Small Episodes, Big Detectives: A genealogy of Detective Fiction and its Relation to Serialization

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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”

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(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

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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”

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(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}

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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).

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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.}

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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).

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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”).

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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: A genealogy of Detective Fiction and its Relation to Serialization