expressions of this kind of narration.

Before we go into the history of the genre, however, it is important to trace the crime fiction and its limits. As the reader might find, the genre in question has received different names throughout history, like Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’, to the ‘mystery and detective fiction’ of the turn of the twentieth century and the ‘whodunnit’ of the period between the First World War and the Second World War (Scaggs 1). However, since the focus of this research is detective fiction, I will use this term to avoid any possible confusion.

1.4.1. Origins

Although crime has been present in literature for more than two millennia, as Bradford states (1) using examples such as Oedipus the King, in which the main character conducts

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 16 an investigation to unmask the murderer of King Laius or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the plot starts with the murder of Prince Hamlet’s father, treating these examples as mystery fiction is, as the same author argues, “to blur and distort the definitive features of the latter” (2). The difference for Bradford lies in the fact that these crimes are subordinate to other themes. In other words, the crime in itself is not the main story. However, different authors (Pykett; Priestman; Humpherys 2017) trace the origins of the detective novel back to two main sources, namely, the Newgate novel and the sensation novel.

The Newgate Calendar (1773) was a collection of “highly fictionalized biographies of real criminals mainly in the Newgate Prison” (Humpherys, British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 4). According to some accounts, London’s most notorious prison was “so dirty and squalid that the floors crunched as you walked due to all of the lice and bedbugs” (Johnson). Thus narratives that contained details of the criminal’s lives and fabricated last confessions (Bell 8), were published from 1773 on as The Newgate Calendar, which usually included the name of the criminal and his charges. In some cases, the best stories were illustrated as a way to grab readers attention, as in the case of Andre Knapp and William Balwin “attorneys at law”, authors of one of the editions of the calendar (Knapp and Balwin). Thus, so-called Newgate novels were inspired by the calendar and usually “took some of their leading characters and plots, from the various versions of the Newgate Calendar, which… satisfied the popular fascination with crime and criminals” (Pykett 20). Although they had little literary value and were reports of theft and other crimes “the texts sold on their promise of sensationalism” (Worthington 15). This, however, brought upon some controversy since, as Pykett states, Newgate novels seemed to romanticize and glamorize crime and low life, inviting “sympathy with criminals rather than with the victims of crime” (20). It was both a literary and social debate then, “about the nature and future of the novel as a literary form, and it was also a response to social upheaval and unrest at home and on the continent of Europe” (21). According to some accounts, this same debate and the anxieties related to crime contributed to the creation of the New Metropolitan Police in 1829 (Worthington 20).

The second element that allowed the birth of the detective novel is, as mentioned earlier, the sensation novel. Whereas the Newgate takes it’s protagonists from public life,

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 17 as Humpherys states, in the sensation novel they were “fictional and private” (“Generic Strands and Urban Twists” 455). According to Pykett, one of the biggest differences between sensation fiction and the Newgate novel is “the shift of focus from crime to detection” (34). Moreover, for Pykett this change might be related to the formation of the new Detective Police in 1842, and also the rise, due to new divorce laws, of the private detectives “who were charged with rooting out the secrets of the family” (34).

“The word detective entered the English language in the mid-1800s, but it is ultimately derived from the Latin detegere, meaning ‘to uncover.’ The label ‘detective’ was not in common usage until there were actual official detectives, which did not happen until the mid- Victorian period, especially after the detective branch of the Metropolitan Police was instituted in 1842 with eight professionals, including two ‘inspectors.’ In 1878, the detective branch was reorganized and renamed the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). By 1888, there were eight hundred officers in the CID” (Humpherys, British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 1).

In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe created detective Auguste Dupin, which is recognized as the first detective in fiction and appears in three short stories, namely The Murders in the Rue Morge (1841), The Mystery of Marie Roget (1841-42), and The Purloined Letter (1844). Poe calls these stories ‘tales of ratiocination’ since “Dupin is certainly the first character in a novel about crime who makes use of his deductive skills to arrive at a solution” (Bradford 7).

It was a matter of time, then, for detective fiction to become a trend. Humpherys argues that between Dupin’s tales of the 1840s and the Sherlock Holmes stories of the late 1880s and 1890s, a growing number of detective stories were published (British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 6), for example, Wilkie Collins’ 1853 The Moonstone, Charles Dickens’ 1853 Bleak House and even non-English novels such as Emile Gaboriau’s L'Affaire Lerouge in France (Priestman 2). Interestingly, between Poe’s Dupin and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock, female detectives appear (Pykett 35), even before any women were actually “part of the detective branch of the Metropolitan Police” (Humpherys, British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 7). Though this fact might seem like a detour, it is important since as we will see later on when we analyze HBO’s Big Little Lies, the figure of Detective Adrienne Quinlan will appear in a genre that has been mainly populated by masculine investigators.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 18 1.4.2. Form and structure

Detective fiction through most of the nineteenth century was mainly written in short story form and published in different various periodicals of the period. (Humpherys, British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 1). However, it didn’t work well commercially until the end of the century due to the success of the three-decker and the serialized novel, which were both still popular publishing forms at the time. As Kayman argues “when [the short story] did take off, this was in no small part due to the success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories in George Newnes’ Strand Magazine (founded in 1891)” (41). As Humpherys accounts, though Conan Doyle’s first two novellas were only moderately successful, the Holmes stories published in the Strand Magazine beginning in 1891 became quickly popular (British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 10). So much so that its circulation grew as a result and when Sherlock Holmes was killed in 1893 it shrunk by 20,000 subscribers (Brombley). The destinies of both the short story and the detective story were, according to Kayman, closely entangled with the history of magazine publication (41).

In this regard, it is interesting to see how Conan Doyle himself states in his Memories and Adventures how he thought about Sherlock Holmes as a way to attract readers towards the Strand Magazine. In 1924 he wrote:

“A number of monthly magazines were coming out at that time, notable among which was ‘The Strand’, then as now under the editorship of Greenhough Smith. Considering these various journals with their disconnected stories it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine. On the other hand, it had long seemed to me that the ordinary serial might be an impediment rather than a help to a magazine, since, sooner or later, one missed one number and afterwards it had lost all interest. Clearly the ideal compromise was a character which carried through, and yet instalments which were each complete in themselves, so that the purchaser was always sure that he could relish the whole contents of the magazine. I believe that I was the first to realize this and ‘The Strand Magazine’ the first to put it into practice” (emphasis added, Conan Doyle).

Whether or not he was the first, what Conan Doyle demonstrated was a deep understanding of the need of seriality to increase consumption, as stated by Hayward (2). Furthermore, he seemed to comprehend very clearly the difference between the serial and

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 19 the series namely that, as Kelleter argues, the first one is “a narrative that works with progressing story arcs”, like Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, and the second “an episodic narrative of repetitive variation” (“Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality” 12), like Sherlock Holmes. In order to convey this “repetitive variation”, Conan Doyle consciously created a schema, a pattern, which he repeated in each instalment. The latter corresponds with Umberto Eco’s principal features of mass media products which are “repetition, iteration, obedience to a preestablished schema, and redundancy (as opposed to information)” (192). Moreover, regarding detective fiction, Eco argued that “the reading of a traditional detective story presumes the enjoyment of a scheme” (192). Accordingly, Conan Doyle’s story repeated the same structure since 1891 with A Scandal in Bohemia:

“A potential client interrupts Holmes and Watson in their bachelor quarters. He or she tells a story involving a mystery that piques Holmes’s interest. That story inspires Holmes’s detective work involving close observation and scientific thinking through which Holmes arrives at the solution. This solution is sometimes tested when Holmes sets up a trap for the perpetrator, and only at that point, at the very end of the piece, does Holmes tell the story of his observations and sometimes the scientific knowledge (he claimed, for example, he could identify up to 140 different kinds of tobacco ash), that led him to uncover the true story of the crime, who did it, and how and why” (Humpherys, British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 10).

Coincidently, in Tzvetan Todorov’s 1977 article Typology of Detective Fiction the author argues that in detective fiction the reader can find two stories, the first one being the one of the crime itself and the second being the story of the investigation, “often told by a friend of the detective, who explicitly acknowledges that he is writing a book; the second story consists, in fact, in explaining how this very book came to be written” (45).

Kayman stresses the fact that each tale is self-contained, providing full narrative satisfaction, “but managed in such a way that it stimulates an appetite for another, similar story” (43). In other words, as Kelleter argues regarding serialization, “the satisfaction of conclusion and the appeal of renewal are balanced through suspense and resolution. Tension is built up to be released again” (“Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality” 9). Thus, considering this appeal of renewal and the fact that, as Kayman states, the figure of the protagonist “‘brands’ the particular commodity on offer” (44), it should be of no

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 20 surprise that it was impossible for Conan Doyle to kill his famous detective in 1893 like he wished (43).

As I have shown in this first chapter, the Nineteenth century was a very seminal moment for both literature serialization and detective fiction. In the case of the first one, the technology brought about by industrialization in this century allowed for the retail price of novels to drop down dramatically, which in turn allowed the rise of the novel in parts that nurtured the habit of following a narrative among readers. The latter eventually became the circulating libraries’ core business up to the point that eventually they played an important influence in the production of the novels they distributed. In the same way that Dickens changed the industry by publishing the novel in parts (i.e. serial novel), the detective short story took off commercially due to the success of Conan Doyle’s short stories in the Strand Magazine, which used another form of serialization, namely instalments that were complete in themselves (i.e. the series), as its main publication format.

This relationship between different serialization methods and detective fiction would soon evolve in the UK and, later, in the United States. However, it would always keep going back to its origins, as I plan to demonstrate in the next pages.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 21 2. Written detective fiction in the Twentieth century

In the twentieth century, two kinds of detective fiction appeared, permeating literature, film and television, namely the Golden Age and the Hard-boiled traditions. These two very different literary traditions of crime fiction, as Marieke Jenner refers to them5, were born in two different countries and followed very different patterns. Thus, this chapter aims to describe each one of them, so the reader can understand how they relate to their Victorian predecessors and, more importantly, how their influence can be traced up until contemporary detective fiction.

2.1. The Golden Age

The Golden Age of crime fiction is usually taken as the period between the two world wars (Knight 77) and is characterized as a moment where “[e]lements that were randomly present in earlier crime fiction suddenly become a norm, like multiple suspects, and some earlier tendencies largely disappear, notably the use of coincidence and historical explanations” (77). Moreover, as Rowland states, writers “placed their faith in the detective, who dominates the plot, [and] organizes the reader’s perceptions (or permits his sidekick to do so)” (118). Thus, during those years the denomination of ‘detective fiction’ was born as well as the notion of the ‘puzzle narrative’.

In order to avoid cheating the reader, several authors follow certain principles. For example, S. S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox published rules (a decalogue in the case of the latter) that champion for a strict, rule-governed puzzle narrative. For example, the above mentioned Van Dine proposed that “[n]o willful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself” (7) and Knox stressed the puzzle-solving notion and a certain scientific approach in order to prevent the writer from “cheating”. In fact, he stated that “[a]ll supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course” (Armstrong). Moreover, according to Knight, the Golden Age brought upon the inclusion of a range of suspects

5 Different denominations can be found in the literature, for example, Marieke Jenner uses the term “tradition”(Jenner, Follow the Evidence? Methods of Detection in American TV Detective Drama); Geoff Mayer refers to hard-boiled fiction as “school of hard boiled” (Mayer, “Readings of Film Noir”).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 22 with motives, but more importantly “the rational analysis of determinedly circumstantial evidence”.

As a result, the main authors of the Golden Age, namely Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers in Britain and Van Dine, Dickson, and Queen in the United States, follow this strict set of rules. Interestingly, different authors agree that the writing was mainly plain and without any embellishments (Rowland; Priestman; Knight). However, these same authors agree on the fact that detective fiction during the Golden Age is loaded with more psychological layers than its predecessors. For Rowland, the “detective in Golden Age fiction is a new hero for the post-World War I traumatized landscape” (120) which changed the typical hero’s quest, in which the main character embarks on a quest, meets obstacles and triumphs at the end.

“[t]he Golden Age detective takes detecting as linear heroic quest and changes it significantly in two ways. Either the quest becomes much more circular or meandering and much more taxing psychologically because he is not succeeding in a triumphant pursuit or, in a much more domestic and psychological mode, he “cooks” the suspects. As cooks, Hercules Poirot, Roderick Alleyn, and Gladys Mitchell’s magnificently sinister Mrs. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley all manage to confine their suspects so that by talking to them and letting them reveal themselves the culprit can be identified (Rowland 120)

This ‘gesture towards psychology’ as Knight puts it (78) is closely related to the fact that in Britain, the Golden Age was defined by Agatha Christie and three other female authors. “All of them were women, but they all chose to concentrate on series featuring a male detective” (Scaggs 26). Moreover, Rowland argues about a certain feminizing of the form, which produce a certain breed of detective that brought upon “non-rational, emotive, so-called ‘feminine’ methods to rank equally with hard ‘masculine’ rationality” (121) into the crime-solving field.

For Rowland, the Golden Age is defined by self-referentiality as detectives are peculiarly self-conscious. The author exemplifies with Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey character ironically introducing himself as “enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman” in Whose Body? (118). Self-referentiality “create[s] a new relationship to the reader” (118) since it invites them to participate in the detective’s chase. As an example, Rowland quotes Philo Vance, created by S. S. Van Dine who in

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 23 The Benson Murder Case (1926), “insists that they and the reader have all the necessary clues” (119). As a result, characters in the novels of the golden era usually commented on the fictional devices of the stories they inhabit. As Horsley states:

“drawing attention to both the artificiality of the genre and the contrived nature of the crimes represented: Griselda Clement, the vicar’s wife in Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage (1930), remarks that the pale mysterious stranger (called, of course, Mrs. Lestrange) ‘Makes one think of detective stories’ (Christie 1982 : 5); Dr. Gideon Fell, in John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (1935), takes metafictional references for granted, “‘Because… we’ re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not’” (Carr 2002 : 152)” (Horsley 31)

Similarly, in 2004 Scones described certain televisual examples in which the characters seem to be aware of the narrative world they inhabit (106). Unlike some film examples where self-reflexivity can be seen in Brechtian terms (i.e. breaking the fourth wall), Scones chooses to use the term “meta-reflexivity” in series since they “depend on the long-term viewer’s knowledge and appreciation of the modes of narration and emplotment characteristic of the series as a whole” (106). Likewise, the examples mentioned by Horsley above would not make any sense if the mechanisms of detective fiction have not been well known among the readers of that time.

In this period the novel replaced the short story as the most popular form of detective fiction (Horsley 31). Although there is little to be found in the literature about why this came into being, British novelist Phyllis Dorothy James argues that these novels were “particularly strong on plot and puzzle” (27), which combined with the ‘gesture towards psychology’ discussed earlier, would explain why Golden Age authors needed more pages to develop their narrative.

The British Golden Era of detective fiction overlaps with a new form of crime fiction that appeared in the U.S. where instalments would again play a key role as I will explain in the following pages. I am talking about a genre characterized by “tough- talking, streetwise men; beautiful, treacherous women; [and] a mysterious city” (McCann 42), printed in cheap paper with cover art that would later become iconic: the hard-boiled genre.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 24 2.2. Hard-boiled fiction

In the following paragraphs I plan to focus on the hard-boiled detective fiction which, for Simpson, “is just one type of noir story” (191), referring to Michael Walker’s film noir genre types where he differentiates three different noir stories: the already-mention hard- boiled detective fiction, the femme fatale seduction/betrayal and the paranoid noir story (191). My interest must be understood, then, as a step towards the sources of the television detective and, more importantly, of domestic noir which will be the main focus of the last chapter.

It might come as no surprise that the deeper one goes into genre categorizations, the more difficult it becomes since the borders that separate each kind of sub-genre become more and more blurry. Hard-boiled fiction is no exception to the rule since its limits become as difficult to investigate as the same mysteries the genre portrays. Moreover, the different denominations (e.g. “roman noir”, “private eye”) given to label sometimes the same texts do little to understand the genre’s scope. To complicate matters more, as in many other genres distinctions, different variations within a single genre do not follow “a clearly delineated progression from one form to the next, nor are the categories mutually exclusive” (Simpson 189).

Hard-boiled detective fiction developed in the early twentieth century, between 1920 and 1930, as a distinctively American sub-genre that “grew out of sources as diverse as the Western and gangster stories” (Scaggs 29). Interestingly, John Scaggs relates W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar to the nineteenth century Newgate Calendar stories discussed before since it offers “an account of the rise and fall of a Chicago gangster” (29) in the same way that Newgate novels portrayed nineteenth century British criminals. According to Porter, hard-boiled detective fiction arose specifically in California, thanks to “a particular historical, socio-economic and cultural conjuncture” (95), enabled, firstly, by the American Gilded Age, which laid the foundations “of the modern American industrial capitalist system” (95). Secondly, due to “the economic take-off associated with the first industrial revolution of iron, steel, steam power” (95) which allowed for a network of railroads to appear that foster urbanization and rapidly “metamorphosed into the age of electricity, the wireless, the telephone, the automobile, the skyscraper and, of course, the moving pictures” (95). Thirdly, due to the rise of a certain breed of chroniclers of this era

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 25 which were, on the one hand, literary naturalists “such as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser” and “muckraking journalists” (96), on the other.

The main difference between hard-boiled fiction and classic golden-era fiction has to do with realism. Pulp editor Joseph Shaw defined the characters portrayed in his magazine Black Mask in the following way:

“When they are wounded they bleed; when they are hurt, they feel it… That is vastly different from reading stories of dummies stuffed into the clothes of the parts they are supposed to act.” (McCann 43)

Instead of the deductive and logical “Holmesian” detective, hard-boiled replaces it for a “tough, insensitive, overtly masculine, and sexist detective who solves crimes with a pistol and his fists” (Scaggs 29). In his famous 1944 essay The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler made an evaluation of “the detective story as literature” (Brown). Moreover, he described author Dashiell Hammett’s style in words that may very well define the style of the hard-boiled:

“He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements” (Chandler)

We can also think of the hard-boiled fiction as a critical response to Golden Age fiction. In his essay, Chandler despises British detective fiction and, more specifically, writer Dorothy Sawyers.

“But if the writers of this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived. And since they cannot do that, they pretend that what they do is what should be done” (Chandler)

Instead of presenting good manners and complicated puzzle-solving, “the hard- boiled story would foreground the detective’s craft knowledge, his physical strength and skill” (McCann 46). Moreover, murderers in this genre committed very explicit crimes “motivated by passion and greed: easily understood acts even if not condoned by the readership” (Simpson 191). When we talk about hard-boiled we face a genre full of violence and sex, which previous expressions of crime fiction did not have. Furthermore, “the line between detective and criminal becomes very thin” (191) probably as a way to

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 26 remember readers that evil comes from all sorts of places of society or that, in Chandler’s words, “murder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with softly graying hair” (Chandler). Although it might seem as a detour, it is worth noting that Chandler never uses the term hard-boiled in his essay. In fact, the word itself was an American slang expression that developed from an original connotation of ‘hard to beat’ (Dumont 87), ‘petty’ and ‘mean’ to ‘hard’ and ‘shrewd’ (Tamony 258).

In terms of structure, editor Otto Penzler describes the hard-boiled structure as:

“a narrative generally told in the first-person form, someone – frequently a young woman– comes to the office of a shamus6 because she's in trouble. The police can't or won't help, or the situation is so sensitive that an investigation needs to be kept secret. The dick takes the case, which is invariably about something more than he was told. He interviews people and learns secrets, frequently about events in the distant past. He is usually betrayed by one or more people, often his client –which, as he is a cynic, doesn't surprise him. By the time he concludes his investigation, there have generally been several more murders along the way as people attempted to keep secrets hidden. He turns over the culprit to the police, and continues with his lonely life, awaiting the next meager payday” (Penzler)

If we contrast this definition with the description of Sherlock Holmes structure exposed in the previous chapter, the reader will notice that the hard-boiled stories seem to have an extra character layer, a more obscure one if you will, where the reader faces lies and secrets that betray the detective’s trust in his witnesses (if he had any at all, in the first place). Hence, it can be argued that while the Golden Era detective unraveled mysteries using his scientific skills from a certain distance, the hard-boiled detective, on the other hand, complements his very limited scientific knowledge with a deep understanding of human nature, to which cynicism seems to serve as the only analgesic that allows him to continue going. For the hard-boiled detective, then, society –in the shape of his client, his suspects and even himself– represents a mystery in itself in which to dig clues to find an answer.

6 Slang for police officer or private investigator (“Shamus”).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 27 As I have mentioned earlier, hard-boiled detective fiction developed as a genre between 1920 and 1930, in the midst of American Prohibition, which set the stage for an “unprecedented wave of crime associated in the popular mind with speed and fire power, fast cars and machine guns” (Porter 96). Although the novel ended up being the publishing form of the Golden Age, hard-boiled stories first appeared in pulp magazines, rapidly finding an audience “eager for fiction that acknowledged the realities of the industrial metropolis” (McCann 42). Pulp magazines were produced in cheap recycled paper using only the cheapest ink, and paying authors in pennies per word or even less (Collier). Moreover, they were considered “escape literature designed to be thrown away once read” (Smith 11). Bradford compares pulps to the nineteenth century penny- dreadfuls with “prurient thrills offered at the expense of style, characterization and plot” (Bradford 27). Thanks to their cost and the rising levels of literacy in the U.S., they crowded newsstands from the 1920s to the 1940s (Smith 11) and were targeted to a socially marginal audience, composed mainly by “factory girls, soldiers, sailors, miners, dockworkers, ranchers, and others who worked with their hands” (12). Moreover, according to some accounts, “rhetoric coming from the middle and upper classes in relation to this form of reading was derogatory” (Hayes).

One of the first pulp magazines of the 1920s was Black Mask, which under Joseph T. Shaw’s hands, was responsible for publishing authors like Dashiell Hammett whose The Maltese Falcon was serialized in the magazine between September 1929 and January 1930 and Raymond Chandler, who made his debut in December 1933 (Ashley). Other detective pulps include Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Clues, and Detective Story” (Smith 12).

Besides the pulps, hard-boiled detective stories found a place in paperback editions, which appeared on 1939 and cost a little bit more than a pulp magazine (twenty- five cents) and targeted the same readers (Smith 13). Editor Joseph T. Shaw influence was important in this new scenario since:

“he encouraged Hammett to adapt some of his short stories into novels, and his first four novels, Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), and The Glass Key (1931) were all published in Black Mask prior to their publication by New York publisher A. A. Knopf. Other pulp writers soon followed Hammlett’s example with novels such as Paul Cain’s The Fast One (1932), Erle

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 28 Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Velvet Claw (1933), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), and Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940)” (Mayer, “The Hard-Boiled Influence” 23).

As the reader might have noticed, one of the patterns explored in the previous chapter repeats: just as Dickens and others in the Victorian era wrote their novels in parts that would later be republished as a three-decker, many hard-boiled authors originally published in instalments and then in paperback edition, probably for commercial reasons. In this regard, two approaches can be seen towards publication, namely the collective reissue of stories like in the case of Cain’s The Fast One that is a collection of already published stories with the same character; and secondly, short stories which were turned into novels like Chandler’s The Big Sleep, who in his own words ‘cannibalized’ his early short stories (Symons) . Then, it might be useful to go back to Law and Patten’s idea that “the canonical volume format raised the cultural status of serialized fiction” (152), which the authors apply to Victorian writers and can also be seen in hard-boiled novels. Interestingly, it concurs with Jason Mittell’s argument of validation through bound publication that he applies to television series in DVD sets and other serialized media (Complex TV 37). In the case of hard-boiled fiction, however, a certain degree of cultural validation would arrive thanks to its adaptation to film (Gorrara 593).

Hence in the following chapter, I plan to briefly account how hard-boiled influenced film noir which, at the same time, have its fingerprints all over the different eras of television.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 29 3. Detectives on television: the first years

Thus far I have established the historical context that allowed for the rise of the nineteenth century novel in instalments in the UK and traced some shared similarities with the practice of seriality in the last twenty years of television. Moreover, I have traced how different social, technological and economic conditions enabled the birth of crime fiction and the upsurge of the detective in literature, using serialization as a production and consumption practice that would soon satisfy a growing mass of readers both in the UK and in the United States. Hence in this chapter, I plan to illustrate how two very different traditions of detective fiction, namely the Golden Age and the Hard-boiled detective arrived at the television screen.

Some clarifications are in order, so the reader can better understand how this chapter is organized. Firstly, as I have stated previously in the introduction, when facing the challenge of writing about the history or evolution of a certain genre, one cannot avoid the danger of exposing information in such a way that the reader is left with a teleological perspective and thus thinks of the different facts exposed as a linear trajectory which, in Cooke’s terms, “develops from ‘primitive’ beginnings towards a state of complexity and ‘sophistication’” (3). However, in the case of the television detective, as in other genres, though there is a recognizable chronology in terms of which program aired first and which ones followed, the lines begin to blur when it comes to recognizing their influences from the literary crime fiction tradition. This phenomenon has to do with the fact that formal characteristics or aesthetic conventions do not always respect the clean divisions of history into periods stated by academic publications and can be seen long past their ‘specific’ moment. Then it should come as no surprise for the reader that some series which I allocate within a certain category like the “Golden Age” tradition of detective fiction that chronologically appeared first, actually premiered later than other detective series that belongs to the most recent ‘noir’ tradition. In other words, as Mittell, I propose to “look at genre history as a fluid and active process, not a teleological tale of textual rise and fall” (Genre and Television 16). Hence, I propose that the following chapter to be considered in genealogical terms, as the description and tracing aesthetic influences, as opposed to a strict and invariable genre definition.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 30 Secondly, there are, as Jenner states, many ‘access points’ to the genre such as her own, which focus on the different methods of detection –namely ‘rational-scientific’ in opposition to ‘irrational-subjective’– and how they act as discourse (Jenner, Follow the Evidence?). However, in the following pages, I plan to describe and briefly categorize the detective fiction on television in terms of the two previously described genre traditions and how they appeared in the small screen during the different eras of American television described by Amanda Lotz. Thus, I will focus on the texts’ connections with the two main literary traditions of detective fiction (i.e. Golden Age and Hard-boiled), resembling Mittell’s cultural approach to television genres, according to which “[g]enres emerge only from the intertextual relations between multiple texts, resulting in a common category” (“A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory” 6).

Therefore, although some examples of the following pages have been categorized by Jenner as irrational-subjective, which is similar to the characteristic of the hard-boiled detective, I argue that due to their narrative structure and realism (or lack of it), they resemble more the Golden Age tradition than the hard-boiled fiction. The latter does not mean that the viewer cannot recognize other influences on the text, since as Mittell states “[t]he mixing of genres is a cultural process enacted by industry personnel, often in response to audience viewing practices” (“A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory” 7) and, in this case we might add, to current industry trends.

Thirdly, although some approaches to the detective fiction genre in literature stress the difference between the police detective and the private investigator (also called ‘private eye’), in the current pages I will follow Marieke Jenner’s description who does not differentiates the police detective from the private detective (“The Detective Series” 20), and consider them simply as detectives. However, she does distinguish the police procedural like CSI: Miami (CBS, 2002-2012) where a team leads an investigation, from a show like Monk (ABC, 2002-2009), where the detective works almost in isolation, having just the company of one sidekick. Thus, following Jenner, in the next pages I plan to focus on detective fiction and discard the procedural, since it is a television genre of its own.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 31 3.1. Golden Age Television detectives in the Network era

The network era of American television refers to the years between 1950 and 1980 when the first television sets arrived at the American households, three major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) broadcasted content and the industry’s business model relied mainly on thirty-second ads (22). The first televisual detectives of these years were mostly rooted in the Golden Age detective, even though, as Jenner argues, it might have a “gesture towards film noir through its aesthetics” (18). Moreover, she argues that “aesthetic requirements of the medium, narrative structures of serialized television and industrial conditions (including censorship)” (18) are too different and should dissuade media scholars from using film noir as a reference point to analyze crime television. However, these very same aspects that for Jenner separate the television detective from film noir can serve as a starting point to describe the characteristics of the genre, at least in its first years.

As mentioned earlier, the first detectives on television come from the ‘Golden Age’ tradition, thus, these narratives introduce an eccentric main character who solve crimes as an intellectual exercise and usually has some disability or personal disorder that affects their social abilities (Jenner, “The Detective Series” 20). In terms of structure, they also draw from the Golden Age tradition since there is limited character development and each episode works with a similar narrative structure composed by a discovery, an investigation and the revelation (“The Detective Series” 20). Although Derek Kompare refers to a procedural, namely CSI, his description for these kinds of narratives may come in handy to describe detective fiction, where “plots unfold similarly [week after week], in a standard narrative structure that explicitly foregrounds the process of investigation as a routine and methodical set of tasks carried out by knowledgeable and conscientious professionals” (23). As can be noticed, Kompare’s description is similar to how Humpherys describes Sherlock Holmes plots (see chapter 1) in terms of how a mystery “inspires Holmes’s detective work involving close observation and scientific thinking through which Holmes arrives at the solution” (British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries 10).

The aesthetic requirements of the medium that Jenner talks about at the beginning of this chapter, that “should dissuade media scholars from using film noir as a reference point” (18), have to do with the fact that many of these first programs were televised

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 32 versions of radio shows and thus their narrative trusted more in dialogue than on images to convey their story. Hence, since the beginnings of American television, the reader might find half-hour programs such as Martin Kane Private Eye (NBC, 1949-1954), The Cases of Eddie Drake (CBS, 1952) or Man Against Crime (syndicated as Follow that man) (CBS, Dumont, NBC, 1949-1954), which are dialogue driven, shot in a mise-en- scène style similar to that of the soap-opera, “without pretense, designed to present the maximum amount of narrative as efficiently as budget, time and technology… allow [it]” (Butler 26). In regard to technology, prior to 1951:

“most television crime dramas were shot in studios, broadcast live, and recorded via kinescope. The production values on programs like Man Against Crime and Treasury Men in Action (1950-54) were limited by their live format, with action confined to fourth-wall interior sets, camerawork privileging distant shots, and scripts requiring lengthy scenes to avoid set changes” (Mittell, Genre and Television 142)

Thus, technological limitations and the fact that, as discussed on the previous chapter, the hard-boiled tradition deals with more complex themes, make the Golden Age detective fiction more suited for the first years of television.

Later, the mise-en-scène style would evolve towards something more cinematographic, a good example being Peter Gunn (NBC 1958-1960, ABC 1960-1961) which can be seen as a major breakthrough in terms of style, “like nothing ever seen before on television or anywhere else” (Burton), with a more ‘cinematographic’ mise-en- scène which clearly evokes film noir. According to Butler, these might be related with the fact that Blake Edwards, Peter Gunn’s creator, had a previous film career “providing one explanation for the show’s indisputable borrowing of noir visual style from cinema” (100). Additionally, according to Barr, by 1953, television in the United States had begun producing shows using film cameras (instead of television cameras), thus allowing two great advances, namely the possibility to repeat (and sell) the same program several times (i.e. syndication) and also the chance to shoot on location (61). Barr quotes a 1954 article from Sight and Sound magazine that describes as a novelty the two styles of television use of film, namely those who “make their films look like films” shooting against locations and those who “reproduce on film the virtues of live television” (Mackie quoted on Barr 61). In the case of Peter Gunn and of many that came after it, the intention to replicate the noir ‘film look’ seems evident.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 33

In the sixties, the private-eye detective genre continued producing half-hour “plot- driven [instalments] and despite the fact that the protagonist returns each week for new adventures, every episode remain[ed] self-contained, void of any memory of prior episodes” (Thorburn 693). Among the genre expressions of that time we can consider now popular classics such as McLoud (NBC, 1970-1977), Columbo (NBC, 1968-78; ABC 1989-2003), Kojak (CBS, 1973-1978), Quincy M.E. (NBC, 1976-1983), Moonlighting (ABC, 1985-89) and Murder, She Wrote (CBS, 1984-1996) among others. Additionally, these series left aside their half-hour ancestors to run for a complete television hour (which in some cases equals nearly forty-five minutes without commercials). In the case of Richard Levinson and Peter Link’s series Columbo, it even went over the hour of duration for the first season of the series. After having a TV-movie called Prescription: Murder (Irving, Prescription) in 1968 and an hour-and-a half pilot episode called Ransom for a Dead Man (NBC, March 1st 1971), each episode of the Columbo series lasted for one hour and sixteen minutes and in the second season its length reaches the one hour and fourteen minutes mark, except for some specific episodes which go as long as an hour and a half (“Columbo Episode List”; Columbo on IMDB).

3.1.1. Columbo and Seriality

At this point, it is interesting to stop for a moment to analyze how television detectives helped building an audience for this fairly new medium called television. In order to do that, I posit that the phenomenon of serialization on detective television should be analyzed taking into account the overall narrative design which considers the installment as part of a series and thus is required to obey with certain narrative principles in order for the whole to ‘work’. Secondly, the series should be analyzed as part of a television flow deliberately designed to keep a captive audience. In other words, as part of the industrial practice of programming television made by the television industry in order to keep and gain viewers.

In chapter 1 I briefly discussed the difference between serial and series. Thus, in this chapter I would like to come back to this very important difference from another angle, that of authors from the field of Television Studies in order to understand how this difference can be seen on the television screen. According to Fiske’s definition:

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 34 [a] series has the same lead characters in each episode, but each episode has a different story which is concluded. There is “dead time” between the episodes, with no memory from one to the other, and episodes can be screened or repeated in any order. The lead characters appear to have a life only in each episode, not between them, and do not grow or change as episode follows episode. Serials, on the other hand, have the same characters, but have continuous storylines, normally more than one, that continue from episode to episode. Their characters appear to live continuously between episodes, they grow and change with time, and have active “memories” of previous events (emphasis added, Fiske 151).

Jenner states that “there is little to no character development from instalment to instalment and each episode adheres to a strict narrative structure –that is discovery- investigation-revelation” (Jenner, “The Detective Series” 21).

“As such, the format is ideally suited for network television schedule: little character development implies that viewers can miss several episodes without missing much of the narrative arc and the familiar narrative structure means that the audience can focus on joining into the ‘game’ of ‘whodunit’, following clues along with the detective, rather than familiarizing themselves with unknown patterns of storytelling” (Jenner, “The Detective Series” 21).

Interestingly, the series as a format flourished during this specific era, while serials would find their moment years later in the multi-channel network that “facilitated and accelerated its expansion” (Dunleavy) as I will explain in the following chapter. Coincidently with Jenner, as we saw previously when discussing Sherlock Holmes, Eco argues that “the principal features of the mass-media products are repetition, iteration, obedience to a preestablished schema, and redundancy (as opposed to information)” (192). Moreover, he posits that “the reading of a traditional detective story presumes the enjoyment of a scheme” which, once found, has allowed the most famous authors to build a fortune on its very immutability (192). In other words, we can think of Eco’s “schema” as what the television industry refers to as a format, defined as “a set of invariable elements in a programme out of which the variable elements of an individual episode are produced” (Moran quoted in Keinonen 997). Accordingly, Eco stresses this game between the variable and the invariable stating that according to the modern conception of aesthetic value, every work “must achieve a dialectic between order and novelty–in other words, between scheme and innovation” (Eco 200).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 35 To illustrate seriality as discussed above, I propose to take a look at Peter Falk’s mumbling Lieutenant Columbo. In order to trace the series scheme, I’ve picked three random episodes, namely Murder by the book (season 1 episode 1, Sept. 15th 1971), Death Lends a Hand (season 1 episode 2, Oct. 6th 1971), Any Old Port in a Storm (season 3 episode 2 Oct. 7th 1973). These episodes were chosen based on the fact that the first two were consecutive episodes, so it would allow to see any differences between consecutive instalments. The third episode, which belongs to another season, was chosen in order to establish any possible character or plot development between different seasons. Although they do not have the same length, it is interesting to realize how the three follow the same schema in both formal and narrative terms. While Murder by the Book and Death Lends a Hand lasts for an hour and sixteen minutes, Any Old Port in a Storm lasts for an hour and thirty-six minutes, which might be related to the success of the series and the need –on the networks’ behalf– to extend a well rated show.

In terms of structure, the three episodes reviewed follow the same pattern which is very similar to the one described by Todorov according to which there are two stories to be found in detective fiction, the first one being the story of the crime and the second one being the story of the investigation (45). In the first fifteen to twenty minutes, the homicide is committed. The screen fades to black probably for a commercial break and the next scene portrays the police at the crime scene and Lieutenant Columbo first appearing in the story. Arriving on the half of the episodes length, we have a second commercial break, when the detective seems to be around his first important clues and the next (and final) commercial break arrives when the murder commits a second action (like murdering a witness in Murder by the Book or offering a new job to Columbo in Death Lends a Hand) that will finally end up demonstrating his involvement in the first murder. My focus on commercial breaks has nothing to do with the breaks in itself, but rather with their function as act breaks (see Blacklist; “Act Break”). For industrial reasons, that I plan to review in the following paragraphs, the second season increased dramatically the number of commercial breaks. In an hour and thirty-six minutes episode, the series went from three breaks to five, starting at the forty-minute mark, following by one commercial break twelve minutes later (at min. 52), then at the hour and eight minutes, then at the hour and thirty minutes and, finally, at the hour and twenty-six minutes. Interestingly, as the reader might have noticed, instead of having a commercial break before Columbo’s appearing, in the second season this is marked by a fade between

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 36 two very different scenes. It is possible to assume that this change might have to do with an audience lost that lead the network to avoid going to a commercial break. However, this is only a suggestion since it is nearly impossible to prove.

Going back to Eco’s idea of repetition, iteration, obedience to a preestablished schema, and redundancy mentioned earlier, it is interesting to note how Columbo offers the repetition of a character which does not evolve and keeps freeze in time, returning to the same running jokes (such as Columbo’s never seen wife) in such a way that it doesn’t add information and only produces the comfort of knowing that, as spectators, we’re facing the same character over and over again. Moreover, as spectators, we see the murder and every step taken by the murderer, but that information is iterated through the Lieutenant’s dialogue. Additionally, as demonstrated previously, the overall narrative follows a schema that keeps immutable between seasons and can be repeated as a pattern.

In terms of mise-en-scène, the three episodes are shot both on studio sets and on location, such as the office of the writers in Murder by the book, Arthur Kennicutt’s (Ray Milland) house in Death Lends a Hand, or Joan Stacey’s (Joyce Jillson) beach house in Any Old Port in a Storm. Shooting on location allows the directors to add visual variety and a more cinematographic approach, as can be seen in Murder by the Book, directed by a young Steven Spielberg. The episode, written by another future legend, television producer Steven Bochco7, uses his location (a fancy office on a high floor) to start the episode with a high angle shot of a car moving through the streets of Los Angeles. While the camera zooms back, it rapidly lets the audience discover that this is not a helicopter shot but a high angle shot taken from an office on a high floor. Hearing only the sound of a typewriting machine, the zoom back allows us, the audience, to discover a series of books on a shelve and –thanks to the very precise backwards camera movement and panning towards the right– introduces us to the soon-to-be victim: Jim Ferris (Martin Milner), a middle age writer who is working on his writing machine. As we can see from the props and the fancy setting, this is by no means a want-to-be writer, but a successful novelist. Thus, the next shot uses a Newsweek cover lying on the wall portraying both

7 Producer of popular procedurals such as Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-1987), L.A. Law (NBC, 1986- 1994), NYPD Blue (ABC 1993-2005) (see “Steven Bochco”)

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 37 Ferris and his partner Ken Franklin (Jack Cassidy), with the headline “The best-selling mystery team” to reinforce that idea. From the shot of the Newsweek cover, the camera zooms back to a close-up of the author enthusiastically working on his writing machine: the next bestseller is being written in front of our eyes. After an extreme close-up of Ferris words on the machine, the director goes back to a shot of the same car that we saw on the beginning, only this time the car is arriving at a parking lot. A high-angle shot from a similar position to that of the beginning, showing the car arrive at the parking lot of the same building we are in, reveals that in that the car lies a mysterious menace that will soon put Jim Ferris’ life at risk.

What I have described in the lines above is not an exception or, as it might be argued, just Spielberg’s talent at display, since similar demonstrations of cinematic narrative skill can be seen throughout the three episodes reviewed in this research. On the contrary, it demonstrates the intention of creating more cinematic television content that, in aesthetic terms, tries to distance itself from the previously discussed dialogue-driven, studio-shot detectives of the fifties. Moreover, one could argue that in terms of visual style Columbo owes more to film noir than it does to its previous televisual ancestors mentioned in this chapter. However, in terms of plot and narrative structure, every episode of Columbo follows ‘Golden Age’ principles since it presents self-contained episodes providing full narrative satisfaction (Kayman 43); it follows every one of S. S. Van Dine rules (see chapter 2); and finally, like Hercules Poirot, Roderick Alleyn and others, the mumbling Lieutenant usually manages to “confine their suspects so that by talking to them and letting them reveal themselves the culprit can be identified” (Rowland 120). Finally, whether it is a coincidence or not, the fact that the first episode of the series8 deals with two detective fiction authors that created their fortune thanks to the adventures of a fictional character, the old Mrs. Melville, seems to highlight that the series would like to be seen as part of the ‘Golden Age’ tradition of detective fiction.

8 As I mentioned earlier, Dead by the book is actually the third Columbo story, but the first of the seasons. In 1968, a made-for-television movie called Prescription: Murder aired and for the first time the character of Columbo appeared in a one hour and forty-minute movie. Almost three years later, Ransom for a Dead Man premiered on March 1971. However, the first of the 1971-1972 regular season of the show is Murder by the book (“Columbo Episode List”; Columbo on IMDB)

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 38 In industrial terms, when NBC’s Columbo premiered, television was on the peak of the network era. Unlike today, the medium was consumed by the family as a whole since the majority of the American households owned just one television set9. Moreover, as Lotz states, “[t]his was the era of broadcasting, in which networks selected programs that would reach a heterogeneous mass culture, but still directed their address to the white middle class” (The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition 24) in a constant stream of content in which programs and commercials intermix in what Raymond Williams would famously define as “flow” (87).

The stories of Lieutenant Columbo were presented under an umbrella title called The NBC Mystery Movie which aired from 1971 until 1977 (Gunzerath), and consisted of several recurring programs that were rotating week after week. Originally, The NBC Mystery Movie consisted of three series, namely, McCloud, McMillan and Wife and Columbo, which lasted between 8:30 PM and 10:00 PM (1971 - 1972 TV Schedule - Classic TV Database). Due to the success of this ‘umbrella program’ which finished number 14 in the Nielsen rankings for the 1971-72 season (Gunzerath), for the next season the network moved the original lineup (the three programs named above) to the Sunday night schedule, added the western Hec Ramsey as a fourth show and created a new slate of programs for its Wednesday night schedule (Gunzerath). As can be seen from this historical account, network programmers “selected programs and designed a schedule likely to be acceptable to, although perhaps not most favored by, the widest range of viewers (Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition 24), in a “planned flow” of content (Williams 91). Then, even though the Columbo stories were self-contained, they brought about an audience that even led NBC programmers to move it for the competitive Sunday night schedule (Gunzerath).

This brief account of the industrial context in which Columbo was broadcasted will help differentiate its industrial context that of later Golden Age influenced series. Hence, in the following section I plan to described how the hard-boiled influence find its way into television.

9 Only 32.2% of the American homes had more than one television set by 1970 (Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition 24)

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 39 3.2. The hard-boiled influence: noir detectives

The second major influence recognizable in detective fiction on television comes from the hard-boiled literary tradition which first arrived at the film screen. Thus, due to the importance of film noir to understand how hard-boiled fiction influenced television, I will briefly account how hard-boiled fiction arrived at film first and then move on to the televisual descendants of both literary hard-boiled fiction and film noir.

3.2.1. Film noir

As Borde and Chaumeton stated in the introduction to their influential A panorama of American film noir, 1941-1953 “[i]t was during the summer of 1946 that the French public experienced the revelation of a new kind of American film” (1) charged with a very specific atmosphere that was new for the time. Critic Nino Frank, who coined the term, argued about The Maltese Falcon that “[these movies] belong to what used to be known as the detective genre, and that from now on we’d do better to call ‘crime adventure stories’ or better still, ‘criminal psychology” (1). Defining noir is no easy task and some, such as Paul Schrader, even argue that it is not even a genre since “it is not defined, as are the western and gangster genre, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by more subtle qualities of tone and mood” (8). For him, noir is “a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave” (8), located between 1940 and 1950 which portrayed the world of dark cities, crime and corruption. In this respect, Borde and Chaumenton would agree since “[f]ew series in the history of cinema have, in just seven or eight years, accumulated so many hideous acts of brutality and murder” (5).

The circumstances that allowed film noir to arise in the United States are a mix of both economic and sociopolitical reasons. According to Hess, in 1930s there were nearly 15,000 movie theaters in an economically devastated country that needed to escape from its problems (Hess). Although Technicolor technology was appearing, the five main studios preferred to produce low-budget black and white B-movies since they had a secure demand from movie theaters thanks to the practice of ‘block booking’ created by Adolph Zukor (Aberdeen) which can be defined as “the practice of licensing, or offering to license, one feature or group of features upon the condition that the exhibitor shall also

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 40 license another feature or group released by the distributor in a given period” (Conant quoted in Davis). In other words, there was a need for a big volume of films and, as Hess states, “[e]ven though quality wasn’t the top priority for the executives, no filmmaker sets out to make a bad film” (Hess).

According to Schrader, there are four political and social reasons that allowed the birth of film noir. First, the war and post-war disillusionments, which consequently to Schrader’s account was a delayed post-thirties reaction. Second, the post-war realism, which responded to audience’s desire for a more honest and harsh view of America which was not satisfied by films shot on studio backlots. Third, the influence of German and East Europeans film technicians and filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, and Billy Wilder, to name a few, that escaped Europe. Although, as Schrader argues, German expressionism with its “reliance on studio lighting seems incompatible with post-war realism, with its harsh unadorned exteriors” (10) he states that “[t]he best noir technicians simply made all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings” (10). Last but not least, the fourth reason stated by Schrader it is the Hard-Boiled tradition, which brought the work of authors like Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar and The Asphalt Jungle), James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice), and Raymond Chandler to the screen. The work of the latter not only was adapted to the big screen (The Lady in the Lake, The Big Sleep) but he also signed adaptations of books such as Cain’s Double Indemnity and Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, not to mention his original screenplay for The Blue Dalia. For Schrader, the hard-boiled writers “influenced screenwriting as much as the Germans influenced noir cinematography” (10).

Just as in the previous chapter pulp editor Joseph Shaw defined the characters portrayed in his Black Mask magazine as real characters, stating that they bleed when they were wounded and felt it when they were hurt (McCann 43), likewise in film noir realism had an important role. Thus, noir film portrays homosexual characters (Dyer), a femme fatal that was objectified for the male gaze (Doane 11), an enigma that drives the story (10), and finally, manly heroes “[although] there is seldom anything heroic about them” (Butler 73). However, portraying these usually moral ambiguous characters was no easy task due to the strict 1940 Motion Picture Production code (or Hays Code)

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 41 promoted by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, that compel directors and producers to “submit all scripts and finished pictures for approval” (Shurlock 112) and to comply with a very strict set of moral rules on the screen. Surprisingly, these censorship methods had a very good effect according to film director Edward Dymtrik: “because it made us think. If we wanted to get something across that was censurable [and] we couldn’t make it openly, we had to do it deviously, we had to be clever and usually it turned out much better [that] if we had done it straight” (Edward Dymtrik in Schon).

3.2.2. Noir Detectives on Television’s Network era

Considering the visual style of noir, its hard-boiled influenced narrative, the big number of productions which allowed room for experimentation, and, finally, the fact that the Hays Code forced films to an inventive mise-en-scène that forced filmmakers to portray realist conflicts in a very elegant fashion, noir soon become synonymous with a very specific kind of film that would bring about a lot of scholarly activity around it. However, regarding what might be called ‘noir detective television’ Jenner argues that “academic criticism published on [television] crime series’ of the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s is limited” (Follow the Evidence? Methods of Detection in American TV Detective Drama 55). Likewise, Butler states that since the first edition of his Television Style in 1985, “111 film noir Master’s thesis and PhD dissertations have been written” (Butler 72), however, when it comes to ‘noir detective television’ things are different since:

“content-heavy genres such as the Western, the gangster film and the melodrama have made easy transitions to broadcast television, but because film noir depends so heavily on its cinematic visual style, it is unclear how well the genre may adapt to broadcast television’s constraints” (Butler 72).

Therefore, it is no surprise that the hard-boiled influence is less present between the 1950s and the 70s. However, just as the end of the Second World War brought about film noir, the end of Vietnam lead to a new breed of hard-boiled influenced private investigators during the 1980s, as Jenner states in another book called American TV Detective Dramas: Serial Investigations:

The private detective investigators of the 1980s are heavily in debt to the hard-boiled detectives of the 1920s and the 1930s and the film noir

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 42 detectives of the 1940s. Yet, working in close-knit teams, these detectives are far less paranoid than their predecessors (Jenner, American TV Detective Dramas 108)

In this list, the author mentions long running series such as Magnum, P.I. (CBS, 1980-1988), Remington Steele (NBC, 1982-1987) and Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-1990). The latter of the three and its relation to noir has brought about an interesting volume of scholarly interest, most remarkably the work of Butler who differentiated the show from others that used the noir style merely as a disguise for more ‘Golden Age’ detection fiction, asserting that “[i]t would be misleading and inaccurate, however, to assume that Miami Vice is nothing but style and that style is the only factor connecting Miami Vice to film noir” (102). Thus, for Butler detectives Crocket and Tubbs are “the Phillip Marlowes of the 1980s” (102).

As can be seen through this chapter, the influence of the Golden Age tradition predominated over the hard-boiled detectives in narrative terms throughout the first televisual detectives of the network era. The newly born television industry offered its audiences different puzzle-solving characters in self-contained episodes that run season after season, offering its viewers’ narrative conclusion and, more importantly, the habit and the need for more adventure. In other words, the industry realized what Sherlock Holmes’ author had discovered years ago regarding magazines, namely that “a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine” (Conan Doyle). However, thanks to a combination of new technologies that allowed a series of industrial changes, television was about to change radically, as I plan to discuss in the next chapter.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 43 4. Detectives on television: Multichannel Transition and Post-Network era

During the 1980s the industry of television started a new era defined by twenty years of gradual changes. Defined by Lotz as the ‘Multi-channel transition’, in the 1980s “[n]ew technologies, including the remote control, videocassette recorder, and analog cable systems, expanded viewers’ choice and control” (The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition 25) which resulted in significant opportunities for innovation and creative experimentation in American TV drama (Dunleavy). Moreover, Dunleavy argues that although the impetus was growing at the beginning of the 1990s, the real change occurred between 1997–2008 thanks to HBO original programming.

“Crucial to the success of the trajectory that HBO followed with original long-format drama was its realization that key to the allure and profitability of a premium cable service would be the offer of programming that was genuinely different to that which broadcasters were offering” (Dunleavy).

The multi-channel transition forever changed how television was experienced and produced by adding competition to the three major broadcasting networks, who now had to compete with a set of new channels. However, as Lotz states, changes such as the cable services and new cable channels, the videocassette recorders and the remote control changed our experience gradually, as old norms and practices still remained (The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition 8). A bigger change was about to come into being, however, with the appearance and adoption of new technologies such as Video on Demand (VOD) and mobile phone and tablets, it led to new distribution models like the subscription model discussed in chapter 1 with regards to portals. Thus, linear scheduling practices like the ones that brought about The NBC Mystery Movie of the 1970s (the umbrella title under which Columbo was broadcasted) were replaced in the post-network era by the practice of content curating, offering an array of programs available at all times without the constraints that linear scheduling implied..

Since form is always in dialogue with “cultural contexts, historical formations and modes of practice” (Mittell, Complex TV 4), the industrial changes that I have briefly described above had important consequences for television storytelling. Mittell described this new breed of television as ‘Complex television’, a narrational mode that crosses

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 44 genres, artistic movements and creators and redefines episodic forms under the influence of serial narration (Complex TV 18). In this regard, the author lists comedies such as Seinfeld, Malcolm in the Middle, Arrested Development and dramas such as 24, The Wire and Lost, which are “an interplay between the demands of episodic and serial storytelling, often oscillating between long-term arcs and stand-alone episodes” (Complex TV 19), where a huge amount of genre mixing takes place and programming categories are brought together, “interwoven, merged and reformed” (Complex TV 233).

Having briefly described the industrial and narrative changes brought about by the multichannel transition and the post-network era, in the following pages I will continue my genealogy of detective fiction, describing not only what new trends inherit previous detective fiction traditions but also how they practice serialization.

4.1. Golden Age Television detectives in the Multichannel Transition and Post-Network era (1980-)

According to Thorburn, private detectives were more scarce during the 1980s and 1990s, even though police procedurals continued to blossom (695). Moreover, he argues that during the first decade of the 2000s, the prime-time schedule became dominated by reality television until the 9/11 terrorist attacks where the appearance of “law-and-order heroes working for the police was intensified” (695). For the author, only Monk (ABC, 2002- 2009) stands as the only notable private detective of the early years of the new millennium. However, drawing upon Jenner’s list of ‘rational-scientific’ television detectives (Jenner, Follow the Evidence? 39), it is relevant to add shows such as Bones (FOX, 2005-2017), Numb3rs (CBS, 2005-2010), Psych (NBC, 2006-2014), and The Mentalist (CBS, 2008-2015) to the list, since they were running for more than five years each, working their narrative in the tradition of Holmesian detectives.

Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle’s legacy continued its presence during the new millennium not only as main influencers of a tradition, but also as main sources for ongoing adaptations of their work. In this regard we can mention series such as House M.D. (FOX, 2004-2012), which can be considered a ‘medical Sherlock’ who abuses Vicodin (instead of cocaine), works with Wilson (instead of Watson) and even lives at apartment 221B of an unknown street (see “How Dr. Gregory House Is like Sherlock

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 45 Holmes”). Other adaptations, such as CBS’s Elementary (CBS, 2012-) replaced Dr. Watson for a female version (Dr. Joan Watson) portrayed by Lucy Liu.

Even though programs such as House M.D. mix episodic and serial storytelling, combining the weekly case-solving with longer narrative arcs such as Gregory House’s (Hugh Laurie) relationship with his boss Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), it might be argued that its ‘Golden Era genes’ seem to own more to the series discussed in the network era than to serial form since its self-contained plot (i.e. a medical case) is usually the one that triggers events in the other secondary plots between the main characters. However, in 2010 a new adaptation of Holmes, namely BBC’s Sherlock (BBC, 2010-), adapted Conan Doyle ‘oeuvre’ to the current British world taking a very different narrative approach which combined a tendency seen on the network era regarding length and some characteristics of Mittell’s complex television concept related with the mix of self-contained and longer narrative arcs in each episode. Thus, in terms of serialization, each season of Sherlock is made out of three ninety-minutes episodes, which according to Jenner and Richards, align with many ITV police and detective dramas that are presented through “fewer episodes but each with a two-hour running time” (25). Moreover, it can be argued that this represents a return to Columbo in terms of length and in the fact that each instalment is dedicated to solving a specific mystery. However, the series usually presents more than two plots per episode, one of which lasts the whole series like the relationship between Sherlock Holmes’ (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his archenemy Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) or a complete season like the love relationship between John Watson (Martin Freeman) and Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington). Furthermore, the serial aspect of the narrative is highlighted by the fact that on the first episode of the first season, A Study in Pink (season 1 episode 1, October 10th 2010) Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson get to know each other and agree to share an apartment at the famous 221B Baker Street in London. In this regard, series like Columbo, or more recent series like Elementary or House M.D. all start in an episode that could have been aired in the middle of the season, as opposed to Sherlock that starts in his diegetic beginning, where the two characters get to know each other, giving the season certain sense of order that a regular series does not have.

The fact that each season of Sherlock is made out of three ninety-minutes episodes, provides a sense of ‘event’ television (25) and due to its use of cliffhangers, creates a lot

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 46 of audience speculation online between each season (see Eames and Dibdin; Lutes). Instead of using cliffhangers between episodes, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s show creates cliffhangers between seasons. Hence, in the first season, spectators are left with Sherlock Holmes pointing a gun at an explosive vest; in the second season, spectators witness the death of Sherlock; in the third season, Moriarty who was allegedly death, seems to reappear in every screen across the UK. Rather than waiting for a day in the case of a soap opera, or a week in the case of a regular network or cable television show, spectators have to wait for more than a year to discover how the last scene of the last episode ends. In fact, the third and last episode of the first season called The Great Game aired November 3rd 2010 and the first episode of season two, that is A Scandal in Belgravia, aired April 2nd, 2012, in other words, more than a year and a half later. Thus the audience speculation online between season was enormous including interviews to their creators (Jeffries) and even speculation about the destiny of their characters (Mackelden).

Another remarkable aspect of Moffat and Gatiss’ adaptation concerns its visuality which:

“seems to be gesturing heavily towards its American contemporaries with its glossy aesthetics, its grey-blue color scheme, its visual emphasis on a laboratory setting and the ‘Sherlock-shot’ which despite obvious differences, has also a lot in common with the ‘CSI-shot’ or the way thought processes are visualized in Numb3rs (CBS, 2005-10)” (Jenner and Richards 25).

In addition to the use of graphics to portray text messages next to the characters faces, ‘tilt-shift’ shots that make London look like a miniature and its fancy locations, other aesthetic features make BBC’s Sherlock fall under Dunleavy’s qualities for American high-end drama:

“[American high-end drama] it’s very high per-episode cost; this currently ranges from US$3–10 million for American-produced examples. High-end drama deploys either 35mm film or ultra-HD digital formats as the shooting medium. Important to it is the strategy of “programme individuation” (Caldwell, 1995: 88), in which selected exterior locations, elaborate sets and cinematography make significant contributions to the distinctive ‘look’ of a TV drama” (Dunleavy).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 47 As can be seen, what I call Golden Age television detectives of the multichannel transition and post-network era offer interesting innovations from their network era ‘ancestors’, especially in how they mix self-contained plots and longer narrative arcs in each episode. The latter expands Todorov’s definition of the two stories involved in a ‘Golden Age’ detective narrative, without leaving aside the puzzle-solving, scientific approach that has defined this tradition since its birth.

4.2. New ‘noirs’

The multi-channel transition allowed for two new kinds of noir to reach the screen, which I refer to as ‘new noirs’, namely the Nordic Noir and the Domestic Noir, which together has given a new impulse to detective fiction. However, just as Schrader stated in 1972 that noir was not a film genre (8), these new incarnations of noir have also found critical voices, like Steenberg who states in regards to The Fall that naming something noir seems more like a “legitimation strategy and a demand to be taken seriously” (63). Surprisingly, this kind of examinations fails to apprehend the genre by looking at it exclusively from an analysis of its texts, instead of glancing them as “discursive processes operative within texts, audiences, industries, and cultural contexts” (Mittell, Genre and Television 27).

Before I go into the detail of the two new expressions of noir, I would like to come back to the Hays Code discussed in the previous chapter, which was promoted by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and listed a very strict set of moral rules of what can or cannot be shown on the screen. Interestingly, the first new noirs were produced and screened through cable television, which don’t have to follow the rules of the American FCC (Federal Communications Commission) that focus on sex, language and violence (Dunleavy). Moreover, these freedoms

“have ramifications not just for the inclusion of sex, language and violence, but also for the ways in which such content is framed and represented. Attributable to the content liberties of cable television, for example, is their evident extension of the conceptual parameters for cable dramas to involve characterizations that remain largely off-limits to American broadcast networks. In complex serials, these content liberties have allowed dramas to be devised around flawed, anti-heroic characters – as exemplified by ‘meth’ cook Walter White.” (Dunleavy)

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 48 As a result, the noir serials listed on the following section were all created and, at the same time, should all be considered as the result of never-before-seen creative freedom, which enabled creators to portray violent murders, domestic violence scenes and a wide scope of previously censurable content, only allowed to post-Hays code films.

4.3. Nordic noir

For Creeber, Nordic Noir is “a broad umbrella term which describes a particular type of Scandinavian crime fiction, typified by its heady mixture of bleak naturalism, disconsolate locations and morose detectives” (“Killing Us Softly” 21). Starting as a best- selling genre with authors like Jo Nesbø and Stieg Larsson (Rice), Nordic Noir rapidly arrived at film and television, first with adaptations of previous literary works (such as Wallander) and then with originally written-for-television shows like The Killing, (2007- 12), The Protectors (2008-10) and The Bridge (2011 - ) (“Killing Us Softly” 22).

Interestingly, for Peacock the genre is a mix of both the ‘Golden Age’ tradition and the ‘hard-boiled’ detective tradition mentioned above, which on screen is characterized by its slow-paced tempo, a distinctive sense of place and remoteness (“Killing Us Softly” 26) and a layer of melancholy which, according to Waade, is inherent to Nordic art since it relates to the region’s climate conditions and landscapes (383). Additionally, Scandinavian crime and Nordic noir are defined for the author by three key components, namely “complex characters and gender issues such as powerful women, feminised male anti-heroes and, in some cases, socially and emotionally dysfunctional main characters as well” (384); “a particular use of Nordic settings, including landscape, lighting, climate, design and architecture” (384); and finally, “societal criticism” (384). Moreover, for Creeber, Nordic noir can be described by its shadowy aesthetic, multi- layered storylines and an interest in uncovering the “dark underbelly of contemporary society” (Creeber, “Killing Us Softly” 22). Finally, the author agrees with Peacock in the programme’s slow and melancholic pace.

In the last years, Nordic noir has become an interesting trend on television, creating a body of work that continues to grow annually. Moreover, it can be traced across Europe but especially in the UK.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 49 “Channel 4’s Southcliffe and BBC Three’s In the Flesh both took their visual look from the same sludgy colour palette as The Bridge. And Broadchurch’s haunting music was by an Icelandic composer. ‘Whenever there is a phenomenon – and certainly Scandinavian novels and TV are a phenomenon – it can’t help but be an inspiration,’ says Ben Stephenson, the BBC’s drama chief” (Midgley).

For Creeber, for example, “[n]owhere has Nordic Noir’s influence been more profound than in Broadchurch (ITV, 2013-2017)” (“Killing Us Softly” 27). However, recent American serials made exclusively for television streaming portals have also received the influence of Nordic noir, namely, Bloodline (Netflix, 2015-2017) and Ozark (Netflix, 2017-). In the case of the first, the cold climate and vast nordic landscapes are replaced by an immense and humid scenery in a much more poor, solitary and dangerous version of Florida than the one portrayed in Miami Vice, where a polarized society seems to depend on secrecy and alcohol to survive and with a male protagonist –detective John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler)– that contains in itself the moral ambiguity of the heroes described previously when discussing film noir in the previous chapter.

4.4. Domestic noir

The amount of scholar and critical work regarding Nordic noir is in no way comparable to that of domestic noir. Moreover, the first peer review overview of the topic was just released this year (Joyce and Sutton).

Also called suburban noir, domestic suspense, the marriage mystery, and chick noir (Kelly), the term domestic noir is a “capacious, flexible category that encompasses realist writing about domestic violence, intersectional feminism, religion, mental illness, and women’s rights but that can also include ‘fantastic and even supernatural storylines such as Sarah Pinborough’s ‘Behind Her Eyes’” (Joyce). The word, coined by author Julia Crouch in 2013,

“takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants” (Crouch).

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 50 According to author Anna Snoekstra, the majority of domestic noir stories follow a similar chronology: “A young woman fears her husband wants to kill her. She begins to search for evidence in their expansive home, which has begun to feel more like a prison. Is she really in danger, or is she paranoid?” (Snoekstra). However, the genre itself has demonstrated how it can go much further than what Snoekstra suggests, with plots that include “disappearing partners, toxic marriages, dark secrets and the lies we tell ourselves as well as each other” (Kelly).

In the bookshelves, the reader might find novels such as Mary Kubica’s The Good Girl, Gilly Macmillan’s The Perfect Girl, Paula Hawkins’ Girl on The Train and its most popular example, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which was adapted to film by David Fincher in 2014 (Fincher). On television, however, series such as The Affair (Showtime, 2014), Doctor Foster (BBC One, 2015-), Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017-), The Replacement (BBC One, 2017) and the soon-to-be-premiered Sharp Objects (HBO, 2018-).

According to different accounts, the appeal of the genre is related to the fact that “instead of making us fret about faceless serial killers they’re making us anxious about the person next to us on the sofa” (Thomas). Moreover, Thomas quotes Alison Hennessey, a senior editor who posits that the rise of domestic noir is also related to

“[how people are now] curating the perfect versions of their lives through social media. The reaction to that is to wonder what lies beyond this perfect façade. People want to be able to see inside a marriage, they even find it reassuring to think it might not actually be that happy.” (Thomas)

The latter concurs with Whitney who argues that “as a generation of Facebookers and Instagrammers, we are hooked into a sanitised online version of ourselves, keen to present a manipulated and buffed-up doppelgänger to the world when underneath everything is far from OK” (Whitney). Thus, the doppelgänger, a theme that has been historically present in film noir usually as a destructive alter ego (Place and Peterson 31), which Spooner relates to the Freudian uncanny, “in which the familiar and the unfamiliar coincide to create a feeling of profound unease” (250), is here represented by the self- made image portrayed on social media that contradicts or directly opposes to the real diegetic life of the character.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 51 Moreover, domestic noir replaces the melancholy of the Nordic vast and cold landscape for that of the allegedly warmer family household, although deep inside it may not be what the characters really thought it was.

4.5. Serialization and domestic noir in HBO’s Big Little Lies

In the following pages, I plan to examine a detective series adapted for television by screenwriters David E. Kelley and Matthew Tinker from a novel by Liane Moriarty. The show is HBO’s Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017-) which features Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley and tells the story of three mothers whose seemingly perfect lives in the Californian beach town of Monterrey will be changed by murder. Besides the success of the series and my own interest as a viewer, what drives me to use this domestic noir novel-turned-into-series as a case study has to do with three reasons, firstly Big Little Lies (BLL from now on) has an approach to serialization that resembles the novel in parts of the Nineteenth century adapted to the specific necessities of its distribution outlets; secondly, is an interesting example of the evolution of the detective genre in terms of plot and narrative structure; thirdly, it deals with contemporary discourses around women that introduces a female point of view into a genre that, before the appearance of domestic noir, was mostly masculine. Although the latter goes beyond the scope of this research, I will briefly address it since I argue that has consequences in the narrative treatment of the series.

In terms of serialization, BLL is an adaptation divided into seven instalments that were produced for a cable channel, which owns two streaming portals (i.e. HBO GO and HBO NOW). As such, the serial is forced to use serialization practices from both the multichannel transition and the post network era, which can be seen from two different perspectives which I define as narrative and extra-narratives. The first one relates to storytelling strategies designed by the showrunners which can be seen in the written script (e.g. a flashback) while the second, which I have called extra-narrative, refers to programming tactics that might be induced by the showrunners but are created to facilitate viewing practices. The latter can be seen especially on former serial forms, such as soaps but more specifically in cable television serials, such as Lost. Thus, I argue that they belong to the multichannel transition.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 52 In terms of narrative strategies, BLL begins immediately after a murder has taken place, however, we get to see the crime scene but not the dead person. Thus, in the first minutes, the question of what happened is raised, creating the interest to follow the serial along the viewers all the way till the proper answer to the questions of ‘what happened?’ (‘whodunnit’) and ‘who died?’ is satisfied, understanding narrative satisfaction in terms of “the values of unity, harmony, and fully integrated design” of a narrative (O’Sullivan, para.2). Interestingly, in genealogic terms, this beginning is a twist from the convention seen in ‘Golgen Age’ detectives where we get to see the murder first and then the investigation process. At the same time, it breaks with Otto Penzler’s hard-boiled structure discussed before where a victim –usually a young woman, in Penzler terms– visits an investigator. Instead, this beginning can be linked to what Pape calls the ‘preemptive ending’ where “an episode [or season] begins by showing a final catastrophe, conflict, or stand-off between two characters, and then goes back in time… to tell the story of everything that led up to the foretold ending” (63).

Moreover, this first scene of BLL states the tone of the story while, at the same time, states the point where the different plots that we are about to see are headed at. In Mittell’s terms, “[w]e watch to see how the writers will structure the narrative mechanics required to bring together the [several] plotlines into a carefully calibrated … narrative machine” (Complex TV 43). These multiple plots, in the case of BLL involve the conflicts that connect the characters of Madeline Martha Mackenzie (Reese Witherspoon), Celeste Wright (Nicole Kidman), Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley), Bonnie Carlson (Zoë Kravitz) and Renata Klein (Laura Dern).

The dramatic arc in these multiple plots is structured similarly to a long film, in this case divided in seven parts, “with a season opener, a first act ending… a mid-point two parter… and a season’s closer which is an intriguing development to make sure the audience returns to the show” (Brett quoted in Thompson 62). Thus, on the first episode spectators are presented with the above-mentioned murder, the main characters Madeline Mackenzie, Celeste Wright, and Jane Chapman; additionally, the first conflict arises which triggers the plot, namely, a bully accusation from Renata’s daughter Amabella against the recently arrived Zyggy (Jane’s kid) that divides the community. Moreover, between episode 3, Living the dream (HBO, March 6th 2017) and episode 4, Push Comes to Shove (HBO, March 13rd), the middle point takes place. As Snyder states regarding

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 53 film scripts, “the midpoint is either an "up" where the hero seemingly peaks (though it is a false peak) or a "down" when the world collapses all around the hero (though it is a false collapse), and it can only get better from here on out.” (Snyder 122). Hence, between these two episodes Madeleine’s teenage daughter leaves home, Celeste starts therapy and her husband admits infringing domestic violence upon her, opening the door to a healthier relationship, Celeste and Madeleine confess to each other that being just a mother is not enough, which will make that the first one goes back to practicing law and the second to go back to an old affair with the community’s theater director. According to Snyder words, many of these moments turn out to be “false peaks” and “false collapses”. For example in the next episode, Once Bitten (HBO, March 20th 2017) when everything seems to be going well for Celeste, her husband beats her throwing legos and other toys at her.

This structure taken from film narrative and display along the seven-episode season directly challenges Creeber’s argument on serials that “continuity between separate episodes is not as foregrounded as it may have once been, allowing greater entry points for viewers who have not followed the entire story” (Serial Television 11). Moreover, when discussing television writing Kristine Thompson posits the term ‘dispersed exposition’ as “a type of redundancy that seems specific to television” (Thompson 65) that comes from the times when audience members enter the movie theater in the middle of a screening and, thus, filmmakers and especially screenwriters were forced to be reiterative so the audience could understand the plot. However, narrative reiteration in BLL is only seen through Jane’s flashbacks on the beach, that haunt the character and remember the audience of the character’s motivations, but that in no way serve as an access point. Moreover, these flashbacks seem to nurture the attention and speculation that preempted endings demand from the audience according to Pape (emphasis added by the author, 64). Thus, if we assume, for example, that episode 3 is the access point to the series for any given viewer, the spectator would have difficulty following and making sense of the whole story. If we go back to, say, Columbo, it can be argued that the network era detective has more “entry points” that BLL, since if a spectator starts watching the series at the middle of the narrative, at the end the mumbling Lieutenant will deliver a speech that eventually will help him understand the whole story. Whereas in the case of BLL, the number of plots and the information that each one conveys makes it impossible to access it in the middle of the narrative. This aspect is very

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 54 important, since it differentiates a detective narrative made for network television, where audiences usually join a narrative half-way its length and must be able to understand it, as opposed to a serial made for a cable channel that owns a streaming portal, where the audience can access the portal and watch the story from the beginning. Going further back in our genealogy, it might seem evident that Columbo works as a short story in a magazine whereas BLL resembles more a novel in parts of the Nineteenth century that is available at the local Mudie library, or in this case, the HBO portal.

As I mentioned earlier, repetition also comes from extra-narrative features in the case of Big Little Lies. As I stated before, these kinds of features are non-diegetic and basically programming-related tactics that are created to facilitate viewing. Here I refer specifically to the beginning of every episode of BLL that is dedicated to reminding the audience of former happenings in the plot. As such, from episode 2 (Serious Mothering) till episode 7 (You Get What You Need), each instalment begins with a short overview of the previous episode that lasts for nearly one minute. Besides this extra-narrative feature, in BLL the viewer does not find himself with other elements that create anticipation, such as the classic short clip at the end of the episode with scenes from the next unseen chapter.

Some critics on the press have argued that BLL is “a high-gloss soap opera” (see Fienberg; Jagernauth), however, that kind of categorization can only be explained by the fact that the program portrays feminine conflicts in serial form, overlooking other important formal, industrial and discursive aspects. As Jason Mittell argues, “[i]t is the prevalence of melodrama in nearly all modes of serial storytelling that we can find the most commonality between daytime soap operas and prime time serials, but we should not assume that the latter is mimicking or transforming the former” (Complex TV 243). Many elements make impossible to sustain the critics’ claim, such as the factory-style mode of production of soap operas, which avoid exteriors and confines spaces (Butler 38) limiting the possibilities of its mise-en-scène dramatically; the acting that according to Butler, “transgresses contemporary conventions of ‘realistic’ acting” (42) in the case of the soap opera and which is incomparable to the realism seen on BLL, exemplified by the scenes where Celeste suffers domestic violence; the total absence of visual effects, which seem inexistent but are crucial in many scenes of BLL (see Côté); and finally, the “High- end drama” quality of the HBO series “in which selected exterior locations, elaborate sets and cinematography make significant contributions to the distinctive ‘look’ of a TV

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 55 drama” (Dunleavy). Summing up, arguing on the ‘soapy’ quality of a program like the one discussed is to oversimplify a complex text. However, this confusion might only be explained by the feminine topics portrayed by the narrative.

It is interesting to note that domestic noir, as I have demonstrated earlier, is a descendant from film noir which was mostly a masculine genre that even objectified women for the male gaze (Doane 11). On the contrary, serials like BLL deal with the role of women in the family, the public image versus the private world, domestic violence and finally, sisterhood. Being present on every chapter of the serial, every one of these topics is conveyed to the spectator in a different manner, conforming a stained-glass window from which to look at the feminine experience with its many different nuances. Thus, in the following pages, I will briefly address how each theme is conveyed through mise-en- scène.

Firstly, each of the main characters of the serial offers a perspective on the role of women in both their families and society not only by characterization, as in what their characters represent and do, but also by openly discussing issues such as the opposition of working mothers with non-working mothers. As a matter of fact, the three, main characters, namely Madeline Martha Mackenzie (Reese Witherspoon), Celeste Wright (Nicole Kidman) and Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley) start the serial as non-working mothers, opposing their antagonists, Madeline ex-husband’s current partner, yoga teacher Bonnie Carlson (Zoë Kravitz), and CEO Renata Klein (Laura Dern). Moreover, in chapter 7, You Get What You Need (HBO, April 3rd 2017), Renata verbalizes the problems that a successful career like hers poses within the social environment of Monterrey. However, as the plot moves forward, each one of the characters will renegotiate its relation between motherhood, work and the social image.

The stressing fulltime job that is being a mother with all the elements that the plot presents gives a lot of space for the representation of very intimate female atmospheres, which resembles with what Borde and Chaumeton’s described about the first film noir that arrived in France. These atmospheres are conveyed by two different mise-en-scène strategies, namely, the use of music and the use of short flashbacks that take the audience towards a memory or a fantasy. In the first case, it is interesting to see how even on the original scripts (see Kelley) there is a list of songs provided, which speaks of the

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 56 importance of the music not as non-diegetic almost decorative element, but rather as an important part of the mood that David E. Kelly, the screenwriter, wants to achieve. In this regard, we can see how every dinner or lunch at the Mackenzie’s house takes place with diegetic music that forces the character to increase their voice volume which adds a layer of tension (both on the characters and on the viewer) and, in most cases, lead to a discussion. However, the most interesting uses of music are when director Jean-Marc Vallée creates clips where one of the characters’ past intertwines with the present, and the subjectivity of the character is expressed through flashbacks of an unknown past. In addition to music, sound design also plays an important narrative role. Take for example the use of the waves crushing against the rocks in specific moments of the plot in order to create tension or, sometimes, working as a sonic match cut, like when Jane arrives from jogging and the sound of the water in the ocean cuts to the sound of the tap water going straight into her face, as if she was trying to wash away a bad memory. The latter matches Jason Mittell’s description of complex narrative as a way of storytelling that “reorder[s] events through flashbacks, retelling past events, repeating story events from multiple perspectives, and jumbling chronologies” (Complex TV 26).

The conflict mentioned earlier that arises from the social image of the mothers and their kids is stated in the first episode, when all the kids attend ‘Orientation Day’ and one of the kids is accused of bullying. In what can be described as a very questionable practice, the teacher gathers both parents and children outside the school and asks the girl that was affected to point out to the kid that attack her. This brings upon a social conflict that goes beyond the school limits, putting the parent up against each other and creating small domestic earthquakes on every character’s life. Moreover, the public against the private theme can be seen clearly since episode one thanks to several testimonies of different secondary characters that give a Greek chorus-like comment on the diegetic events, which are taken from the police interrogatories that are taking place to elucidate the crime mystery. Moreover, the latter resembles Penzler’s description of the hard-boiled structure where the detective “interviews people and learns secrets, frequently about events in the distant past” (Penzler). These scenes bring upon a new point of view, a social one as might be called, that contrast or sometime complements the plot against the social gaze, the others point of view in the form of gossip disguised as confession.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 57 This social gaze as I have called it is conveyed through mise-en-scène which might be argued that is built around peeping, as Michael Zak has pointed out on a video essay (Zak). Starting on from its introduction clip, the peeping is present on several sequences and from different points of view, such as the final sequence of the first episode, where a series of short scenes of the characters thinking, watching their relatives and also, being looked at (like Jane who’s spied by her own son Ziggy) or a longer sequence on the second episode where Celeste arrives at the school and starts arguing while the camera shows how the school’s principal is looking from his office. After seemingly looking at the scene, the principal then turns to the left and turns his eyes on another scene taking place at the school entrance, this time between Ziggy and Madeleine’s daughter. This scene is, at the same time, being looked at by a group of teachers. A point of view shot (POV) then introduces another spectator to the kid’s scene, Jane, who is looking how the kids interact from her car. Finally, Jane is surprised by Madeleine who parks her car next to Jane’s and starts a conversation. This schema is repeated as a leit motiv which reaches its peak at the end of the serial, with a scene that portrays the group of women on the beach, playing with their kids, is seen from a POV resembling a pair of binoculars. The sound of a zippo lighter which, as spectators know belongs to the detective reveals that even though they seem to be free, Detective Adrienne Quinlan (Merrin Dungey) is looking at them.

When discussing domestic noir themes on the pages above, I mentioned how social media makes us ‘curate’ the perfect version of our lives and put it online for the world to see. This “sanitized version of ourselves” as Rebecca Whitney stated, which “present[s] a manipulated and buffed-up doppelgänger to the world” (Whitney) can be seen in several scenes throughout the seven episodes. Even though many characters entangle with social media, like when Madeline gives her yoga class the finger and Celeste takes a picture of that and Madeline asks her not to post it, or when Madeline decides to auction her virginity on Facebook for a good cause, there is no clearer example of Whitney’s statement that on the Nicole Kidman’s character. On Somebody’s death, episode 1, Celeste is alone on her terrace, uploading different photos of his husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) and her twins to her Facebook page. As the original screenplay states “[t]t's a collage of bliss” (Kelley). Suddenly she flinches when a hand touches her on the shoulder. To our surprise is Perry, who haunts her from behind. As spectators will

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 58 later found out that this seemingly perfect marriage, who is even described as ‘gooey’ by the Otter Bay School community is, in fact, a nightmare.

Finally, the last recurring theme is that of sisterhood. According to the second and third meaning that the Merriam-Webster dictionary gives to the word (“Sisterhood”), sisterhood might be defined as a community or society of sisters and the solidarity of women based on shared conditions, experiences, or concerns. Thus, on a nutshell, Big Little Lies is a story about how five different women put their problems aside to face a menace that affects all of them, namely, an aggressive man, and how they embrace a sisterhood which will be forced to keep a secret in order to survive.

Thus, the editing of the serial reminds us constantly about the elements that unite them. As an example, at the beginning of Once Bitten (HBO, March 20th 2017) a montage sequence shows us how the five women driving their kids to school showing us their faces from the rearview mirror, stressing the fact that even though they are very different, they have similar concerns. Later, on the same chapter, another sequence shows us Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley) running on the beach alone and full of rage by the sounds of Hands Around My Throat by Death In Vegas. Suddenly, she is joined by Madeline and Celeste, finishing the sequence (and the music track) in the local cafeteria where they have lunch and share their problems. Another interesting example of how director Jean- Marc Vallée portrays sisterhood is related to how he combined the multiple plots that move his story forward by using a set of editing techniques, such as match cuts and others, that unite sequences not only by logic chronological terms but also by their expressed emotion which put the personal stories of the five women side by side.

Hence, it can even be argued that this sisterhood is born out of the distrust in a justice system that will judge women for murder without taking into consideration the reasons that lead to it, in the same way that they are being judged in other areas of their life. Interestingly, the threat to this sisterhood is another woman, namely, Detective Adrienne Quinlan, the detective in charge of the case who does not give up till the last frame of the first season.

All in all, Big Little Lies makes a good example of a complex narrative that fulfills the formal characteristics of a domestic noir with a very interesting mix of serialization

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 59 practices that owe from both the multichannel transition and the post network era. Moreover, its narrative which moves within the boundaries of a genre, namely domestic noir, that have proven to be dramatically current in times of social movements such as #MeToo, when the way men and women relate to each other is under a huge amount of scrutiny. Unsurprisingly then, the program is going into a second season (Goldberg) based on an original treatment by author Liane Moriarty. As viewers, we will have to wait to see how this created-for-the-screen-only second season, entangles itself with three changing worlds, namely, serialization, detective fiction and women position in contemporary western societies.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 60 5. Conclusion

A murder, a victim, a weapon and a motive. Our fascination with the darkest side of human desire and the addictive questions about how and why these kinds of events take place have been present on the human psyche for centuries and will probably continue to do so for many years to come. Although this genealogy ends in the sunny Monterrey beaches where a sorority of women covers a crime, in the process of this research, different serials appeared on television portals and even one of them, namely Steven Soderbergh’s noir series Mosaic, has blurred the boundaries between television and another kind of media, combining television episodes with a mobile app only available in the US, which has allowed viewers to follow the story by using their own smartphones and tablets. Hence, Mosaic appeared as a new example of Jennifer Hayward’s idea that serialization has historically been used to increase a medium’s consumption” (2).

However, a serial such as Big Little Lies can hardly be understood without taking into consideration their genealogic origins that, as I have argued throughout this thesis, make these television shows the descendants of previous narrative traditions, such as the domestic noir novel and the high-end drama from the post-network era. From the first one, BLL draws its domestic violence and feminism, while the second, namely high-end drama, gives the series a combination of specific aesthetic and narrative characteristics that confer a distinctive look to HBO’s show. Moreover, both the domestic noir and the high-end drama draws from the mid-1940s film noir which portrayed the world of dark cities, crime and corruption. As Paul Schrader claimed, hard-boiled writers “influenced screenwriting [in film noir] as much as the Germans influenced noir cinematography” (10). As I argued in chapter two, Hard-boiled fiction did not appear on a vacuum since it was a critical response to the British Golden Age of detective fiction, which came into being thanks to nineteen-century crime fiction, made popular by Conan Doyle. In other words, if the reader of this research plays the game of the detective for one moment to understand how five mothers from Monterrey end up being investigated for murder, he or she would have to question not only the main suspect, BLL author, Liane Moriarty, but also a big list of authors and characters that directly or even very indirectly have influenced a narrative like the one analyzed in the last chapter.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 61 Thus, this project’s aim is to trace and understand how this need for repetition and the satisfaction generated by crime solving has evolved in the last centuries across different mediums and societies. By tracing a genealogy all the way back to earlier forms of serialization and detective fiction, I have offered a glimpse with the intention to give the reader parallelisms between older and newer forms of serialization. However, it should be stressed that by no means this is an attempt to equalize one form to the other since the historical evolution of societies, the mediums itself, and the consumption of these mediums would make it impossible. On the contrary, I propose to take the current research as a contribution that will allow the reader to understand the current serialization seen on television streaming portals as an older cultural practice that adapts to specific mediums and genres.

Based on the evolution that this research has accounted for, it is interesting to outline a set of conclusions that might be useful to considerate for further debates and research. Firstly, serialization is a cultural practice that takes many forms depending on the medium (comics, soap operas, television serials, and others). Moreover, it’s a response to a need for habit on the side of the consumer (readers or viewers) achieved by certain features established by Humberto Eco, namely, “repetition, iteration, obedience to a preestablished schema, and redundancy” (192) to achieve its purpose. However, it poses the question regarding how the massification of serials and series will affect discrete craft-like works of art such as independent films and what would it mean for them in the long run.

Secondly, the two main traditions of detective fiction, that is, the ‘Golden era’ and the ‘Hard-boiled’, entangle with serialization in very different ways, namely series and serials. Thus, as I have argued, television programs such as House MD, Elementary, and Columbo work as a self-contained series, while Big Little Lies or Broadchurch work as a serial, with longer narrative arcs designed for binge watching. Furthermore, each of these two traditions can be considered as the direct result of very specific industrial and social factors, in other words, by-products of the historical moments inhabited by their respective consumers. Thus, I argue that each new subgenre of detective fiction should be understood and studied not only from its formal attributes but also by looking at the society where it was born and how that society consumed this works.

“Small Episodes, Big Detectives” 62 Finally, “just one more thing”, as Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo used to say before finishing a case, throughout this research I have quoted Jennifer Hayward’s idea that serialized works appeared at or near the inception of their respective medium, and were used to increase its consumption” (2), however, I have not argued specifically about how consumption could be increased. As this thesis has shown, few genres seem more tailor-made for this purpose than detective fiction since our fascination with the darkest side of human desire seems inherent to our own human condition.

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