Tag Archives: romantic suspense

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An Unexpected and Very Badass Romance Is Why I Kept Watching AMC’s The Killing

tk-s3-gallery-linden-holder-760-21Let me confess up front that one of the principal reasons I haven’t been blogging much is that I haven’t been reading as much as usual this winter. And this is primarily a book blog, right? There’s still a part of me that feels guilty about watching television instead of reading. But the availability of streaming television series, whole seasons and even whole series available for the bingeing, is changing how I consume media, as it is for so many people. I used to occasionally binge on a whole season of something good, back in the days of waiting for the DVD release. These days, hardly a week goes by without a streaming binge of one show or another, from OITNB to GoT to Boardwalk Empire.  I’ve become obsessed with new content from new producers – Sundance (Rectify, An Honourable Woman, The Red Road), Amazon (Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle), Netflix (House of Cards, of course). Downton, Sons of Anarchy, The Good Wife and The Americans are among the few remaining shows in which I didn’t or can’t overindulge.  Oh, and Mad Men, which is maddeningly STILL not back to wrap up its serialized Great Expectations tale of Don Draper.

The thing is, being able to keep watching numerous episodes in one evening, bingeing on a serial television program is starting to feel more and more like my old reading habits, staying up into the wee hours consuming chapter after chapter of an engrossing novel.  Of course tv and books are not the same, and neither is watching vs. reading, but there’s something about some of the most compulsively watchable series that feels a little bit like reading an intricately plotted, un-putdownable novel.

10860051_375675945890414_535456110_aAnd this is how it was for me with watching AMC’s The Killing. At first it was just beautiful and moody and arrestingly sad. Then it bogged down with its own pretension, and some ridiculous plot points, but the relationships, the characters and the actors, and the gloomy vision of a rain-soaked Seattle kept me hooked.

The other key ingredient was following episode by episode commentary from Vulture’s Starlee Kine. Her recaps full of pissed off commentary (about gaping plot holes, leaps of logic, cops being terrible at their jobs, implausible medical miracles and lack of appropriate law enforcement technology) resonated and deepened my attachment to the show. The show did garner a lot of critical attention, both positive and negative, for some of its risky and/or groundbreaking elements. But it seems I am not the only one to fall under the spell of the relationship at the center of The Killing, so much so that you’re willing to put up with all kinds of nonsense, just to keep watching this pair of damaged souls find their way. Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) and Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) kept me mesmerized.

SPOILERS BELOW ….. (but here’s a spoiler-free review of Season 4 by Jeffrey Bloomer for Slate) 

And at the end of the final season…. a Happy Ending!  As in a real live, romantically-together-at-the-end-of-the-story, HEA, or at least an HFN, for the series’ two protagonists. It turns out Holder and Linden really were the main couple in a four-season-long, made-for-cable-and-netflix, contemporary romantic suspense thriller. This was one of the most emotionally satisfying television finales since the brilliant end of Six Feet Under.  But it felt very different, because of its close focus on just the two main characters, rather than showing us a montage of all the characters and their various fates.  It felt like the end of a very long, very suspenseful, almost-DNF’d-when-it seemed-to-go-off-the-rails, romance novel.

Here’s how four seasons of a moody, pretentious crime drama (based on the Danish drama Forbrydelsen, or The Crime) ended up feeling like a romance novel, in a good way (and I find I don’t care about the tv noir fans who decried the happy ending as “too American” or too cheesy):

2f02f3be-d214-b142-d53d-ed227fa777b7_TK_307_CS_0429_0186.jpgTortured Hero Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), silver-tongued smoldering Swedish 12-stepper. He had a rough childhood, made his way onto the police force as an undercover narcotics officer, got addicted to methamphetamine, got sober, got promoted to Homicide, and has the most amazing soliloquies that are themselves an addicting blend of American street slang, laconic delivery, 12-step taglines, irony, self-deprecating humor, psychological insight, and Kinnaman’s nascent Swedish accent slipping in from time to time. It’s not that he’s always got his shit together, but he manages to rise above even his own most horrible behavior, to own his bad acts, make reparation, and see through his own posing. When he’s crushed by grief and guilt and doubt (there are some really bad and tragic things that happen to people in this show), he somehow even seems to embrace these as necessary steps on the path. His most vulnerable moments are heartbreakingly simple: when he’s forced to let down his nephew on the boy’s birthday in order to support Linden in a terrible circumstance; when he visits the grave of a murdered teen runaway he had tried to help, used as a confidential informant, and ultimately failed to protect.

downloadEven more Tortured Heroine Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos), enigmatic single mom; a supposedly brilliant detective whose empathy for victims pushes her to extreme lengths to catch killers even as she neglects her own tween son so much she almost loses him. A hard-knock child of the foster care system herself, she is a mass of denial and self-delusion/self-confusion about what she really wants, where she really belongs. For the entire first season she’s supposed to be leaving Seattle to move to sunny California and get married, but you can tell from the outset that she’s never really going to go that easy route, and that the guy who’s her intended mate is All Wrong For Her. But it’s done with such intensity and misdirection in terms of the writing that it actually feels stunning when it’s finally revealed that he was her psychiatrist during her most recent lockup — she has a history of compulsive obsession with a closed case she’s convinced put the wrong guy in jail, and it’s wreaked havoc with her mental health.

10808688_1406921106271566_586127293_nMeet cute  Still, she’s a star homicide detective, so even though it’s her last day on the job, she gets assigned to mentor the new kid just promoted from Narcotics when they land a high-profile case of a murdered teen who may have been killed by one of half a dozen of Seattle’s leading citizens. The scenes where she’s trying to clear out her desk and leave while he’s trying to chat her up are fantastic. She gives him NOTHING, she’s so convinced she can walk away from the case and all she wants to do is get on that plane to California. Their boss does keep pressuring her to stay for this case because he doesn’t know/trust Holder yet. She insists she will give him only one day, then one more day. But somehow she just keeps missing the damn flight…. And Holder can tell she’s not going anywhere. His self-awareness gives him the compassion and capacity to “get” her before she can begin to get herself. There are numerous times when, in spite of his youth and charisma and hoodies, and her horrible mom sweaters and measured pace, he shows himself to be the more emotionally mature one. Meanwhile, she’s busy writing him off as a recovered-tweaker hipster who happens to have mad getting-street-people-and-teens-to-share-information-and-secrets skills. Their conversations are the best part of the show, and the episodes devoted to watching them ride around talking and smoking were some of my favorite hours of storytelling in a long time.

10729214_773357939410073_326592516_nRescuing each other, literally and emotionally It’s a darkly intense crime drama, so there are a lot of other things going on, from the raw pain of the victim’s grieving parents and siblings to corrupt politicians, snarky campaign operatives, and enough creepy possible suspects from all walks of life to fill at least a dozen different Law & Order cases. And like all noir-ish detective shows, the plot places the protagonists in grave personal peril – there is one beautifully produced sequence involving a kidnapped Linden secretly keeping her radio on and talking to her abductor for hours, using clues and codes that only Holder will comprehend, so that after a whole incredibly intense episode he is finally able to locate her and bring in the rescue operation.  Of course this kind of thing is a metaphor for the ways in which they can rescue each other emotionally, if they are willing to be honest with one another.

A Happy Ending It’s not a surprise that Holder is the first to recognize and acknowledge their deep connection. The challenge, both for the characters and for the viewer, is having the patience and trust to wait for Linden to get there. The final episode delivers with a classic romance novel trope — the last-minute capitulation. It’s a year since they have survived their final horrific case, which includes some very bad business for which both of them have risked prosecution. Linden’s been drifting around the country, visiting her son who she’s finally placed in the more stable environment of his father’s (out-of-state) home. Holder’s been recovering his equilibrium and grounding himself further as a Narcotics Anonymous staff leader. She “stops by” to see him. They talk about how much they mean to each other. But she can’t see herself putting down roots anywhere. They embrace and he lets her go, but not without ratcheting up the sexual tension a couple dozen notches. Still, she walks away. And he loves her enough to know she can’t be chased. All seems dire. But then it’s several hours later and she’s there on the sidewalk waiting for him at the end of the day. And she’s finally all in. And that’s the end of the show – just some quick shots of their joyful faces, and not even a cliche’ clinch. (Not onscreen anyway – show creator and director Veena Sud has said that Enos and Kinnaman did in fact kiss during the final take, but the camera had moved on so it wasn’t captured.)

tumblr_n9omjwbxeJ1ql3i4oo3_250The heroine’s journey It was reading this Veena Sud interview that really affirmed the connection for me between the story of Linden and Holder, and the romance genre. While Holder was the more charismatic character, making it easy to focus on the ways Kinnaman made him really leap off the screen, the overarching narrative is Linden’s journey. Which connects The Killing to one of the ways the romance genre is often read, as a narrative formula that comprises the heroine’s journey from a state of incompletion and lack of self-knowledge, to wholeness, integration, and her emotionally proper place in the world.  Linden finally tells Holder that she’s found her home, and it’s not a place, it’s him. Sud references this directly when she’s asked about a possible fifth season for the duo:

We brought her to the end of her journey. She found the thing that she was looking for all along. It’s the end of the story.

As is right and proper for a satisfying romance. It was such a treat for the show to end this way. Somehow they managed to pull off the happy ending in a way that feels believable, yet unexpected. I did stick with this drama even when I knew I was watching a show that was going off the rails in many ways, because of the chemistry and emotion between these two.  It was often so bleak and damp and dark I certainly did not expect an HEA out of the experience. I don’t know if this is because I wasn’t paying close enough attention, or because Sud and her team just decided very late in the game to give fans the satisfaction.  But I for one thoroughly enjoyed the emotional payoff – and I think people like me who hung in with this show deserved it.

ee866e46c16c6dbae2dd20f768dad275I’m casting around trying to think of other shows where the two leads end up together when the show ends…. Maybe Moonlighting? I honestly can’t remember how that finally ended. How about the fun US Marshal drama, In Plain Sight – nope, that one ended disappointingly for some fans, with Mary and Marshall agreeing she was better as his work wife than she could possibly ever be as his real spouse/lover.

How many other tv shows are there where the ending has the look and feel of a romance novel HEA for the two main protagonists?

 

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Reader, they married. What if Jane Eyre were a series?

What if Jane Eyre were a series? Would we like to hang out with the Rochesters as a married couple?

Full disclosure:  I’m not actually going to talk about Mr. & Mrs. Rochester all that much. It’s not a series and Charlotte Bronte didn’t write a “Thornfield Book 2.” So if you are offended by a mild Bait & Switch approach, let me offer my apologies. But there’s another Bronte-esque, moody married couple I have been spending time with lately, and it’s got me thinking…

Back in May I posted about my intoxication with the gothic, Eyre-ish romance of Lady Julia Grey and the maddening, enigmatic Nicholas Brisbane. I’d just finished Book the First in Deanna Raybourn’s Silent trilogy, and it provoked me to indulge in a near-orgy of adulation for this couple as a re-invented post-feminist, mystery-hunting version of the challenging, unequal, yet deeply satisfying romance between Jane and Rochester.

In August, I gobbled up three more tales about Brisbane and Julia, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes these novels work as romances. They’re not published as such but the marketing – especially the original paperback editions (US only? I’m not sure.) – suggests the romance genre and I think they enjoy a wide popularity with romance readers, in addition to the nebulous “women’s fiction” readership and/or lovers of romantic historical fiction.

Having just finished the fourth novel, I am currently visiting with the Brisbanes as newlyweds. They are enjoying what would in a traditional romance be their well-deserved HEA. They’ve had an extended honeymoon across Europe, solved a mystery in India, and are preparing to make their home in England together.

A quick recap: Silent in the Grave (2007) introduced Julia and Nicholas over the dead body of her husband. Secrets emerge, the murder is solved, they get in each other’s way a lot, conversations smolder. Destiny is foretold; gratification delayed. It’s achingly romantic, and I loved it.

In Silent in the Sanctuary (2008), they meet for the first time after a year’s separation when Julia’s father throws them together at a large house party where a murder occurs and everyone is trapped by a heavy snowfall. A classic whodunit-at-a-house-party story. What ensues is a reluctant courtship of sorts, with other potential lovers aplenty and Brisbane nursing — in his inimitably enigmatic way —  all the carefully constructed reasons he ought not to act on his obviously intense attraction and deep emotional connection to Julia. This is Brisbane at his most maddeningly remote.

Silent on the Moor (Lady Julia, #3)With the third novel, we reach the most Bronte-esque of settings when Julia tracks Brisbane to his neglected Yorkshire estate, complete with colorful household staff, a windswpet moor, and a madwoman. Silent on the Moor (2009) is the story — at last — of this couple’s reconciliation and acceptance of their feelings for one another. At last they marry. But Raybourn infuses the conclusion of the Yorkshire book with sufficient uncertainty to leave plenty of room for further romantic tension and conflict in subsequent novels.

Dark Road to Darjeeling (Lady Julia, #4)And of course, this is precisely what we get with the next book, the start of a new, “Dark” trilogy: Dark Road to Darjeeling (2010). I still love this couple, and I’m willing to follow them down at least a few more dark roads.  But I found myself falling out of the story more often as I read, and looking harder at whether it still reads like a romance.

The series is ineffably clever and Raybourn sustained the buildup of romantic tension so well over the first 3 books.  At the same time each novel has its own narrative arc that tracks with many romance conventions.  These include a sudden and/or unexpected meeting, mutual attraction  and romantic entanglement, a dangerous situation, fear for the loved one’s safety, deception of the beloved (often motivated by protective urges), confrontation, betrayal, rejection, reunion, and ultimately a satisfying yet tantalizing expression of love and dedication. The first two such expressions are somewhat oblique, but potently symbolic. While they certainly don’t constitute a traditional HEA, they are enough to scratch the romance-reading itch that demands some kind of declaration by the hero which is accepted by the heroine. In short, although not romance novels, I found I experienced each book in the Silent series as a self-contained “romance read,” and I rejoiced for Julia and her smoldering Gypsy-blueblood husband, when matrimony was finally achieved at the end of the first trilogy.

Dark Road to Darjeeling opens with marital bliss but quickly tears the Brisbanes apart as they receive information about a possible murder and revert to their pre-nuptial behavior of attempting to manipulate each other and exert control over an investigation in which they each have a particular interest. Julia begins a deliberate campaign to prove her worth as an investigator and withholds so much information that the two are at arms length emotionally even when they are physically reunited about halfway into the book. For me, the first inkling that this book was going to be a different sort of read was the fact that early on I became completely annoyed with Julia’s passive aggressive behavior. She’s too often on the verge of sharing useful information with Brisbane, only to withhold it in order to try and do him one better, and it just comes across as spiteful. But was her behavior different from the previous books, or am I holding her accountable differently because he’s her husband now?

To put it another way, is Julia written differently as a wife character, or am I reading her differently as a wife character? Intrepid and strong-minded, or foolhardy and shrewish? Brisbane as a husband strikes me as about the same combination of stubborn inscrutability, ruthless possessiveness and hidden vulnerability, as he did when he was loving Julia from afar — it does come across differently near the end of the book, but a bit more about that anon.

These questions also remind me that there are very successful romance novels where the H/h are married to each other from start to finish (I’m thinking right now of several wonderful historicals by Sherry Thomas, including Not Quite a Husband and Private Arrangements, but there are also contemporary examples such as Ruthie Knox’s recent novella, Making It Last, which is – interestingly – part of a series). So I don’t think what I’m puzzling over is the question of a married romance vs. a romance that ends with marriage. It’s more about the idea of a series — told over the course of multiple books — that follows a couple over the relationship lifespan – how does that work within the romance conventions, or does it? Can I keep coming back to the same couple, even if I do find them quite intoxicating, and receive the same novel-reading pleasure that takes me on an emotional journey to an HEA (or some kind of stand-in for the HEA) — or will it at some point start to wear?

On the up side – with Julia’s married POV, readers can look forward to elegantly circumspect yet deliciously pointed conversations alluding to Brisbane’s …er, appetites, and the sexual and emotional intimacies of the marriage bed. This kind of thing, along with domestic interactions (he takes lots of baths) and discoveries, deepens the emotional impact of their exchanges and their manipulations. Yet the constant push/pull between them started to wear on me somewhere along about the third or fourth time they played out their cycle of intrigue, deception, discovery, confrontation, rupture, confession, reunion…more intrigue…

But this novel can also be read as a portrait of a marriage in the making.  It’s a very young and fragile marriage between two quite mature and willful individuals. Yes, I grew (quite) weary of Julia’s endless attempts to circumvent Brisbane and her self-righteous and unbecoming piques when the shoe is on the other foot and he out-maneuvers her. By the same token, Brisbane’s high-handedness almost started to seem manufactured or arbitrary, a necessary dramatic element to further their romantic tension. Without stepping into spoiler territory, I must say that I found the test he sets Julia at the end of the book held a slight hint of D/s which seemed to come out of nowhere.

But perhaps what makes the book succeed as a romance is that it asserts marriage itself as a series of these narrative arcs. There are absences and chance encounters, intrigues and partnerships, withholding and separations, confrontations and communions, ruptures and renewals. And these cycles can occur more than once in a couple’s journey. I’m pretty sure most people would agree this is true in real life — the question is, do we want to read about these exhilarating (or exhausting, depending on your point of view and/or what’s happening in your personal life) roller coasters when it’s a fictional couple we hold dear?

Leaving aside the issue that they might not have a new mystery to solve every 6 months or so, would we want to read more books chronicling how Jane and Rochester fared?  I think I probably would find them irresistible, and they’d certainly be commercially viable, but Charlotte B may not have wanted to write them.

This may be one of the important ways Brisbane and Julia are NOT like Rochester and Jane – the mysteries provide the opportunity and the means for new chapters of their married story, and their ongoing battle of wills provides the motive to keep reading – and writing – them as romances.

2006 film adaptation of Jane Eyre, an apocryphal final scene

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The Lady Julia Gray series is published by the MIRA imprint of Harlequin. I purchased copies of these first four books at my local used paperback shop. I’m hoping they may have a copy of #5 – The Dark Enquiry when I stop in there this week. If not, it’s going in my Amazon cart, because I’m definitely along for the ride with the Brisbanes, in spite of my quibbles.

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Widow and Orphan: What Jane Eyre and Julia Grey Have In Common

I am a latecomer to the novels of Deanna Raybourn.  She has a new release set in colonial Africa out just last week, but just last night I finished Silent in the Grave (2007), which is the first Lady Julia Grey book, a Victorian-set mystery. 6933131

Being compulsive about sequels, I’ve already begun Silent in the Sanctuary (2008), which is the second book in which Julia will — it appears — solve a tangled mystery in the smoldering and rather mysterious company of investigator Nicholas Brisbane.

Charlotte Bronte, on the other hand, has been in my life since my early teens. I’ve posted recently about the enormous influence of Jane Eyre on my tastes and preferences as a reader, as part of explaining (for myself, mainly, and also for anyone else who’ll listen) why the hell I decided to start this blog.  🙂  Jane is a key figure in my literary back story – why I love reading, why I love romance and history and moody gothic tales, why in spite of knowing the absolute opposite is true, I still sort of think being a governess sounds romantic….

I didn’t expect Jane to keep cropping up all over the place this week, but it’s been a week of Big Thoughts about romance and history, and my bedtime reading has put me in a shadowy Jane Eyre mood.  Silent in the Grave is a Harlequin MIRA romantic mystery, so not a traditional HEA romance, but it’s honestly the most achingly romantic book I’ve read in a while.

At the center is an attraction compulsion that provokes me like Jane and Rochester with its subtle complexity and oblique intensity.  Julia and Nicholas positively spark and flare, generating heat without sex scenes, just by being in a room, circling each other, worrying about each other, vaguely threatening each other.

bbc2006

I realize I am not the first to see Bronte resonances here.  There’s the incredibly tangible atmosphere of a gaslit Victorian England, from the overstuffed privilege of a fashionable family home to the grim surroundings of the expendable classes (prostitutes, orphans). Yes, I know it’s 1886, and Jane Eyre was published in 1847, but I’m talking about a mood here, people.  I can’t wait to get to the third book, where they’ll head north to the moors and I can picture them, windswept and wild, stalking each other until they finally succumb to the lust!

Jane Eyre 2007Because of course the most resonant thing about this book is the relationship itself, and the way Julia and Nicholas interact.  This above all is what puts me in mind of Jane and Rochester.  It’s something about the way they inadvertently both madden and seduce one another, with intellect and conversation and a hands-off but incredibly latent and irresistible sensual appreciation for each other’s physical presence and appearance.

Of course what’s totally different for Julia is that she is in fact a widow, and not an orphan.  Her very involved and encouraging family are another delightful aspect of this book, though even without them, this heroine enjoys a much less precarious position in Victorian society than poor long-suffering Jane.  As MacPudel so astutely pointed out in a Comment on the Historical Romance brouhaha this week, heroines who are believably in a position — economically and socially — to make their own relationship choices — in a historically accurate historical novel — are hard to find.

jane_2006_4_465x310I always thought of Jane as unrelentingly strong-willed, and from the start I loved how she made herself Rochester’s equal in intellect and conversation, but when push comes to shove, her existence as a single woman of no family is dangerously marginal and fraught with peril.  When she does make her own choices, her independence comes at a huge price. But Julia has the means to be independent, or at least as independent as was possible for a young widow with a fond father to be.  Not only does she not serve Nicholas as member of his domestic staff, but she has actually sought his services as an investigator and has a higher social status.

So it would seem Julia and Jane really don’t have very much in common at all.

tobystephens

Except for the romance.  The intense fixation on a charismatic, brooding and tormented hero who himself is unable to tear himself away from watching and waiting for the woman who challenges and fascinates him.

Bottom line — if there’s anyone reading this who hasn’t already read the Lady Julia Grey series, I’m going out on a limb to highly recommend after only one book.  And I just can’t stop thinking about the ways this book is getting under my skin because of its smoky Jane Eyre echoes. Reader, find. A. Copy.

Fellow Jane fans will likely notice I’ve only used pics from the 2007 BBC production with Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson.  I know claiming a “best” adaptation is controversial, but in my mind this is absolutely it.  Love love love the sizzling chemistry between these two – it was the first film adaptation where I actually felt the heat, and where Rochester was both unappealingly beastly and astonishingly gorgeous in a way that made sense to me.  

So what about you? Which is your favorite Eyre?  And for those who are ahead of me on this, and have read the Silent series, what do you think?  Are Julia and Nicholas as epic as Jane and Rochester?