Fictional author authors fiction
Clever. It’s a little bit of a disturbing precedent to set, but nevertheless clever. Here is a novel written as a tie-in to ABC’s television show Castle. Castle is a show about suspense novelist Rick Castle (played by Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) who rides along with NYPD homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic). The pair comes right out of the tradition of screwball comedy and the show is generally funny, carried mostly by Fillion’s comedic delivery.
Fillion’s character, Rick Castle, writes a novel inspired by his experiences shadowing Beckett, and to build interest in the show, ABC had a novel written and marketed with Rick Castle as the purported author. The disturbing thing about it is that the actual author of the novel is never credited. It’s a mystery argued on fan websites and I won’t add to the speculation.
The novel itself is disappointing. Though viewers of the show are led to understand that Heat Wave is based on Beckett’s character, in fact the entire book reads as though it were a screenplay for Castle with the names changed and Castle himself written as a Gary Stu version of himself who ends up getting the girl, though that’s not how it happens in the show. Castle’s name has been transparently changed to Rook, Beckett’s of course to Nikki Heat, and every other character from the show makes an appearance in the book in exactly the same role they inhabit in the show.
It’s not that the book isn’t entertainingit is. It’s funny and well-paced. What’s disappointing is that it undermines the illusion that the character Rick Castle is actually a good writer. It takes some skill to write a mystery novel like this, but in the context of the series it means that Castle writes only about people and situations he knows. There’s no sly or subtle hints that these characters bear resemblance to their «real» fictional counterparts. They are the characters any viewer of the show would know, with names changed.
The whole point of marketing a tie-in novel like this is to extend the myth of the show. If the network simply wanted to cash in on the popularity of the show they could have licensed the franchise to authors the way that countless television shows have. But the very idea of releasing the book written by the fictional author is supposed to enrich and deepen the experience of the world we see in the show. This was done nearly twenty years ago with the show Twin Peaks and the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. The Secret Diary provided clues to the show that viewers wouldn’t see just by watching. If you wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer, you could go through her diaries and search for things that might explain some of the mystery.
ABC entirely missed the opportunity to do this. Not only did the book fail to reveal anything about the characters, it undercut the illusion that the title character is as skilled at his craft as viewers had been led to believe. Instead of deepening the reader’s investment in the show, it reduced the reader’s stake in it.
