A Novel Experience in Crime Narrative: Watching and Reading The Killing

This essay will consider the adaptation of series one of the Danish television serial Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007) into David hewson’s novel The Killing (2012). Considering the television show through theoretical paradigms of contemporary long-form television, i will examine the discourses of ‘the novel’ and the ‘novelistic’ as they relate to both texts. As i will argue, attributing ‘novelistic’ characteristics to television texts may be problematic, but it also provides a significant opportunity for rethinking dominant or fixed conceptions of the novel as a cultural form and product. looking closely at hewson’s novel, the paper will also aim to reconfigure the ‘convergence’ model of novelization, thinking instead about the novel adaptation as a form of interpretive process across media. in doing this, i will consider how such adaptations are informed by conceptions of novelistic form and style, which may work discursively to reconfigure or ‘legitimize’ the adapted text but also to disavow ‘low’ cultural connotations.