I love ABC’s detective drama, Castle. I’m not normally a big fan of detective shows, but Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic have perfect chemistry, and the dialogue is witty and entertaining. As a result, every Monday night I snuggle into bed to watch my new favorite TV show. So, when the franchise decided to actually publish the book promoted in the show, I wondered how Heat Wave would fit into the television drama.
According to Henry Jenkins (2006), a “transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (p. 97-98). Does Heat Wave make a valuable contribution to Castle? In some ways, yes, and in other ways, no.
I decided to read Heat Wave because 1) I love to read and 2) I was curious about the story because its promotion during the television show. All plot lines discussed in the show (i.e. Detective Beckett’s aka Nikki Heat’s steamy sex scene) were fulfilled in reading the novel, so in this way, the book was actually an extension of on-screen content. Yet instead of a book inspired by the characters in the show, the book was like an episode of the show: one mystery, one female lead detective, one writer tag along, a duo of comic relief detectives, and one overly charismatic mother. Alas, Alexis (the daughter) was the only major tv character that did not make an appearance in the novel.
Since, from the beginning, the characters in Castle were ostensibly living in the real world (See Castle’s Twitter feed), I wonder why they would bother to create a novel that is a mimic of any given television episode. This should have been an opportunity to hide clues to upcoming episodes or inspire dialogue about how plot elements tie back to the show. Instead, allusions to the show in the form of plot events and witnesses were pretty transparent and I didn’t feel like the novel offered me new insights about characters or challenged me to make deeper connections with the show.
Economically, I would call Heat Wave a success: It is currently #6 on the New York Times bestseller list. I think this shows fan interest in the book, but I wonder whether the content of the book is enough to sustain interest in future Castle novels. When Jenkins wrote Convergence Culture in 2006, he indicated that there were big question marks regarding the how’s and when’s of transmedia storytelling, and I think that Heat Wave is an indication that these questions have not yet been sorted out.
As a fan, though, the novel offered some rewards (which I won’t mention specifically in case one of you plans on reading the book). But if, instead of writing from the perspective of TV writers creating a transmedia experience for readers, the writers wrote Heat Wave as if they were successful detective novelists, I think the book experience would have added that additional layer of content accessible only to fans willing to invest the time in reading the novel. Instead, I got more of the same from the tv show, which I really like, by the way.
S
