Murder by the Book -- Mapping the Detective: Falk's Early Drives -- Best-Selling Mystery Team: Columbo and Televisual Collaboration -- "I'm Fascinated by Money": Rank, File, and Gumshoe Detection -- Special Guest Stars: Hollywood Icons and Repeat Offenders -- Between Columbo and Cassavetes: A Familial Pack -- An "Obsessive Preoccupation with Gadgetry": Columbo's Investigation of Media Technologies -- Columbo's Reign: Of Life and Death and Detection -- Loving and Leaving Columbo.
Summary:
"In Columbo, Amelie Hastie argues that Richard Levinson and William Link's popular crime series trains its viewers in the interpretation of television as a medium. Columbo dramatizes the "process of coming-to-know" by following Peter Falk's fictional detective as he makes associations between seemingly disconnected details. Hastie shows how this intertextual process of detection mirrors the experience of watching television, which can be understood as a "simultaneous play of texts." Hastie's treatment of Columbo as a series is similarly intertextual: The book is at once an examination of television as a media technology, a historical study of Hollywood film and television production in the 1970s, and a formal analysis of the series itself"-- Provided by publisher.
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