Detective Drama Research Articles

Research on the Communication Strategy Based on the Challenge of Hong Kong TVB Detective Drama “Heading North”

Research on the Communication Strategy Based on the Challenge of Hong Kong TVB Detective Drama “Heading North”

COMIC READING ANDROID APPLICATION

Comics are a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically takes the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. The size and arrangement of panels contribute to narrative pacing. Comic-Ray is a Comic and Manga reading app in which a wide range of comics and mangas (many genres) will be available in pdf format. Comics have been around since at least the 19th century. The term manga is used in Japan to refer to both comics and cartooning. Outside of Japan, the word is typically used to refer to comics originally published in the country. In Japan, people of all ages read Manga. The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action, adventure, business and commerce, comedy, detective drama, historical, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy sports and games, and suspense among others.

Interdiscursivity as Reflection and Interpretation of Discursive Space of a Film in Professional Press (based on journalistic articles about the detective drama television series ‘Capitaine Marleau’)

Interdiscursivity as Reflection and Interpretation of Discursive Space of a Film in Professional Press (based on journalistic articles about the detective drama television series ‘Capitaine Marleau’)

(C)Overt Operations

In ‘(C)Overt Operations: Detective disguise and the threat of deception,’ Isabel Stowell-Kaplan explores the productive tensions and contradictions rife in the theatrical performance of undercover operations. Beginning with the introduction of the New Police in the mid-nineteenth century, the article shows how the institution of a centralized police force in London laid bare anxieties about police power and the sort of state surveillance the British associated with revolutionary France. These concerns quite literally shaped the initial force. The ‘bobby’ was employed in conspicuous policing; he was to deter criminals and prevent crime by virtue of his very visible presence. What then do we make of his plainclothes counterpart? No longer badged or uniformed, how did the new detective visibly perform his police work in a country not always comfortable with his plainclothes presence? One answer to this question could be found in mid–late nineteenth-century detective drama, beginning with Jack Hawkshaw—the first English detective on the stage. ‘C(O)vert Operations’ explores how Hawkshaw’s showy performance fit within a melodramatic schema that valued clarity and moral legibility. In Detective Hawkshaw’s hands, and those of many of his successors, ‘undercover’ was a synonym for ‘disguise’, and dramatic disguise at that. It was, in other words, simultaneously clandestine and flashy, indicative of the contradiction at the heart of performing ‘undercover’. It was, moreover, a propensity shared by the detectives’ stage nemeses, and thereby threatened to bring the detectives uncomfortably close to those they pursued. Examining nineteenth-century plays such as The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), The Detective (1875), Handcuffs (1893) and Sherlock Holmes (1899), the article investigates the implications of this uneasy association between the detective and the criminal, showing how nineteenth-century detective drama explored the social and theatrical consequences of going ‘undercover’, where police work, criminality, and theatrical fraud and deception merged.

The Importance of Realism, Character, and Genre: How Theatre Can Support the Creation of Likeable Sociable Robots

Stage plays, theories of theatre, narrative studies, and robotics research can serve to identify, explore, and interrogate theatrical elements that support the effective performance of sociable humanoid robots. Theatre, including its parts of performance, aesthetics, character, and genre, can also reveal features of human–robot interaction key to creating humanoid robots that are likeable rather than uncanny. In particular, this can be achieved by relating Mori's (1970/2012) concept of total appearance to realism. Realism is broader and more subtle in its workings than is generally recognised in its operationalization in studies that focus solely on appearance. For example, it is complicated by genre. A realistic character cast in a detective drama will convey different qualities and expectations than the same character in a dystopian drama or romantic comedy. The implications of realism and genre carry over into real life. As stage performances and robotics studies reveal, likeability depends on creating aesthetically coherent representations of character, where all the parts coalesce to produce a socially identifiable figure demonstrating predictable behaviour.

‘See How the Blood is Settled in his Face’: Shakespeare’s Warwick – Fiction’s First Pathologist

The twenty-first century television detective drama often relies heavily on the forensic pathologist; analysing what they see and reaching a conclusion about the manner of death, not just the cause. This might include determining that a case that initially looks like natural causes is in fact murder. While this may involve toxicology reports and other modern methods of investigation, it might also include the state of the body; things like post-mortem lividity or marks such as scratches, or a lack of them. Using these sorts of indicators is not new; in fact Shakespeare was writing about them in the late sixteenth century in 2 Henry VI. In it, the Earl of Warwick describes the state of the body of the Duke of Gloucester who has reportedly died in his bed. Over the course of around twenty lines Warwick gives a detailed catalogue of the state of the body and why each sign indicates a violent, rather than peaceful, death. This paper looks at that description and relates it to other descriptions of murder victims in drama at the time, as well as to those investigated by twenty-first century television pathologists.

Isn't that Columbo?

Peter Falk is beloved by millions for Columbo, the TV series about an apparently shambling and forgetful detective with a mind like a steel trap. In his trademark grimy overcoat (Falk's own), Columbo and his dog puttered through the decades from 1968 to 2003, solving murders and picking up Emmy Awards. The series' radical innovation is the way it splurges information most detective dramas hold back: the audience knows who the murderer is from the get-go. The pleasure is in watching Falk's detective, cigar in hand, with a seemingly innocent question always at the ready, circle his unsuspecting prey while regaling them with anecdotes about his beloved Mrs Columbo. Or, as Falk himself put it in his memoir Just One More Thing, being investigated by Columbo is like “being nibbled to death by a duck.” The series gave Stephen Spielberg and Jonathan Demme early work, and drew its howcatchem (not whodunit) structure from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

On the Couch: The Alpha Male in Therapy in Contemporary American Television Drama

As ideas of masculinity have changed in the United States, so too has the presentation of men on television. This article, then, explores a range of characters that have characteristics associated with the alpha male in the unusually vulnerable position of the patient, in a variety of programmes from generic detective dramas through to critically acclaimed productions, to analyse how programme makers navigate questions of masculinity against the cultural backdrop of the most recent fin de siècle. It also demonstrates a range of responses by programme makers, including some that question hypermasculine tendencies only to ultimately reinforce them.

Scott and Bailey: How the Detective Drama reaches its Apogee in Light of the Historical Process

This article is about the ITV detective drama series Scott and Bailey. Following an analysis of its dramatic power, the author endeavours to situate Scott and Bailey in the context of crime drama more generally by offering a broader account of the development of the detective genre; from its 19th century origins in works by Poe and Conan Doyle, to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers some decades later, right up to contemporary offerings such as Prime Suspect, Cracker and Scott and Bailey itself. The article aims to reveal the dialectical thread that runs through such a development. The archetype of the detective is transformed from its beginnings as an abstract, rootless creation, an ahistorical force of moral goodness and order—to an increasingly rounded and socially concrete figure grounded in an institutional hierarchy and subject to the social and class contradictions of the modern world. Coevally, the archetype is transformed from a character who is loosely upper class in behaviour and mannerism to a figure who is far more plebeian in social origin; the aesthetic dialectical that underpins the development of the detective archetype is one that involves a profound democratisation, then. In the conclusion, the author seeks to demonstrate how the democratisation of the aesthetic is part and parcel of the way emerging capitalism and the period of bourgeois revolutions which inaugurates it necessarily presuppose a higher level of participation in the political process on the part of the masses in and through the printing press, political propaganda, newspapers, etc. The article hopes to establish that the key to the aesthetic lies, in the last analysis, in the most thoroughgoing and profound democratisation of politics and culture at the level of the forms and structures of social being.

Book Reviews

Katherine Spring Saying It with Songs: Popular Music & The Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema New York: Oxford University Press, 2014: 229pp.Whether in pursuit of employment or stardom, myriad people have, at one time or another, fallen prey to the bewitching glamour of Hollywood. In the late 1920s, it was the turn of songwriters, who migrated in their dozens from east to west to reap the benefits of the sound-film boom. Technological advances had at last made synchronised sound commercially viable and movie magnates were eager to embrace it. By December 1930, the vast majority of these hopeful musicians would find themselves without a contract. But in the interim, their productivity had helped to transform the relationship between popular music and film: a little more than four years previously, feature-length synchronised sound film had been a pipe dream; at the start of the new decade, more than half of the sound films produced by leading companies contained a popular song.Despite the astonishing proliferation of popular music on early sound film, the medium's seminal half-decade has attracted only modest scholarly attention. In part, this may simply reflect the fact that popular-music studies remains a relatively young discipline, with much unchartered terrain still to be explored. Katherine Spring's new book, on the other hand, suggests that this has been a more calculated oversight. The 'sheer quantity of songs [...] in early sound films', she argues, has made scholars uncomfortable, because it points to music's appropriation by an industry more concerned with maximising profits than with producing works of art (3). The value of this as a claim about contemporary attitudes is questionable: the extent to which popular-music studies perpetuates traditional aesthetic hierarchies remains open for debate. As an observation about historical attitudes towards sound film, however, it is astute. Hollywood's earliest interactions with the popular music industry were driven by the former's desire to capitalise on the latter's lucrative business. But with the novelty of popular song on the big screen quickly wearing thin, early attempts to incorporate such music were increasingly seen to undermine the narrative conventions established by silent cinema.How this tension between 'commerce and story-telling' came about, and subsequently played out, forms the crux of Spring's rich account (1). Her particular concern is 'non-musical' films, such as Westerns, comedies and crime - - a focus that offers a refreshing change from the more common subject of how Broadway adaptations paved way for the film musical. As Spring is careful to note, however, during the period in question the distinction between musical and non-musical film was less rigid than it subsequently became. In part because of the dominating influence of Broadway, and perhaps also because of the novelty factor, non-musical genres frequently featured popular song in both diegetic and non-diegetic capacities. But even as these instances tapped into the representational conventions established by Broadway, incorporating popular song into non-musical films also posed a distinct set of challenges, not least that the appeal of these films to alternative generic conventions (such as those of romantic comedy or detective drama) heightened the disruptive potential of popular song.The first part of the book explores Hollywood's relationship with Tin Pan Alley. The opening chapter sets the scene with a broad overview of how America's Manhattan-based popular music industry functioned in the 1920s. In particular, Spring explores how popular song was promoted through a network of radio broadcasters, music publishers, Broadway producers, song-writers, and performers - a complex of media outlets that created and sustained a market for popular music. The second chapter goes on to describe how, when Hollywood began its conversion to sound, its major players bought into this network. …

Detective Fiction and “The Original Crime”: Baudrillard, Calle, Poe

Baudrillard appeared uninterested in the detective story and his work barely features in studies of the genre. This essay argues, however, that analyzing detective fiction from a Baudrillardian perspective – concentrating in particular on how the genre is structured around a tension between the forms Baudrillard termed “production” and “seduction” – can nonetheless illuminate how it works and enable us to reassess how far classic nineteenth-century detective fiction adhered to the principles of scientific logic, panopticism, and positivism. The essay begins by exploring detective fiction generally in relation to Baudrillardian approaches to the object and seduction before looking at two very different examples of detective fiction, but which turn out to explore the opposition between production and seduction in similar ways: the parodic detective dramas of the contemporary conceptual artist Sophie Calle, and Edgar Allan Poe's classic detective story, “The Purloined Letter.”

Music and series: the verbalizing role of soundtrack lyrics from TV series to user-generated narrations

In 1984, the creators of Miami Vice — a famous NBC detective drama — added pop and rock hits to the original themes of the soundtrack. This new use of music, later defined as ‘MTV-inspired’, has progressively increased in the last 10 years and has now become one of the widely accepted standards for music and image integration in US TV series and movies. Recently, it has also been fully exploited by users of social networking platforms in creating their own contents. In this article, the author examines how lyrics are used to ‘design’ meaning in both TV series and user-generated narrations, by applying the methodological framework of multimodality outlined by Kress, Van Leeuwen and Jewitt and, in particular, the system network of semiotic resources of sound elaborated by Van Leeuwen.

Imogen Goold and Catherine Kelly (eds), Lawyers’ Medicine: The Legislature, the Courts and medical Practice, 1760–2000 (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009), pp. xiv + 224, £30.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-84113-849-7.

Imogen Goold and Catherine Kelly (eds), Lawyers’ Medicine: The Legislature, the Courts and medical Practice, 1760–2000 (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009), pp. xiv + 224, £30.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-84113-849-7. - Volume 55 Issue 1

No Longer ‘The Best in the World’: The Challenge of Exporting British Television Drama

Within the broader context of globalisation and the transformation of world television markets, this article sets out to address the extent of British drama's international presence, and the factors which either promote or inhibit that presence in Britain's major television export markets in the United States, Western Europe and Australasia. Alongside an examination of recent policy debates, which raised concerns about the exportability of British drama series, this article pinpoints and assesses the culturally specific factors that affect overseas acceptance of British drama. These include the continuing decline of traditional public service channels, the different needs of distinctive nationally based television ecologies, and the growing demand for more locally originated programming. Sales of British drama are stagnant or declining, but alternative export strategies, including coproduction and the export of scripted formats, have had only limited success. Increasingly, Britain's export successes are dominated by programming genres (children's, factual) and entertainment formats, which can be indigenised and adapted by the receiving culture, and in their more ‘universal’ appeal are quite different from the identifiably British detective series, historical and literary-based drama on which Britain's international success was judged in the past.

The Continuum encyclopedia of American literature

From John Smith to Jack Kerouac, Cotton Mather to Toni Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King, Francis Parkman to Alex Haley, the story of American literature is really many stories - of ancient indigenous peoples, early settlers, men and women enslaved and liberated, war and peace, and immigrants seeking better lives. America's multifaceted literary heritage reflects its deepest spiritual and material consciousness: rooted and rootless, rural and urban, timeless and ever-changing. Through a living literature, one comes to learn one's orientations, aspirations, and worldviews: where we have come from and where we may be going.More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the United States and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature.A special feature is the topical article. There are 70 such essays in this volume, among them: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, CANADA, CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, THE DETECTIVE STORY, DRAMA, THE ESSAY, EXPATRIATES, FEMINISM, FILM AND LITERATURE, GAY MALE LITERATURE, HISTORY AND LITERATURE, HUMOR, JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE, LATINO/A LITERATURE, LESBIAN LITERATURE, LITERARY CRITICISM (before and since 1914), LITERARY JOURNALISM, LITERARY PRIZES AND AWARDS, MODERNISM, POLITICS AND LITERATURE, RELIGION AND LITERATURE, SCIENCE FICTION, THE SHORT STORY, THE SOUTH, THE SUPERNATURAL, TRANSCENDENTALISM, UTOPIA, and YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE. Wherever possible, references to authors of merit who do not receive individual articles are incorporated into the text of the most relevant topical essay. All topical and biographical-critical entries are cross-referenced and linked to the index. Select bibliographical material is included in most articles.Through American literature, we discover the imaginative and artistic expression of a multiplicity of people united by nationality, diversified by ethnicity and cultural identity, religion, social and economic class, political conviction, region. It is hoped that this Encyclopedia serves as a useful reference work and may itself be considered a lasting contribution to the very literature it surveys.

The Menace of the Post‐Hardboiled Maverick: Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 and Modern Television Detective Drama

The Menace of the Post‐Hardboiled Maverick: Jim Thompson's <i>Pop. 1280</i> and Modern Television Detective Drama

Early Detective Drama in Percy Shelley's the Cenci

1University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Early Detective Drama in Percy Shelley's the Cenci

Early Detective Drama in Percy Shelley's the Cenci

Tough Guys: The Portrayal of Hypermasculinity and Aggression in Televised Police Dramas

Psychological research evidence reveals serious, harmful implications for the intersection of macho personality and criminal behavior in individuals. This content analysis examines that intersection as it occurs in television content. Three hundred twenty-one male characters from police and detective dramas from the 1970s through the 1990s were examined for their levels of hypermasculinity and antisocial behavior. Results find strong associations for all male characters between physical aggression/antisocial behaviors and hypermasculinity measured along three dimensions. "Bad guys" consistently rated higher than "good guys" for hypermasculinity, and "good guys" appeared to have become less hypermasculine over time.

Jim Neu's Him or Me

Him or Me: a portrait of a detective drama, the second of Jim Neu's plays to be presented in New York, opened at the Squat Theatre on March 9, 1979. The performers were Nancy Shinkle, Carol Mullins, John Nesci, Jim Neu and Bob Feldman, saxophonist. Recorded music was composed by Lenny Pickett. Bill Wert designed the projections. The play was directed by Jim Neu and John Nesci.The audience is seated in tiers of seats facing a square, flat performing area which is quite bare. The large storefront window of the Squat Theatre is concealed by a white backdrop that doubles as a screen and onto which slides are projected from backstage. Lighting, pink and white, is projected from overhead and from two downstage side spots. Scene settings are suggested by light and music with a minimum of props—table, chairs, a divan, etc.