A few weeks ago Turner Classic Movies presented yet another film of the Thirties which, had it been made in the Forties, would have been accepted by everyone as film noir.

   I refer to Crime and Punishment (Columbia, 1935), based on Dostoevski’s classic novel. For obvious budgetary reasons director Josef von Sternberg makes no attempt to recreate mid-19th-century St. Petersburg, and we are told in an opening title that the story could take place at any time and anywhere.

   This is why the protagonist’s name morphs from Rodion to Roderick Raskolnikov, and also why we never see any automobiles or horse-drawn vehicles or any other form of transportation that might give us a clue to whether we are in the 19th or the 20th century.

   Amid grotesque shadows and bizarre camera angles, Peter Lorre in his first role after escaping from Hitler’s Europe played Raskolnikov — how could that whiny, sweaty, pop-eyed little toad have ever imagined himself to be an Ubermensch above the law? — while the police detective Porfiry Petrovich was played by Edward Arnold, who the following year would be cast, for one film only, as Nero Wolfe.

   If you missed the TCM debut of this version of Crime and Punishment, watch for it when next it’s shown.

   Speaking of Nero, it was my good fortune that I began reading Rex Stout in the late 1950s, when I was in my middle teens and also pigging out on a dozen or more TV Western series a week.

   Why was this a lucky break for me? Because one of those Western series saved me from misunderstanding Archie Goodwin.

   If you were following the Wolfe saga during the Hammett-Chandler era when the novels and novellas were first coming out, you might easily have tried to assimilate Archie to the legion of wisecracking PI/first person narrators of the time, and then rejected the character when you sensed what a poor fit that was.

   Even so astute a critic as John Dickson Carr, writing in 1946, referred to Archie as “insufferable” and a “latter-day Buster Brown.”

   But if you were fortunate enough to discover Stout in the late Fifties, at a time when millions of Americans including myself were watching Maverick every Sunday evening, you might have recognized Archie Goodwin and Bret Maverick as soul brothers.

   You might have credited Rex Stout with having created in prose the Great American Wiseass prototype which James Garner brought to perfection on film. You might have longed to see one of Stout’s novels filmed with Orson Welles as Wolfe and Garner as Archie. At least I did. What a shame that it never happened!

   When did TV movies begin? The first films that networks called by that name were broadcast in the fall of 1964. But if a TV movie is a feature-length film that tells a continuous story and was first seen in a single installment, the genre dates back at least to the suspense thrillers and Westerns that were aired one week out of four, beginning in the fall of 1956, as part of the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90 (1956-61).

   As a young teen I watched some of those films. Until recently the only one I had revisited as an adult was So Soon to Die (January 17, 1957), starring Richard Basehart and Anne Bancroft and based on the novel of the same name by Jeremy York, one of the many bylines of the hyper-prolific John Creasey (1908-1973).

   A few weeks ago I came upon another, one that I hadn’t seen in more than half a century. The Dungeon (April 10, 1958), written and directed by David Swift, starred Dennis Weaver as a man who, after being acquitted of murder, is kidnapped by a psychotic ex-judge and locked up in a cell in the attic of his isolated mansion, along with several other acquitted defendants.

   A great noir premise and a great cast to boot — Paul Douglas, Julie Adams, Agnes Moorehead, Patty McCormack, Patrick McVey, Thomas Gomez, Werner Klemperer, the list goes on and on. And the tension is heightened by the magnificently ominous music of a never credited Bernard Herrmann.

   I wish Swift had provided a backstory to explain what turned the judge into a sociopath, and my mind, not to say my nose, boggles when I start wondering how his prisoners (one of whom has been held for more than a year!) ever showered or kept clean-shaven or changed clothes. But if you have the good fortune to find this film on DVD as I did, it’s well worth seeing and, thanks to Herrmann, hearing.

   The Poetry Corner has been on sabbatical lately but I need to bring it back in order to tout perhaps the finest detective novel to deal centrally with the subject.

   The author was Nicholas Blake, known outside our genre as C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), poet laureate of England and the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The detective, as always except in Blake’s non-series crime novels, is Nigel Strangeways.

   The title is Head of a Traveler (1949). Thomas Leitch in his essay on Blake in Mystery and Suspense Writers, Volume 1 (Scribner, 1998), describes the novel as “one of his most tormentedly introverted. The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his vanished brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse. The events of the fatal night remain obscure even after Strangeways’ final explanation; the real interest of the novel is in its impassioned examination of the costs of poetry — the lengths to which poets and those who love them will go in pursuit of their craft.”

   Anthony Boucher in his short-lived “Speaking of Crime” column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (August 1949) was a bit less enthusiastic: “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.”

   Whichever critic is right, when it comes to the intersection of crime fiction and poetry, Head of a Traveler remains the “locus classicus.”

   The early literature of Eric Ambler belongs with such contemporaries as Graham Greene and Geoffrey Household: novels which plausibly construct their dark and ominous prophesies of quiet disaster and which find the power game, as played out by ordinary people on intercontinental trains and across shifting frontiers, more imaginatively stimulating than the one-man antics of the post-Ian Fleming era.

   Above all, Ambler’s novels have that air of confident enjoyment in the game they are playing which is so easily conveyed to the reader: his works are entertainments, in Greene’s sense of the word, and, undeniably, intelligent ones.

   It is a truism that Ambler was the founding father of the modern political thriller, the writer who brought the genre to maturity in the 1930s. In just six novels, from The Dark Frontier in 1936 to Journey into Fear, 1940, he created the distinctive form that was to have a seminal influence on all writers in the genre.

   In the late 1930s, he had strong anti-fascist leanings and his stories reflected the political tensions of the time, when Europe was about to explode. Before he rewrote the conventions of the spy thriller, the genre was epitomised by Sapper’s thuggish Bulldog Drummond and Buchan’s Hannay, officer-class heroes with little more than a gung-ho approach to life and its problems.

   Moreover, detective stories of the day (by the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers) were considered respectable; thrillers in the former vein were not. Happily, Ambler changed all that.

   His heroes were genuinely ordinary people, amateurs of a kind closer to Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden. They stumbled into complex situations, where they had to make tough choices under pressure. A romantic sense of Ruritania gave way to a more precise Italy, France and Turkey preparing for a second world war.

   As we know, four of his six pre-war novels became films (of varying merit). The Mask of Dimitrios (Warner Bros, 1944; from A Coffin for Dimitrios) and Journey into Fear (RKO, 1943) remain consistently enjoyable with a nice tangle of mystery and suspense.

   Background to Danger (WB, 1943; from Uncommon Danger) provides a suitably menacing, violent atmosphere for Greenstreet and Lorre to display their familiar brand of icy unpleasantness.

   The British production, Hotel Reserve (RKO, 1944; from Epitaph for a Spy), already reviewed and discussed in detail here, looked better (thanks to camera operator Arthur Ibbetson) than it perhaps deserved.

   For the most part, the television work of an author (whether as adaptations of their work or as original teleplays) is generally regarded — when it is regarded at all — as less than worthy of interest. My view is that all of an author’s work is of interest. The TV representations of Ambler’s work are, admittedly, more often less-than-rewarding but are still worthy of examination.

   His earliest work to appear in a television translation was the espionage thriller Epitaph for a Spy (1953), a BBC-produced six-part serial dramatised by Giles Cooper and featuring Peter Cushing as the innocent-in-a-spot teacher Josef Vadassy. The following year, CBS adapted the story (drawing on the services of three writers) for their anthology series Climax! (CBS, 1954-58), starring Edward G. Robinson as the frightened, bumbling character.

   BBC-TV returned to Ambler’s story again in 1963 for a four-part serial (dramatised by the usually dependable Elaine Morgan). Unfortunately, the producers, seemingly lacking confidence in the 1938 work, decided to condense the story into four instalments and, of all things, update it to the 1960s (changing nationalities, providing new motives and readjusting relationships). It is indeed unfortunate that the 1953 BBC version no longer exists; it should be considered a small mercy that there is no sign of a recording of the 1963 ‘satire’.

   Although A Coffin for Dimitrios was not afforded an adaptation for television as such, the basic plot turned up as “Satan’s Veil” (1956), an episode of the Warner Bros. TV drama Casablanca (ABC, 1955-56).

   The storyline (presumably a Warner property since their 1944 The Mask of Dimitrios) was reworked in the form of an adventuress (the sultry Rossana Rory) trying to conceal the details of her faked death from Charles McGraw’s hard-boiled Rick.

   Considering that other WB works were given a small-screen adaptation (“Casablanca”, in 1955; “Mildred Pierce”, 1956; “To Have and Have Not”, 1957, etc.) via the adventurous Lux Video Theatre (CBS/NBC, 1950-57), one wonders why the perfect-for-TV Dimitrios was overlooked.

   The other Climax! presentation was a lamentable “Journey into Fear” (1956) with a quivering John Forsythe as a terrified-out-of-his-wits American engineer whose life is endangered in Istanbul and then shipboard to Genoa by ever-present assassins. Hitchcock television regular James P. Cavanagh adapted Ambler’s 1940 novel.

   The Schirmer Inheritance (ITV, 1957), involving a New York attorney’s search for the rightful heir to a $4,000,000 inheritance, was adapted into a six-part serial by Kenneth Hyde for Britain’s ABC-TV company. Not so much a wary passage through post-war Europe (in the Greene/Third Man vein) as a gallery of suspicious figures in a rather over-talky journey to a bandits’ lair on the Yugoslav-Greek border.

   Ambler moved to Hollywood in the late 1950s and, in 1958, married long-time Hitchcock collaborator producer-writer Joan Harrison, who was at that time producing the Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS/NBC, 1955-62) and Suspicion (NBC, 1957-59) anthologies.

   For the latter collection (where he met Harrison), Ambler wrote the soft mystery “The Eye of Truth” (1958) featuring Joseph Cotton as a blackmailed corrupt attorney who’s trying to cover up some incriminating documents. In 1962 he was brought on-board the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series to adapt a Nicholas Monsarrat short story as the episode “Act of Faith” (1962) in which an aspiring author seeks finance from a successful novelist, with unexpected repercussions. (This was Ambler’s second adaptation of a Monsarrat work; the first, the screenplay for the 1953 wartime drama The Cruel Sea, earned him an Oscar nomination.)

   Perhaps his most curious and direct television contribution was as creator of the mystery series Checkmate (CBS, 1960-62), an often satisfying who’s-going-to-do-it drama involving a trio of San Francisco private investigators: their job, and the series’ hook, being to prevent crimes before they happen.

   Although it was intimated at the series’ launch that Ambler himself would be contributing original stories, the series did employ the tantalising talents of many respected crime-mystery writers, including Leigh Brackett, Jonathan Latimer and William P. McGivern. The hugely enjoyable “The Terror from the East” (1961) episode (written by Harold Clements), with a highly suspicious, shambling Charles Laughton as a visiting missionary from China, has our heroes running in circles like hypnotised rabbits.

   A later, similarly formatted series, The Most Deadly Game (ABC, 1970-71), created by Mort Fine and David Friedkin (for Aaron Spelling Productions), featured three criminologists who, rather than preventing crimes, engaged in solving offbeat whodunits. Since Joan Harrison was one of the series’ producers (along with Fine & Friedkin) one can be less than surprised by the similarity.

   Although some modern sources have credited Ambler with the development of The Most Deadly Game, Fine and Friedkin are the only ones to receive a ‘created by’ credit.

   An additional point of interest: a co-writer credit for the episode “Model for Murder” (1970) goes to the fascinating but elusive Elick Moll who, in collaboration with Frank Partos, wrote the screenplay for the hauntingly Woolrichian Night Without Sleep (20th Fox, 1952), based on Moll’s original treatment (and published as a novel in 1951).

   For Alcoa Premiere’s “Pattern of Guilt” (1962), Ambler, as producer of the episode, hired Helen Nielsen to compose an original teleplay for what may have been a proposed series’ pilot episode. The story involved Ray Milland as a reporter who is assigned to cover a series of murders, all spinsters, where related clues are found at each murder scene. Little seems known about this one; why Ambler suddenly became a producer (if in fact so), was it actually intended to spin-off a Milland-as-reporter series?

   Following up the association with Aaron Spelling Productions, Ambler wrote and Harrison produced Love, Hate, Love (ABC, 1971), an annoyingly tedious TV movie thriller starring Ryan O’Neal and Lesley Warren as a couple stalked by Warren’s psychotic ex-boyfriend (Peter Haskell).

   The next of Ambler’s spy stories to be adapted for the small screen was the four-part A Quiet Conspiracy (ITV, 1989). Taken from his 1969 novel The Intercom Conspiracy, the post-le Carré plot follows former journalist Joss Ackland and his daughter Sarah Winman as they stumble about in an international conspiracy involving a secret NATO spy satellite. The red herring fishery was worked overtime, thanks to producer Anglia TV’s co-production casting of various, unfamiliar European actors.

   With The Care of Time (ITV,1990), another made-for-TV film (Anglia TV), adapted from Ambler’s 1981 novel, the central character, an American ghost writer (a baffled Michael Brandon), is an outsider who is drawn into an overly-complicated web of international intrigue.

   The puzzling plotting and colourful scenery moves (totters, at times) from Pennsylvania, across Europe to the Austrian Alps, collecting Christopher Lee’s political fixer, who’s ducking his enemies, and his attractive body-guard (Yolanda Vazquez) along the way. An ambitious TV film with a reach that was greater than its grasp.

   A couple of Footnotes: one of relevance to the above television work; the other because it’s an irresistible connection.

(I) In 1965, US trade journals began making brief, intriguing references to the production of a pilot episode (“The Seller’s Market”), written by Ambler, for a proposed espionage series called Journey Into Fear for NBC; the episodes would revolve around star Jeffrey Hunter as a scientist who is drawn into working for the CIA.

   Completed (and an hour in length), the series was rejected by the network and the pilot episode was despatched to the vaults. Perhaps the partnership of Ambler and the 1960s Spy Boom would have been an awkward one (he had a dislike for master-villains, pseudo-scientific gadgets and the general paraphernalia that characterised the 1960s spy genre), but the possibilities still fire the imagination.

   For a fuller report on this unsold series, check this link for Glenn Mosley’s (University of Idaho) absorbing survey.

(II) Geoffrey Household merits some reference here, not only because Ambler wrote the screenplay for Rough Shoot (1953; aka Shoot First), based on his 1951 novel, but that Household’s espionage/adventure characters belong to the same fold as Ambler’s victims of circumstance.

   His most famous work is of course Rogue Male (1939), becoming the much praised Fritz Lang film Man Hunt in 1941 and, in 1976, an equally commendable TV film starring Peter O’Toole. Another TV film, Deadly Harvest (1972), was made from his 1961 novel Watcher in the Shadows.

   Two early Suspense (CBS, 1949-54) episodes based on Household stories (“Death Drum”, 29 Jan 1952; “Woman in Love”, 26 Aug 1952) can be viewed on the Internet Archive. (Follow the links provided.)

            Eric Ambler Television:

1. Epitaph for a Spy (serial; BBC, 14 March-18 Apr 1953; 6 x half-hour). Producer/Director: Stephen Harrison. Scr: Giles Cooper, from 1938 novel. Cast: Peter Cushing (as Vadassy), Ferdy Mayne, Warren Stanhope, Joan Winmill.

2. “Epitaph for a Spy” / Climax! (CBS, 9 Dec 1954). Dir: Allen Reisner. Scr: Donald S. Sanford, David Friedkin, from Ambler novel. Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Vadassy), Melville Cooper, Marjorie Lord, Dave O’Brien.

3. “Satan’s Veil” / Casablanca (ABC, 31 Jan 1956). Dir: Alvin Ganzer. Scr: Norman Lessing, Nelson Gidding, from ‘story’ by Ambler. Cast: Charles McGraw, Marcel Dalio, Rossana Rory, Dan Seymour.

4. “Journey into Fear” / Climax! (CBS, 11 Oct 1956). Dir: Jack Smight. Scr: James P. Cavanagh, from 1940 novel. Cast: John Forsythe (as Graham Johnson), Eva Gabor, Arnold Moss, Anthony Dexter.

5. The Schirmer Inheritance (serial; ITV, 3 Aug-7 Sept 1957; 6 x half-hour). Prod: Stuart Latham. Dir: Philip Dale. Scr: Kenneth Hyde, from 1953 novel. Cast: William Sylvester, Vera Fusek, Jefferson Clifford.

6. “The Eye of Truth” / Suspicion (NBC, 17 Mar 1958). Prod: Alfred Hitchcock. Dir: Robert Stevens. Scr: Eric Ambler. Cast: Joseph Cotton, George Peppard, Leora Dana, Philip Van Zandt.

7. Checkmate (series; CBS, 1960-62). Created by Eric Ambler. Regular Cast: Anthony George (as Don Corey), Doug McClure (Jed Sills), Sebastian Cabot (Dr. Carl Hyatt).

8. “Pattern of Guilt” / Alcoa Premiere (ABC, 9 Jan 1962). Prod: Eric Ambler. Dir: Bernard Girard. Scr: Helen Nielsen. Cast: Ray Milland, Myron McCormick, Joanna Moore, Olive Carey.

9. “Act of Faith” / Alfred Hitchcock Presents (NBC, 10 Apr 1962). Dir: Bernard Girard. Scr: Eric Ambler, based on a story by Nicholas Monsarrat. Cast: George Grizzard, Dennis King, Florence MacMichael, Jeno Mate.

10. Epitaph for a Spy (serial; BBC, 19 May-9 Jun 1963; 4 x half-hour). Prod/Dir: Dorothea Brooking. Scr: Elaine Morgan, from Ambler novel. Cast: Colin Jeavons (Vadassy), Burnell Tucker, Janet McIntire.

11. Love, Hate, Love (TV film; ABC, 9 Feb 1971). Dir: George McCowan. Scr: Eric Ambler, based on story by Ambler, Robert Summerfield. Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Lesley Ann Warren, Peter Haskell, Henry Jones.

12. A Quiet Conspiracy (serial; ITV, 24 Feb-17 Mar 1989; 4 x hour). Prod: John Rosenberg. Dir: John Gorrie. Scr: Alick Rowe, from 1969 novel The Intercom Conspiracy. Cast: Joss Ackland (as Theodore Carter), Sarah Winman, Hartmut Becker.

13. The Care of Time (TV film; ITV, 26 Aug 1990). Dir: John Davies. Scr: Alan Seymour, from Ambler novel. Cast: Christopher Lee, Yolanda Vazquez, Ian Hogg, Michael Brandon.

Footnote: “Seller’s Market” / Journey into Fear (1966 pilot episode; not transmitted). Prod: Joan Harrison. Dir: Robert Stevens. Scr: Eric Ambler. Cast: Jeffrey Hunter.

EDITORIAL COMMENT. Eric Ambler was born 28 June 1909, so next month will mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. We apologize for jumping the gun by a few days, but we welcome the opportunity to toast here and now one of the greatest spymasters of all time.

BURN NOTICE. Pilot episode for the USA cable network series of the same name; first telecast on 28 June 2007. Jeffrey Donovan, Gabrielle Anwar, Bruce Campbell, Sharon Gless, with David Zayas, Ray Wise, Dan Martin, China Chow, Chance Kelly.

   Since the third season of this series will soon be beginning, you aren’t likely to need this review of the pilot episode to tell you whether or not you should be watching it. But if you’re a fan of humorous spy comedies, with a bit of Private Eye work thrown in, and if you were to ask me, I’d have to say I think you should.

   If I weren’t being a bit hypocritical about it, that is, because I watched this first episode when it first was shown and never watched another one. I recently bought the DVD set of the first season, though, so there you go. Commercials and I have given up on each other. I don’t watch them, and they don’t care.

   But just in case you’ve never seen (or heard) of the series, here’s a quick recap. Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan, whom I’ve never seen anywhere else, but he’s been around) is either a CIA agent or an independent operative who works with the CIA is abruptly — and I mean abruptly — issued a burn notice; that is to say, he’s out of a job for no stated reason, his friends won’t talk to him, his financial assets are frozen, and he’s dumped in Miami where he’s allowed to roam freely, but he’s followed and watched constantly, and he’s unable to leave.

   That’s the overall picture. Figuring out who’s behind it and why he’s in this fix, that’s the story that’s the basis for the series. In the meantime, to make a living, he’s forced to work as a strictly unofficial private eye, assisted by his ex-girl friend Fiona Glenanne (the diminutive but utterly glamorous Gabrielle Anwar), sporting a wonderful Irish accent, and a pensioned-off rogue of a buddy named Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell, who’s really been around).

   Westen’s exasperation with his situation is played as much for laughs as it is for a story line, and I haven’t even mentioned the funniest part. Miami is where his mother lives (Sharon Gless) who wonders if this is the year her son will be home for Christmas, among other worries that a mother always has, even if her son works for the CIA.

   Says Westen in voiceover mode: “Thirty years of karate, combat experience on five continents, a rating with every weapon that shoots a bullet or holds an edge… still haven’t found any defense against Mom crying into my shirt.”

   In this, the pilot episode, Westen agrees to help a Cuban groundskeeper who’s suspected of stealing several valuable works of art from the home of the wealthy collector he works for, along with getting his life sorted out and set up for the rest of the series. A simple but effective story.

   I could do without the mother, and I would have liked to have seen more of the ex-girl friend, who thinks violence is a form of foreplay, but she’s in all the ads for the show, so I assume her part is a major one. Westen himself is a little too smug for my tastes, but maybe not yours. It’s a good show, and if it weren’t for the commercials, I would have told you so long before now.

   Says Westen, channeling a chap named MacGyver in a similar vein: “Once somebody sends a guy with a gun after you, things are only going to get worse. But like it or not, you’ve got work to do. For a job like getting rid of the drug dealer next door, I’ll take a hardware store over a gun any day.

    “Guns make you stupid. Better to fight your wars with duct tape. Duct tape makes you smart… Every decent punk has a bulletproof door. But people forget walls are just plaster. Hopefully you get him with the first shot. Or the second… Now he’s down and waiting for you to come through the front door. So you don’t come through the front door.”

THE LAST DETECTIVE. Pilot episode for the British ITV series of the same name; first telecast on 7 February 2003. Peter Davison, Sean Hughes, Rob Spendlove, Emma Amos, with Joanne Frogatt, David Troughton, Rachel Davies. Based on the book Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective by Leslie Thomas. Director: Nick Hurran.

   As far as the literary world is concerned, there are only four books in the “Dangerous Davies” series, but there were 17 episodes of this television series, spread out over four seasons, all part of the box set of DVDs I recently purchased, and I’m glad I did.

   This, the first episode, was adapted into a TV movie once before, a production with the same title as the book, Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1981), written and directed by Val Guest and starring Bernard Cribbens as Davies. I’ve not seen it, but it is included in the box set. (A sad note about the earlier movie is that it marked the last screen appearance of Bernard Lee, long-time “M” of the James Bond series.)

   So far as I know, Dangerous Davies never has had a first name, and the reason he is called “Dangerous” is that as a policeman, he isn’t. He’s slow, he’s methodical, the punks in the suburban town outside (or just inside) London don’t mind being arrested by him — he doesn’t resort to violence or racial epithets as the other coppers do — and he’s called the last detective, as he’d be the last one in the station house to be given a case of any significance.

   It’s not really clear how he fell so far in the opinions of his fellow officers or Inspector Aspinall (Rod Spendlove), his superior officer, as there are no flashbacks to tell the viewer (the writers of the TV series may want to hold that back for a while) and of all of the accents of the players involved, it’s those of his fellow policemen which I found the most difficult to translate.

   Davies, as I see I haven’t mentioned it so far, is played by Peter Davison — or should I say underplayed, as he’s certainly the gentlest and most patient of police detectives I have ever seen on TV. (This may be why he gets on the nerves of his fellow officers.) Davison, of course, also played Dr. Who for a while in his long acting career, as well as a shorter stint as Albert Campion, Margery Allingham’s stalwart but enigmatic hero.

   Assigned a nothing job to see whether a known hoodlum is coming back to England from Spain, and if so, why, Davies sidetracks himself onto another case, one that been open and unsolved for 20 years — that of a 17-year-old girl who went missing one night, her body never found.

   Reopening the case means wounding the girl’s family all over again, her mother, her father, and especially the girl’s sister, who came along only after her older sibling disappeared. Joanne Frogatt plays both parts, Josie in the present, and Celia in the past.

   She’s cheeky, sexy and vulnerable at the same time, and as Josie, at point slyly (but almost shyly) makes a play for Davies. It’s a wonderful performance.

   Davies, though, is married, but only barely. Emma Amos plays his wife, exasperated by Davies, unable to live with him, but there’s a sense that she still loves him, and if so, I imagine this is a thread that will play its way out over the course of the series. (They do have a large dog in common.)

   Stand-up comedian Sean Hughes plays Davies’ buddy Mod, who assists him on his cases, very much unofficially, while holding a number of real jobs, including dog-walker and door-to-door interviewer about the sex lives of senior citizens — and not very successfully.

   The ending is bittersweet, as Davies’ approach, low key but effective at the same time, is to persuade the killer to confess. Thus justice is done, but with no fanfare and at the same time embarrassing the department — slipshod and ineffective policework was done at the time — and thus getting himself into a deeper hole on the job.

   Episode Two now awaits me. While I’m not likely to be reporting on more, I am more than ready for the task. Eager, in fact. After a while, watching endless car chases on The Rockford Files eventually become boring, no matter how much you enjoy James Garner as Rockford.

   I agree the Chaykin and Hutton Nero Wolfe series is not only the best film version of Wolfe, but one of the best adaptations of a fictional sleuth to film (certainly to the small screen).

   Both Edward Arnold and Walter Connolly, who played Wolfe in early films, decided to play him as a jovial and bluff type much like the millionaires and politicians they usually played, and it didn’t help that Lionel Stander (Max on Hart to Hart) was badly miscast as Archie (much less John Qualen as Fritz).

   The sets were faithful to the books, though. (The two films were Meet Nero Wolfe, based on Fer de Lance, and The League of Frightened Men.)

   Television did much better with the pilot film Nero Wolfe (1979) that starred Thayer David and Tom Mason. Based on The Doorbell Rang, it was a superior made-for-television film, and David and Mason were both good. They even did the scene from the book where Wolfe’s client (Anne Baxter in this one) spots the portrait of Wolfe’s father (Sherlock Holmes).

   If memory serves Biff McGuire was Cramer and John Randolph played Lon Cohen. Frank Gilroy directed and scripted. The untimely death of Thayer David postponed the series, which eventually starred William Conrad and Lee Horsley, and the least said about that the better.

   Wolfe did somewhat better on radio where the role was played by Santos Ortega and Sidney Greenstreet. If you’ve never heard them they are well done, and not hard to find. But running only a half hour, the series episodes seldom adapted Stout’s material.

   As to why there is no American equivalent to Mystery or Masterpiece Theater, part of it lies in the fact the BBC is a government operation, and part the commercial nature of network and cable television. We’ll always get another version of Knightrider and seldom get a quality program like Nero Wolfe, and certainly nothing to resemble those adaptations of Lord Peter, Campion, Poirot, or Miss Marple.

   Another factor is that many British series only commit to six to eight episodes a season so budgets aren’t as restrictive, and the actors can do other work while doing a series without having to leave the series.

   That the Jim Hutton Ellery Queen, the Chaykin Wolfe, and the Spenser TV series were as good as they were and ran as long as they did are all minor miracles.

   Eventually there will be a revival of classical tec films (everything comes back to some extent), and we’ll get a new round of American-made Agatha Christie’s with some poor actress as badly cast in the part of Miss Marple as Helen Hayes was, or a Peter Ustinov struggling with diminishing budgets and scripts.

   But the sad fact is, it’s cheaper to generate material based on old series and follow trends than try to do something smart. It’s more cost effective to invent a tec series for the small screen than to buy the rights to a proven product and run afoul of fans’ preconceived ideas and the author’s desires.

   It probably doesn’t help that today’s honchos have a better understanding of comics, science fiction, fantasy, movies, and 80’s television than mystery fiction. Our only hope is that somewhere down the line another cable network decides to gamble on something like the Nero Wolfe series and produces something worthwhile instead of more reality series and tiresome comedies and dramadies. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

   And I know I’m gilding the lily here, but there seems to have been a suggestion that Perry Mason debuted sometime around the creation of the Raymond Burr television series. Of course Mason appeared for the first time in the late 1930’s when Gardner was already a highly successful pulp author. (H. Bedford Jones officially passed the title king of the pulps onto Gardner.) Mason pushed Gardner onto the bestseller list and made him one of the most successful writers of all time.

   Warner Brothers did a series of Mason movies with Warren William, Ricardo Cortez, and Donald Woods as Mason (at least one had Allen Jenkins as Paul Drake and Errol Flynn made his American film debut as a corpse in another). There was also 15 minute radio serial based on Perry, but it was never a particular success.

   It wasn’t until television and Burr’s incarnation of the character that Perry finally conquered another market. Fans will recall a second attempt to do Perry with Monte Markham that met an early and much deserved end, and of course Burr’s return to the role in later years in a series of made for television movies.

   Although Gardner was a major success as a mystery writer without Burr, it can certainly be argued that Burr so embodied the character that he took the whole thing to another level pushing Perry to a level closer to Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and James Bond than the usual run of mystery icons. There is a good book, Murder in the Millions, that covers the mega sales of Gardner, Ian Fleming, and Mickey Spillane.

   I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gave me to write those words, the opening scene of the A&E adaptation of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel “Champagne for One.”

   For one thing, I’ve been a fan of Nero Wolfe since I was a kid. The Brownstone on West 35th Street where Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin live and work in New York City was as real to me as my family’s suburban tract home in Walnut Creek, California. I read each and every book, reveling in Archie’s amiable narration, his lively banter with Nero Wolfe, and Wolfe’s wonderfully verbose and brilliant speeches. While I may have been underwhelmed, even as a teenager, by Stout’s lazy plotting, I loved the language and, most of all, the relationship between Wolfe and Archie. I never dreamed I’d have a chance to write those characters myself. And, in the case of that opening, to write new words in their voices, at least as I’ve always heard them.

   It was a screenwriting assignment unlike any other that my writing partner, William Rabkin, and I had ever been involved with. Because “Nero Wolfe,” starring Maury Chaykin as Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie, was unlike any other series on television. It was, as far as I know, the first TV series without a single original script — each and every episode was based on a Rex Stout novel, novella, or short story. That’s not to say there wasn’t original writing involved, but it was Stout who did all the hard work.

   Everyone who wrote for “Nero Wolfe” was collaborating with Rex Stout. The mandate from executive producers Michael Jaffe and Timothy Hutton (who also directed episodes) was to “do the books,” even if that meant violating some of the hard-and-fast rules of screenwriting.

   Your typical hour-long teleplay follows what’s known as a four-act structure. Whether it’s an episode of “The West Wing” or “CSI,” the formula is essentially the same. But “Nero Wolfe” ignored the formula, forgoing the traditional mini-cliffhangers and plot-reversals that precede the commercial breaks.

   Instead, we stuck to the structure of the book, replicating as closely as possible the experience of reading a Rex Stout novel (which, sadly, few viewers under the age of 50 have ever done).

   In the highly competitive world of primetime network television, and in an era of “MTV”-style editing, it helped “Nero Wolfe” stand apart (and, perhaps, sealed its doom). “Nero Wolfe” required the writer to turn off most of his professional instincts and, instead, put all his trust in the material — which was a whole lot easier if you were already a Nero Wolfe fan.

    “It’s amazing how many writers got it wrong,” says Sharon Elizabeth Doyle, who was head writer for “Nero Wolfe.” “I mean very good writers, too. Either you get it or you don’t. It’s so important to have the relationships right, and the tone of the relationships right, to get that it’s about the language and not the story. The characters in these books aren’t modern human beings. You have to believe in the characters and respect the formality of the way they are characterized.”

   That doesn’t mean writers for the show simply transcribed the book into script form. It can’t be done. There’s no getting past that a novel and a TV series are two distinct, and very different, mediums. The writer’s job on “Nero Wolfe” was to adapt Rex Stout’s stories into scripts that could be produced on a certain budget over a seven-day schedule on a particular number of sets and locations. Beyond that, the writer had to re-tell Stout’s story in the idiom of television. By that, I mean the story had to be shown not told, through actions rather than speech, which isn’t easy when you’re working with mysteries written in first-person that are mostly about a bunch of people sitting in an office and talking. And talking. And talking. It’s very entertaining to read it, but can be deadly dull if you have to watch it.

   Our first step in the adaptation process was the most fun — we’d sit down and read the book for pure pleasure, to get the feel and shape of the story (I couldn’t believe someone was actually paying me to read a book that I loved!)

   After that, the real work started. We’d sit at the laptop and briefly jot down notes on the key emotional moments of the story, the major plots points, the essential clues, and most importantly, whatever the central conflict was between Wolfe and Archie. We’d also make notes of an obvious plot problems (and there were many). Once we were done with that, we were ready to read the book again, only not as readers but as literary construction workers who had to figure out how to take the structure apart and rebuild it again in a different medium.

   We”d go through the book page-by-page, highlighting essential dialogue while writing a scene-by-scene outline on the computer as went along. We used the outline, combined with our previous notes, to get a firm grasp on the story, to see what scenes had to be pared down, combined or removed. Within scenes, we looked for ways the dialogue could be tightened, simplified or re-choreographed to add more momentum, energy and movement to the episode. And we’d do all this while keeping one thought constantly in our minds: stick as closely to the books as you can.

   More often than not, that meant loyalty to the dialogue rather than to the structure of the plot or the order, locations, or choreography of the scenes. Because the first thing we discovered as we took apart Stout’s stories and put them back together again was how thin and clumsily plotted the mysteries are — a weakness that seems to be more easily hidden in prose than it can be on camera (which is one reason plots are so often reworked in the movie versions of your favorite mysteries).

    “Television does seem to make the plot problems more glaring. The Nero Wolfe mysteries, generally, are very weak,” says novelist Stuart Kaminsky, who adapted the novella “Immune to Murder” into an episode. “Wolfe seldom does anything brilliant. We are simply told he is brilliant and are convinced by his manipulation of people and language. His is a great act.”

   Any avid reader of the Stout books soon discovers that there are three ways Wolfe will solve a mystery:

    a) Wolfe either calls, mails, or in some other way contacts all the suspects and accuses each one of being the murderer, then waits for one of them to expose him or herself by either trying to steal or retrieve a key piece of evidence — or trying to kill Archie, Wolfe, or some other person Wolfe has set up as bait.

    b) Wolfe sends his operative Saul or Orrie to retrieve some piece of evidence that is with-held from Archie (and, by extension, all of us) and revealed in the finale to expose the killer.

    c) Wolfe uses actual deduction.

   The challenge in adapting the Nero Wolfe stories for television was obscuring those plot problems by playing up the character conflicts and cherry-picking the best lines from Wolfe’s many speeches. The plots became secondary to the relationships and the uniqueness of the language. The vocabulary was never dumbed down or simplified for the TV audience, which is why the series felt so much like the books.

    “There is a pleasure in Wolfe’s speeches, what we call the arias,” says Doyle. “Wolfe has lots of them, the trick is isolating that one aria you can’t live without.”

   In the novel “Too Many Clients,” which Doyle adapted for the show, there was one Nero Wolfe speech that she knew had to be in the episode:

    “A modern satyr is part man, part pig, part jack-ass. He hasn’t even the charm of the roguish; he doesn’t lean gracefully against a tree with flute in hand. The only quality he has preserved from his Attic ancestors is his lust, and he gratifies it in the dark corners of other men’s beds or hotel rooms, not in the shade of an olive tree on a sunny hillside. The preposterous bower of carnality you have described is a sorry makeshift, but at least Mr. Yeager tried. A pig and a jack-ass yes, but the flute strain was in him too, as it once was in me, in my youth. No doubt he deserved to die, but I would welcome a sufficient inducement to expose his killer.”

   Where else on television do you find a character who talks like that? No where. Not before “Nero Wolfe,” and not now that it has been cancelled.

    “There is one thing we did that nobody else is doing. We played with the language and had a good time doing it,” Doyle says. “Most TV language is very minimalist.”

   She’s right. When was the last time you heard a TV character use satyr and bower in casual conversation? I’m not surprised “Nero Wolfe” was canceled. Perhaps the creative choices that were made, while respecting the material, were wrong for TV. Not because audiences are stupid, but because television is, ultimately, not a book, and certainly not one written in the 1940s. By design, the show had a dated feel, one that may have alienated all but the oldest viewers and the most avid Wolfe fans.

   That said, and with my obvious biases showing, I think the series, and especially the performances of Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton, will be recognized as the definitive dramatic interpretation of “Nero Wolfe,” the one any future movie or TV incarnations will be measured against. And I was honored to be a part of it.

Lee Goldberg was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his work on “Nero Wolfe.” This article first appeared in Mystery Scene magazine and is reprinted with the author’s permission.

THE DOORBELL RANG. Made for TV. A&E Network, 22 April 2001. Season 1, Episode 1 of A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Tim Hutton (Archie Goodwin), Maurie Chaykin (Nero Wolfe), Bill Smitrovich (Inspector Cramer), Saul Rubinek (Lon Cohen), Colin Fox (Fritz Brenner), Conrad Dunn (Saul Panzer), Fulvio Cecere (Fred Durkin), Trent McMullen (Orrie Cather) R.D. Reid (Sergeant Purley Stebbins). With Debra Monk, James Tolkan, Francie Swift, Robert Bockstael, Nicky Guadagni, Gretchen Egolf. Based on the novel by Rex Stout. Teleplay: Michael Jaffe. Director: Timothy Hutton.

    I haven’t been talking to you about most of the television shows I watch — the regular series fodder, almost all of it on DVD — but in this case I’m making an exception.

    As indicated above, this two hour adaptation of one of Rex Stout’s most highly rated Nero Wolfe novels — and some would say that it is his best — was the first episode of the finest TV series ever based on the works of an American mystery writer.

    Is there one that I’m not thinking of? One that’s better than this? I don’t think so, and I’ll get back to this in a minute.

    There were two seasons of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, preceded by a pilot film, The Golden Spiders, which premiered on March 5, 2000. There were 27 episodes in those two season, filming in delightful fashion eight novels, seven of them in two parts, and 12 novellas. For a hint of how well staged and photographed the settings and the players are, I’ll add a half-dozen scenes from the film, but keep in mind that it’s only a hint.

    The story in The Doorbell Rang is relatively simple, at least on the surface. I could do a more detailed synopsis that would include all of the complexities, but after several minutes thinking about it, I’ve decided to keep it, as I say, simple.

    A wealthy woman has read a book critical of the FBI and its activities and has been sending books to friends and people in high power across the country. (The book is real: The FBI Nobody Knows, by Fred J. Cook, 1964, Macmillan.) Convincing that the FBI is retaliating by having her followed and tapping her phones, she hires Wolfe to get them off her back.

    Inspector Cramer gets involved, and so does the unsolved murder of a newspaper writer who was supposed to have been writing a series of articles about the FBI, also critical of the way J. Edgar Hoover was using his position of power. Wolfe needs leverage, and solving the murder is one way of getting it.

    I taped this series, both seasons, while it was on, but I never watched any of them, except in passing. Once on tape, though, you can fast-forward through the commercials — a big advantage, as far as I’m concerned — but on the other hand, once on tape, you’ll never find the time to go back and watch them — again as far as I’m concerned. (I don’t know about you.)

    So I never really saw any of the series until now, after I purchased the complete A&E set during a recent pre-Christmas sale at well over 50% off, an absolute bargain. This is a shameful admission, I admit, because as I stated above, I can’t think of a better adaptation of an American mystery series into TV or movie form than this A&E production. (A previous version of Nero Wolfe with William Conrad and Lee Horsley isn’t it.)

    Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason comes close, but I think the TV version was on the air so long that Erle Stanley Gardner started writing his books with Burr in mind, rather than the other way around.

    I stand to be corrected, and any and all suggestions are welcome.

    I believe that all of the stories in the A&E version, which I will be referring to from now on, are altered into taking place in the 1950s — and absolutely beautifully photographed, by the way — no matter when the books themselves took place. The Doorbell Rang was published in 1965, for example. (I may be in error in saying this. See the comments.)

    No matter. For the most part, Stout’s stories are timeless. It’s the people in them, who don’t really change all that much over the years, and (for example) the interior of the Manhattan-located brownstone where 80% of the stories take place, that’s what’s important.

    Wolfe’s yellow shirts, that is, the dining room, the orchid room, and Wolfe’s office, complete with the large globe, Archie’s desk at an angle to Wolfe’s, the chairs that can be rearranged facing the great detective, the hidden peephole designed so someone not in the room can look and listen in without being discovered — all wonderfully rendered, even though in my mind’s eye I had everything mirror-image reversed, left and right.

    The apartment is also much larger than I pictured it. I sensed tighter quarters.

    And whole chunks of dialogue from the book appear to have been repeated verbatim. (I haven’t checked, but I’d be mildly surprised if I’m wrong.)

    As for the players, some brief impressions: Maurie Chaykin is — how shall I say this? — the right girth and weight, but he’s not nearly as handsome as I see Wolfe, but I have an idea that as I lend an eye to more of the episodes, how I see Wolfe and the others will start to change. What Chaykin does have is the eccentric genius concept down pat.

    Tim Hutton as Archie? Near perfect. His stride seems a little too jaunty to me, and his hat is too big. Of course I (as well as everyone else) am no longer used to seeing anyone wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Colin Fox as the live-in cook, Fritz Brenner, is perfect. Bill Smitrovich as Inspector Cramer seems a little too agitated to me; I seem to think of him as a calmer sort of fellow, not that Nero didn’t usually get under his skin, and badly.

    The others of the regular cast generally weren’t on the screen long enough to say aye or nay, but if it turns out to be nay for any of them as I watch my way through the series, I will be greatly surprised.

    From the general reaction that this series has produced from readers and critics alike, I don’t suppose I’m saying anything very much new here. I regret being so long to catch up with everyone else, but I’m glad I have.

JESSICA FLETCHER & DONALD BAIN – Murder She Wrote: A Palette for Murder.

Signet, paperback original. First printing, October 1996.

   The first question that occurs to me as I sit down to write this review, and it hadn’t occurred to me before now, except in a nebulous sort of way, is just how many of these “Jessica Fletcher” books are there? They’ve seemed sort of generic and ubiquitous at the same time, and I never stopped to get them listed and enumerated. Until now. Take a look at the other end of this review…

   … and now that your eyes are back,some historical perspective may be in order. The TV show itself, the one starring Angela Lansbury, was on the air for twelve seasons, from 1984 to 1996, with four made-for-TV movies appearing after that, the last one in 2003.

   The first Murder, She Wrote novel came out in 1985, and there’s at least one that’s scheduled for 2009, a span of years that’s even longer than when the TV program was on the air. It’s quite a track record, and it certainly goes a long way in explaining the ubiquitousness I mentioned above.

   Which of course got me to thinking. What other series of TV tie-ins has consisted of more books than this one with Mrs. Fletcher has?

   To set some parameters, let’s restrict this question to detective novels. Otherwise in the field of science fiction, there is Star Trek, and we do not want to even begin to go there.

   In the field of gothics, and books that are actually included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, there are the Dark Shadows books, of which there 32 (at a quick, rough count). Good, but not good enough. There are 35 Murder, She Wrote books, or there will be soon.

   If anyone can come up with a series I’m simply not thinking of — and, no, I don’t consider the Perry Mason paperbacks with photos of Raymond Burr on the back cover true TV tie-ins, or should I? — let me know.

   As for the author, Donald Bain, he has his own website (and photo), and by following the link, you can find a complete list of all of the books he admits that he has written, and not all of them have been crime fiction, by any means. His bibliography also pointedly omits 24 books he wrote under another’s name but which he can not contractually reveal. Most of these books are (in all likelihood) the Margaret Truman books, of which Al Hubin says, again in the Revised Crime Fiction IV:

   Back up when I starting this review, which seems a long time ago already — you don’t know it, but it is now several days later, real time — I also called the books “generic” as well as ubiquitous, and perhaps I should apologize for that, even though I said “they’ve seemed,” since of course and/or as usual, this is the first one that I’ve read.

    “Ubiquitous” I think I may have proven, but the case is far less solid when it comes to generic, unless of course you think that the TV show was generic, and maybe it was, but what TV show today exerts as much effort into actual deduction in terms of its detective work than Murder, She Wrote? Numb3rs, perhaps? Any others?

   I’ll get back to this. To tell you something about the book I have just read, in it Jessica Fletcher is visiting the Hamptons (on Long Island), trying to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city and secretly to try her hand at oil painting.

   The latter effort fails — well, in fact both objectives fail — if getting away from the big city means staying away from murder cases — when the young model posing nude for Jessica’s class is found dead while taking a short break. (With careful camera angles, most of the activity immediately preceding could have been shown on television.)

   But in any case it is thus that Mrs. Fletcher is introduced to world of modern art, including thefts (her own sketch of the dead girl included), forgeries and high finance, Long Island style.

   She also tells the story in her own words, and what is quite remarkable is that Donald Bain as the author has her voice down cold. Perfect. To a T. From page 58:

   And then a second death occurs, suggesting that the first one was not a simple accident of some kind, as if we (the reader) did not know that already. Perhaps innate in the world of “cozy” detective novels, the death may have affected me more than it did anyone in the story, including Mrs. Fletcher, who had begun to know the second victim well. (Shouldn’t she have at least been angry about it?)

   What I said about Donald Bain’s having his “co-author’s” voice down pat, he — at this relatively early point in the series — it does not seem to me that he has the mystery-telling (and solving) pattern of television series very well in mind at all.

   Instead of calling the suspects together and recreating the crime scene (in flashbacks) and naming the killer as a result, we have Jessica going here and there on her own and in exceedingly dangerous places, not realizing as she should that a two-time killer is on the loose.

   The ending is rather muddled altogether, in fact, and that I ending up skimming through it, rather than being transfixed with the unraveling, may tell you more about the mystery than anything else, I regret to say. I may read another, but without a push from some other direction, all things considered, it’s not as likely as it should be.

By JAMES ANDERSON —

   The Murder of Sherlock Holmes (n.) Avon, pb, 1985.

   Hooray for Homicide (n.) Avon, pb, 1985.
   Lovers and Other Killers (n.) Avon, pb, 1986.

By DAVID GEORGE DEUTSCH —

By JESSICA FLETCHER & DONALD BAIN —

   Gin and Daggers. McGraw-Hill, hc, June 1989; Avon, pb, October 1990; Signet, pb, April 2000.

   Manhattans and Murder. Signet, pb, December 1994.
   Brandy and Bullets. Signet, pb, August 1995.
   Martinis and Mayhem. Signet, pb, December 1995.
   Rum and Razors. Signet, pb, April 1995.
   A Deadly Judgment. Signet, pb, April 1996.
   A Palette for Murder. Signet, pb, October 1996.
   The Highland Fling Murders. Signet, pb, April 1997.
   Murder on the QE2. Signet, pb, October 1997.
   Murder in Moscow. Signet, pb, May 1998.
   A Little Yuletide Murder. Signet, pb, October 1998.
   Murder at the Powderhorn Ranch. Signet, pb, May 1999.
   Knock ’Em Dead. Signet, pb, October 1999.
   Trick or Treachery. Signet, pb, October 2000.
   Blood on the Vine. Signet, pb, April 2001.
   Murder in a Minor Key. Signet, pb, October 2001.
   Provence to Die For. Signet, pb, April 2002.
   You Bet Your Life. Signet, pb, October 2002.
   Majoring in Murder. Signet, pb, April 2003.
   Destination Murder. New American Library (NAL), hc, October 2003; Signet, pb, September 2004.

   Dying to Retire By. Signet, pb, April 2004.
   A Vote for Murder. NAL, hc, October 2004; Signet, pb, September 2005.
   The Maine Mutiny. Signet, pb, April 2005.
   Margaritas and Murder. NAL, hc, October 2005; Signet, pb, September 2006.
   A Question of Murder. Signet, pb, April 2006.
   Three Strikes and You’re Dead. NAL, hc, October 2006; Signet, pb, September 2007.
   Coffee, Tea, or Murder. Signet, pb, April 2007.
   Panning For Murder. NAL, September 2007; Signet, pb, September 2008.
   Murder on Parade. NAL, hc, April 2008. Signet, pb, March 2009.
   A Slaying In Savannah. NAL, hc, September 2008. Signet, pb, September 2009.
   Madison Avenue Shoot. NAL, hc, April 2009

[UPDATE] 01-30-09. Any updating has already been done, either in the course of the review, or in the subsequent bibliography. This post is long enough now without my needing to say more!

NIKKI AND NORA. Unaired TV pilot, UPN, 2004. Christina Cox (Nora Delaney), Liz Vassey (Nikki Beaumont). Director: John David Coles.

   It didn’t make the new season for the UPN television network, but from all I’ve read, this busted TV pilot has become a cult favorite in many quarters. You can watch it in its entirely on YouTube, broken up into seven parts, starting here. Warning: The picture quality leaves something (a lot) to be desired.

   Nikki and Nora are cops. That’s nothing new, not even if they’re young and good-looking. Pepper Anderson was not the first lady policewoman on TV, but she was one of the first whose good looks were emphasized. In fact, for many undercover situations she usually found herself in, her good looks were most definitely a positive plus for the job.

   It’s not that Nikki and Nora are partners and both female. Cagney and Lacey covered that territory a while ago also. Here’s the thing – in case you didn’t know where all this is leading. Unknown to the New Orleans Police Department, Nikki and Nora are lovers.

   There has been at least one TV series featuring two law enforcement officers having an affair: a show called Standoff that starred Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt as top-notch hostage negotiators for the FBI. The program lasted about 18 weeks a couple of years ago. It wasn’t bad, but there are only so many hostage crises you can see before you decide you don’t want to see any more.

   The brunette is Nikki, the honey blonde is Nora. Nora’s family doesn’t know, except for her brother, who’s also on the force. Nikki comes from a wealthy family which gives her an “in” in certain (wealthy) neighborhoods. Her daddy is a suave southern gentleman fond of the local cuisine.

   The story itself is standard enough. A young girl, a member of one those wealthy families I just mentioned, is raped and murdered in her own home. Before she died, though, she was able to call 911.

   After one false trail, a (snoopy) eye witness is able to send Nikki and Nora in the right direction. I could say more, but you may want to watch this for yourself. The acting is adequate, most of the time, and the two female stars seem to do most of the action scenes themselves. The scenes with the two of them together at home are toned down, I’m sure, from how they might have played out on cable TV.

   Some additional background might help you place the two stars: Christina Cox played ex-cop turned PI Vicki Nelson in a series called Blood Ties not too long ago. (She specialized in paranormal cases: vampires, werewolves and the like.) Liz Vassey has been on several series. Most recently she’s been Wendy Simms on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

   Neither of these two shows means much to me, I’m sorry to say. I’ve never seen an episode of either series, but the first one sounds tempting. I tend to stay away from crime scenes and autopsy labs. (I was going to say I ought to get out more, but that’s not the problem.)

MURDER 101: NEW AGE. Hallmark, 2008; aka MURDER 101: LOCKED ROOM. Dick Van Dyke, Barry Van Dyke, Carey Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke, Susan Blakely, Wendy Glenn. Director: David S. Cass Sr.

   On August 2, 2008, Hallmark Channel premeiered a two-hour film in its Murder 101 series, which stars Dick Van Dyke as Prof. Jonathan Maxwell, a university criminology instructor.

   In this one, a New Age guru is found shot dead in a locked meditation room along with four other people. Trouble is, they’re all in deep meditative trances when the crime is discovered. Even when the sheriff fires off a blank, they still remain in the trance state.

   Of course, when they do come ’round none of them remembers seeing the crime occur. A further complication is that no one heard the fatal shot, yet a test later proves that a firearms discharge would be heard outside.

   The gun itself, found next to the victim, had no silencer attached, and since there is no GSR [Gun Shot Residue] on the dead man, it is very unlikely he committed suicide. But a note, which many construe as indicating the victim contemplated killing himself, is found in his room.

   GSR is soon discovered on one of the four who were in the room at the time, but shortly after this person is arrested he lapses into a near-death state: “Suicide by coma; that’s a new one.”

   Meanwhile, someone tries to run over an associate of the dead guru in the hospital parking lot and later tries to tidy up the loose ends of the crime by cremating Jonathan — while he’s still alive ….

   This one reminded me of a first- or second-season Murder, She Wrote episode in which a group of people are in a hypnotic trance when a murder takes place right before them, but the similarity ends there.

   The violence content is quite low, with the script concentrating more on WHO, WHY, and HOW, a refreshing change of pace from the usual “crime drama.”

   I didn’t think this was the best possible treatment of the locked room theme — the impossible crime motif is by far my favorite — but it wasn’t all that gosh-awful either.

      Filmography:

Murder 101. 01-07-06. A successful executive is murdered in an explosion at his mansion, and an attractive female investigative reporter is suspected; she had been working undercover on a story about corporate scandal.

Murder 101: College Can Be Murder. 01-06-07. When Dr. Maxwell does not believe that Professor Archer Coe died of a heart attack, he hires his friend, PI Mike Bryant (Barry Van Dyke), to investigate.

Murder 101: If Wishes Were Horses. 08-18-07. A horse is stolen, and the owners receive a $100 million ransom demand; the trainer is later found dead.

Murder 101: New Age. 08-02-08.