Castle
Brings a Modern Edge to the Old-School Detective Genre
“There
are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people,”
Richard Castle explains at the start of the ABC drama Castle.
“Psychopaths and mystery writers. I’m the kind that pays
better.”
Mystery
writers assisting law enforcement in tracking down murderers was originally
championed in the mid-1970s by television writers Richard Levinson and
William Link with the short-lived Ellery Queen. Set in the
1940s, author Ellery was inevitably drawn into the latest New York City
slayings being investigated by his father Inspector Richard Queen and
would famously gather all of the suspects together at the end of each
episode and subsequently reveal the identity of the culprit. Unfortunately,
Ellery Queen failed to attract a large enough audience to keep
it on the air longer than one season, but Levinson and Link enhanced
the concept with their creation of Murder, She Wrote. Changing
the setting to both contemporary times and tranquil Maine, as well as
the gender of the main protagonist, the two crafted one of the longest
running and most successful crime series in television history.
Castle,
meanwhile, explores the same terrain that Levinson and Link traveled
in the 1970s, 80s and 90s but gives the “mystery writer turned
real life detective” a more modern edge and style. A lot has changed,
after all, within the crime genre since Murder, She Wrote ended
in 1996. Classic detective shows of the past have given way to the forensic
dramas of the present, with the procedural aspects of crime solving
overshadowing the intellectual connecting-the-dots of yesteryear. Castle
thus walks the fine line between its modern day contemporaries and old-school
premise while mixing its own ingredients for success in the process.
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The
Nikki Heat Novels of Richard Castle
When
high-profile mystery novelist Richard Castle of the ABC drama Castle
kills off Derek Storm, the main protagonist of his best selling series,
it is more than a case of eliminating the goose that laid the golden
egg. “Life should be an adventure,” he tells his teenage
daughter Alexis at the start of the series. “You want to know
why I killed Derek? There were no more surprises. I knew exactly what
was going to happen every moment of every scene.” Castle finds
more than he bargained for, however, when he is brought into a murder
investigation by New York City homicide detective Kate Beckett and not
only finds the exhilaration his life had been missing but a muse on
which he could base a new character.
“She’s
going to be really smart, very savvy, haunting good looks, really good
at her job,” Richard Castle later explains of his newest creation.
“And kinda slutty.” While the premise of crafting New York
homicide detective Nikki Heat after Kate Becket offered Castle the opportunity
to follow Beckett on the television show, it also paved the way for
a series of actual mystery novels written under the pseudo name Richard
Castle with the same titles as those seen on the crime drama. In the
September 2009, for instance, Heat Wave hit the book market
just as the second season of Castle premiered on ABC. While
Naked Heat was the follow-up tome on Castle, meanwhile,
the same held true for the real world of crime fiction with the release
of Naked Heat the following year.
There are
many similarities between the settings of the television show and the
novels of its fictional author. While Richard Castle is a mystery writer
on Castle who tags-along with Kate Beckett as research for
a new series of novels, in Heat Wave it is journalist Jameson
Rook who follows homicide detective Nikki Heat for a magazine article
he is writing. Supporting characters in Heat Wave also directly
relate to those on Castle—detectives Raley and Ochoa
are doppelgangers of Ryan and Esposito and the closeness of the two
partners is emphasized by them jointly being known as “Roach”
in the Nikki Heat novels.
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Castle
and the Murder of Johanna Beckett: Chapter Three
The
ABC drama Castle can be enjoyed on a multitude of levels. On
the one hand, each episode of the series features a neatly-crafted New
York City murder for homicide detective Kate Beckett and her mystery
novelist consultant-slash-partner Richard Castle to investigate and
resolve by the end of the hour. Castle also contains, however,
a collection of equally well-crafted characters that adds substance
to the show that goes beyond mere crime drama and are just as entertaining
as the weekly cases themselves. First and foremost are Beckett and Castle,
but supporting cast members Martha Rodgers, Alexis Castle, detectives
Javier Esposito and Kevin Ryan, and Captain Roy Montgomery add to the
series’ success as much as anything else.
The duo
of Kate Beckett and Richard Castle are somewhat polar opposites—Castle’s
background as a mystery novelist inevitably brings imaginative interpretations
to the facts at hand while Beckett is more “no-nonsense”
and “by-the-book” than her offbeat pseudo-partner. Conflicting
personas also exist between the other characters on Castle,
but in the end they all come together to form a tightly-knit family
nonetheless. The group inevitably cares about each other as more than
mere co-workers and instinctively watch each other’s back throughout
the seasons. A prime example of these familial bonds involves another
on-going narrative thread on Castle—the investigation
into the murder of Kate Beckett’s mother over ten years earlier—as
each of the characters play their part in the unfolding drama.
The death
of Johanna Beckett has only been featured in a small handful of episodes
since Castle first premiered in March 2009 but enough pieces
of the unsolved murder puzzle have been assembled to build a clearer
picture of the event. Initially ruled an act of gang violence, for instance,
it was discovered during season two that Johanna Beckett was actually
the victim of a hired hit man who also killed three others during the
same time period. The following season, clues led to the even older
death of an undercover FBI agent named Bob Armen in the same alley that
Johanna Beckett herself was murdered. The convicted culprit in the Armen
case, mob enforcer Joe Pulgatti, maintained his innocence when Kate
Beckett and Richard Castle later interviewed him, however, claiming
that the shooting was part of a kidnapping attempt gone wrong by three
rogue New York City police officers.
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Castle