I am always fascinated by the credited (as well as the uncredited) work of interesting genre authors for television: not, generally, that it really signifies anything very much, but there is considerable satisfaction to be drawn from recognising, or kidding oneself that one recognises, the hand of a favourite author in some otherwise unremarkable small screen work.

   Rather sadly, not too many such opportunities present themselves these days.

   David Goodis is an interesting case in point: while his novels and his source-as-screenplays are duly honoured in their respective quarters (read, viewed, reviewed), his admittedly slim trail of TV credits have been all but forgotten.

   Thank you, Mr. Nevins, for your astute observations once again (the Bourbon Street Beat segment). (I am still indebted to you for your enlightening article ‘Cornell Woolrich on the Small Screen’ in The Armchair Detective of Spring 1984.)

   The earliest Goodis television credit that I’ve been able to unearth belongs to the live anthology series Sure As Fate (CBS, 1950-51), which staged ‘Nightfall’ in September 1950, adapted by Max Ehrlich and directed by Yul Brynner in his days as a studio director with CBS-TV. John McQuade featured as the young artist on the lam from both gangsters and police. A version of ‘Nightfall’ was also presented by (Westinghouse) Studio One in the following year (July 1951).

   Edmond O’Brien and Maria Riva featured in ‘Ceylon Treasure’, adapted by Irwin Lewis from a Goodis story for Lux Video Theatre in January 1952. This was a Far East adventure yarn in which treasure hunter O’Brien tries to keep safe a fabulous sapphire against the larcenous efforts of Riva and her cohorts. Adapted from the 1953 short story “The Blue Sweetheart”, I believe.

   In January 1956, Lux presented their version of Warner’s 1947 The Unfaithful, featuring Jan Sterling and Hugh Beaumont in a noirish tale of murder and infidelity. Benjamin Simcoe adapted the Goodis-James Gunn story and screenplay for the hour-long play.

   The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (CBS/NBC, 1962-65) was one of the most effective chiller-suspense anthologies of its period, and it seems fitting that Goodis developed for the series the teleplay ‘An Out for Oscar’ from Henry Kane’s story My Darlin’ Evangeline (Dell, 1961). Telecast in April 1963, the multi-twist story has Larry Storch’s bank clerk being set up as the fall guy by his unfaithful wife (Linda Christian) and her killer boyfriend (Henry Silva) in a turnaround heist thriller.

   An anthology package of more recent years, the superbly dark and diverting Fallen Angels (Showtime, 1993; 1995), presented the 1953 Goodis short story ‘The Professional Man’ (1995), with Brendan Fraser as a hit man with a conscience. Teleplay veteran Howard Rodman (Naked City, Harry-O) adapted the half-hour episode for director Steven Soderbergh.

   By happy coincidence, another favourite from the past, W.R. Burnett, whose novel Dr. Socrates has recently been revived by O’Bryan House. It may therefore be of interest to overview the TV work of Burnett, another original whose credits cropped up on the small screen, albeit intermittently, between 1950 and 1967, but whose name as screen value seems now to have faded from view.

   Following adaptations of his works, by others, for the anthology series Danger (with ‘Dressing Up’ in October 1950) and Studio One (‘Little Man, Big World’ in October 1952, from teleplay by Reginald Rose), Burnett supplied two notable teleplays for episodic series in 1960. The first was ‘The Big Squeeze’ (February 1960; co-scripted with Robert C. Dennis from Dennis’s story) for The Untouchables, an exciting hour with Dan O’Herlihy as a bank robbery mastermind (of almost Dillinger dimensions) capable of outwitting Robert Stack’s Eliot Ness at almost every turn.

   The second teleplay, ‘Debt of Honor’ (November 1960) for the excellent Naked City series, was a moody, sensitive piece about gambler Steve Cochran repaying an old debt to a man in Italy by marrying the man’s daughter so that she can enter the U.S.

   The following work was skipped from the above chronology because, while sharing Mr. Nevins’s dread of the Warner Brothers TV ‘sausage factory’ of the day, one still wonders what was made of the race-track thriller ‘Thanks for Tomorrow’ (October 1959) for 77 Sunset Strip. With a teleplay adapted by William L. Stuart — whose own 1948 Night Cry was turned into the memorable Where the Sidewalk Ends in 1950 by Preminger — from (and I’m not certain here) Burnett’s Tomorrow’s Another Day (1946), there just may be a little of something left to savor.

   In 1961, MGM used the title of their 1950 Burnett/John Huston movie, The Asphalt Jungle, for a short-lived police detective series which, while fairly interesting in itself, bore absolutely no relation to the taut caper feature. Burnett was credited (with Paul Monash) for the screenplay of the European-released ‘feature’, The Lawbreakers (1961), an extended version of the series’ second episode (‘The Lady and the Lawyer’).

   His non-crime genre work for television included John Ford’s 1955 baseball drama ‘Rookie of the Year’ (story only) for Screen Directors Playhouse, ‘Manhunt’ (1965) for The Legend of Jesse James, ‘The Hellcats’ (1967), a pilot episode co-scripted with Tony Barrett about barnstorming flyers in the 1920s, and ‘The Fortress’ (1967) episode of The Virginian series (co-story with Sy Salkowitz), focusing on a Canadian border manhunt.

   Earlier talents and their moments of television (and cinema) remain, unfortunately, much in need of discovery.

   Whenever I visit a foreign-language website and click the mouse for an electronic translation, I am reconfirmed in my judgment that of all the Ed Woods of the written word whose genius for mangling the language has enriched my reading life for decades, my computer is second to none.

   May I give a for instance? Night and Fear, a collection of stories by Cornell Woolrich that I put together a few years ago to celebrate the centenary of his birth, was recently published in Italian by Feltrinelli Editore. Here’s what I learned about the book from various Italian websites, Englished by my trusty computer. “In order to from birth celebrate the one hundred years of the ‘father of noir’ the Cornell Woolrich, its biographer Francis M. Nevins has collected… fourteen storys escapes on reviews pulp.”

   Of “New York Blues,” the final tale in the collection, which “exited posthumous in 1970,” I was told that it’s “a splendid compendium, a epitaffio that it encloses in little pages all the reasons of the fiction of Woolrich: stilistico virtuosismo, evocativa force, dominion of the solitudine, struggimento for impossible loves, madness, desperation and dead women, that is all the colors of the buio.” Woolrich evokes “the tension of a city noir for excellence but in whose comparisons a visceral and unconditioned love can be nourished, nearly it blinds to you from its lights and the migliaia of dowels of solitudini that of it make the greatest agglomerate than history that the humanity could conceive….”

   Woolrich’s New York “is a blues warm alternated to a jazz isterico, is a place where however it wants courage to us, is for living that in order to kill, is a cigarette to the poison with which you play the life in one night whichever.”

   So that’s what Woolrich was all about! I was wondering.

   Flitting from the master of noir to his nearest rival, I recently stumbled across a factoid about David Goodis which seems not to have surfaced before. It’s long been believed that Warner Bros., to whom Goodis was under contract in the late 1940s, did nothing with the multiple screenplays he wrote and later adapted into his novel Of Missing Persons (1950).

   It turns out however that they did. Those screenplays were the source of “False Identity,” an episode of WB’s 60-minute TV series Bourbon Street Beat, which was aired on ABC during the 1959-60 season and starred Andrew Duggan and Richard Long as a pair of New Orleans private eyes. Air date was May 23, 1960. William J. Hole, Jr. directed from a teleplay by “W. Hermanos,” the house name used by just about everybody who wrote under the counter for WB during the then ongoing writers’ strike. Featured in the cast were Lisa Gaye, Irene Hervey and Tol Avery. How much authentic Goodis material survived the trip through the Warner Bros. TV sausage factory? I’d guess not a whole lot.

   Flitting from fiction to film, I’ve also recently discovered the existence of a previously unknown work by my old friend Joseph H. Lewis (1907-2000), who is best known of course as the director of noir classics like Gun Crazy. During the late Fifties and early Sixties when Joe directed 51 episodes of Four Star’s hit TV series The Rifleman over its five-year run, he also helmed a few segments of other Four Star shows like The Detectives, and also, as I learned a few weeks ago, an episode of the Dick Powell Theater (NBC, 1961-63), a 60-minute anthology series.

   “The Hook” (March 6, 1962) is about an investigator for the California Attorney General’s Office (Robert Loggia) who comes to suspect that the rule of a powerful underworld boss (Ray Danton) is about to be challenged by a former mob kingpin (Ed Begley) just released from prison. Finding out about this film was easy. The hard part begins when I try to track down a copy.

   Like everyone who went to school when I did, I had great gobs of poetry shoved down my throat in my English classes, but I never developed a fondness for it except for what I discovered on my own, like the hilarious verses of Ogden Nash. My first sale to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine more than 35 years ago was a piece of criminous doggerel in the Nash manner, and every so often a poem has figured in one of my stories or novels — for example, the toad quotations from Shakespeare, Kipling and Karl Shapiro in “Toad Cop.”

   But those facts plus my having lived a block from Howard Nemerov between about 1980 and his death hardly qualify me as an authority on poetry. So it was rather odd that several months ago I was offered a princely fee by the Poetry Foundation, which has an endowment in the megamillions, to write an essay for its website on the links between poetry and crime fiction. That piece, along with Ed Park’s excellent discussion of poetry in the novels of Harry Stephen Keeler, is now a few clicks away from anyone with a computer at www.poetryfoundation.org.

   The final version of my brief essay discusses only Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald. But that thing went through more drafts than one of the toads in “Toad Cop” has warts, and a slew of interesting interfaces between poetry and mystery fiction wound up on the electronic cutting-room floor. This is why I plan to turn the final item in several future columns into a sort of Poetry Corner.

   For space reasons I’ll keep my first specimen short and light. Fatal Descent (1939) was the only collaboration between two of the giants of the golden age of detective fiction, John Rhode and Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr). Its plot seems to have been devised by both men but the writing is all Carr, a fact for which anyone who’s read Rhode’s dry-as-dust prose will thank whatever gods there be.

   Investigating the impossible murder of a publisher while alone in a descending elevator, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Hornbeam takes time out to read a newspaper account of a speech by one of the suspects entitled “A Peak in Darien.” The inspector is unversed (sorry, couldn’t resist) in poetic allusion. “What’s Darien?” he asks Dr. Horatio Glass. “I’m not sure,” that brilliant amateur sleuth replies. “It’s a place where you’re supposed to stand silent and look at the Pacific. Why are you interested in all that guff, anyway?”

   To the poetryphiles who read this column I promise that my next specimens will be more respectful.

  Hello Steve,

   I would like to submit a follow-up on the interesting observations about The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (for which, incidentally, Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Collins’s “The Moonstone” were also planned, but remained unproduced) and Orson Welles Great Mysteries.

   Orson Welles Great Mysteries, produced by Anglia Television (an independent British TV company serving the commercial network for the east of England), was a syndicated (taped) series of 26 half-hour episodes and was first broadcast in the London area from 6 July to 18 December 1974 (1st series) and then 18 September to 16 December 1975 (2nd series). The suitably haunting title music was by John Barry. Unfortunately, a very-unhaunting Orson Welles was brought in to introduce the stories, garbed in a black, swirling cloak and a slouch hat (suggesting the appearance of an Oliver Hardy as The Shadow).

    The story sources for the individual episodes are as follows:

   Captain Rogers (based on a story by W.W. Jacobs)
   The Leather Funnel (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
   A Terribly Strange Bed (Wilkie Collins)
   La Grande Breteche (Honore de Balzac)
   The Dinner Party (James Michael Ullman)
   Money To Burn (Margery Allingham; dramatised by Michael Gilbert)
   In the Confessional (Alice Scanlon Reach; with Milo O’Shea as Father Crumlish.
   Unseen Alibi (Bruce Graeme)
   Battle of Wits (Miriam Sharman)
   A Point of Law (W. Somerset Maugham)
   The Monkey’s Paw (W.W. Jacobs)
   The Ingenious Reporter (Pontsevrez)
   Death of an Old-Fashioned Girl (Stanley Ellin
   Farewell to the Faulkners (Mirian Allen de Ford)
   For Sale — Silence (Don Knowlton)
   Inspiration of Mr. Budd (Dorothy L. Sayers)
   An Affair of Honour (F. Britten Austin)
   The Power of Fear (Lawrence Treat; dramatised by N.J Crisp)
   Where There’s a Will (billed as an original script by Michael Gilbert, but wasn’t there an Agatha Christie story…?) Here, Richard Johnson plays Bruce Sexton.
   A Time to Remember (James Reach)
   Ice Storm (Jerome Barry; dramatised by N.J. Crisp)
   Come Into My Parlour (Gloria Amoury)
   Compliments of the Season (O. Henry)
   Under Suspicion (Norman Edwards)
   Trial for Murder (C.A. Collins and Charles Dickens)
   The Furnished Room (O. Henry)

   The script editor for the above series was John Rosenberg, who later became the producer for Anglia TV’s Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected (1979) and (now minus Dahl) Tales of the Unexpected (1980-88). The videotaped look and feel, rather disappointingly, was similar to the earlier Welles series.

   Interestingly, during the year of Dow Hour‘s monthly presentations, 1960, a lesser-known genre author also had his works (or at least his characters) produced — as Diagnosis: Unknown (CBS, July-September). Lawrence G. Blochman’s police pathologist Dr Daniel Coffee was played by Patrick O’Neal (with Cal Bellini as Dr Motilal Mookerji and Chester Morris as Captain Max Ritter) in a series of only 10 hour-long episodes. The mystery here is that this fascinating-sounding series, which nobody seems to have seen, either back then or in more recent times, seems to have disappeared entirely. Fortunately, two of the Dr Coffee books (the collection Diagnosis: Homicide, 1950, and novel Recipe for Homicide, 1952) do crop up on AbeBooks.

MIKE HAMMER: SONG BIRD. 2003. Movie compiled from two episodes of Mike Hammer, Private Eye, May 10 & 17, 1998. Stacy Keach, Shannon Whirrey, with Jack Sheldon, Moira Walley, Frank Stallone. Based on characters created by Mickey Spillane. Director: Jonathan Winfrey.

   As far as I’m concerned, Stacy Keach is Mike Hammer on TV. Not Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, I didn’t say that. But as a savvy, trenchcoat-wearing private eye handy both with a gun (Betsy) and a quip – “Lila B. went through piano players like Janis Joplin did bottles of whiskey” – who just happens to be named Mike Hammer on the small screen, there simply is or was no better.

   The TV series that this film was taken from was the third or fourth time he’d taken the role, if I have the chronology correct. I’m taking this information from http://www.stacykeach.com/hammer-series.htm, but I’ll take the responsibility if I happen to be restating it incorrectly.

1. MICKEY SPILLANE’S MURDER ME, MURDER YOU. (1983, CBS, TV movie)

2. MICKEY SPILLANE’S MIKE HAMMER. (1984-1985, CBS, series). 22 60-minute episodes.

3. THE NEW MIKE HAMMER. (1986-1987, CBS, series). 22 60-minute episodes.

4. MIKE HAMMER, PRIVATE EYE. (1997, syndicated series). 26 60-minute episodes.

    By the time the syndicated series came along, episodes of which I don’t remember ever seeing before, he seems to have mellowed into the part, fitting into the role as if it were an old shoe, an old dog who no longer needs to learn new tricks. In this series Velda was played by Shannon Whirrey, who gets second billing on the DVD case. Whirry began her career playing what are generically called erotic B-movies. Playing Velda was a step up into better roles.

    “Song Bird” is a heartfelt homage to jazz, smoky jazz clubs, jittery, jiving jazz musicians and jazz singers that doesn’t make a lot of sense as a murder mystery, but I’ve watched it twice in the last couple of months, and I’m bound to be watching it a few times more.

    Jack Sheldon in the real world is a wise-cracking jazz singer and trumpet player who in “Song Bird” plays a wise-cracking jazz singer and trumpet player named Des Long who has a jazz band and who’s a good friend of Mike Hammer. Moira Walley’s name is not even on the DVD case. She’s the thin, blonde, and slightly flighty jazz singer Lila B. who drops in for a few sets with Des’s band every so often, as the mood strikes her, and who’s in love with Johnny Dive (Frank Stallone) a gangster who’s gotten in bad with the boss of the mob he’s a member of, and who is not likely to survive very much longer as a result.

    Forget the story. I can’t even find a decent photo of Moira Walley to show you, but she’s as perfect in the role of Lila B. as Jack Sheldon is playing Jack Sheldon. Or Stacy Keach playing Mike Hammer. The rest of the cast may not even need to be there, except that there is a story, one which I’ve already suggested that you forget.

    And forget the lousy reviews that Moira Walley received. Off-key warbling? No way. The role she plays may be off-key, intentionally, but hardly the warbling. A weak vocalist who reaches for every note and only looks flustered and out of it when she’s required to say lines? The guy must have been watching another movie altogether. Forget him too.

    Watch this one for the music, and don’t forget to listen. They’re all having a great time, gats, gorgeous girls and gams (and more), gangsters and jazzheads, and so did I.

MYSTERY SERIES CHARACTERS: FROM THE PRINTED PAGE TO TELEVISION
         – Addenda and Corrections, by Marvin Lachman.

The primary list appeared on the original Mystery*File website in five parts:

CORRECTION– Ashdown, Clifford (joint pseudonym of R. Austin Freeman and John James Pitcairn).

NEW– Ashe, Gordon (pseudonym of John Creasey).   On April 30, 1962 on the American series Thriller, there was an episode, “The Specialists,” that was based on the Ashe series about PATRICK DAWLISH, though the lead character, played by Lin McCarthy, had his name changed to Peter Duncan.

CORRECTION– Biggers, Earl Derr.   The name of the series was The New Adventures of Charlie Chan.

NEW– Buchan, John.   Hannay was a 1988 British series, with Robert Powell as RICHARD HANNAY. Powell had previously played Hannay in a 1978 film remake of The 39 Steps.

ADDITION– Chandler, Raymond.   Danny Glover played Marlowe in the adaptation of the short story “Red Wind” in the Fallen Angels series on November 26, 1995. In the 1998 TV movie Poodle Springs, based on the novel which Robert B. Parker completed from material left by Chandler, James Caan was Marlowe.

ADDITION– Charteris, Leslie.   Ivor Dean was INSPECTOR TEAL to Moore’s Templar. Simon Dutton was Simon Templar in a British series of six TV movies under the umbrella heading of Mystery Wheel of Adventure in 1989.

CORRECTION AND ADDITION– Christie, Agatha.   Regarding the series with Joan Hickson as Jane Marple, eliminate the word “Mystery!” and change the title of the first show to The Body in the Library. David Horovitch played DETECTIVE INSPECTOR SLACK on that show. Harry Andrews was SUPT. BATTLE in The Seven Dials Mystery which aired in Britain on Mobil Showcase on April 16, 1981. Philip Jackson was CHIEF INSPECTOR JAPP during the series in which David Suchet played Poirot.

NEW– Cody, Liza.   ANNA LEE was played by Imogen Stubbs in a 1995 series aired in the U.S. on the A & E network.

NEW– Deighton, Len.   Ian Holm was BERNARD SAMSON in Game, Set, and Match, a 1988 TV series based on Deighton’s trilogy.

ADDITION– Dexter, Colin.   Kevin Whateley continued his role from the Inspector Morse series, albeit with a promotion, as INSPECTOR LEWIS in the 2006 TV movie of that title.

ADDITION– Fair, A.A. (Pseudonym of Erle Stanley Gardner).   In 1959 a U.S. TV pilot film starred Billy Pearson as DONALD LAM and Benay Venuta as BERTHA COOL.

NEW– Gould, Chester.   His DICK TRACY was played by Ralph Byrd (who had played him in the movies) in a 1950-1951 American series.

NEW– Hamilton, Nan.   ISAMU (“SAM”) OHARA was played by Pat Morita in a 13-episode American series in 1987-1988.

NEW– Holton, Leonard (pseudonym of Leonard Patrick O’Connor Wibberly).   George Kennedy was Father Samuel Cavanaugh in the 1971-1972 American series Sarge. According to William L. De Andrea because of similarities to Holton’s books about FATHER JOSEPH BREDDER, a royalty was paid to the writer while Sarge was aired.

NEW– Hornung, E.W.   His RAFFLES was played by Anthony Valentine in a 1977 series for Yorkshire TV in England.

ADDITION– James, P.D.   CORDELIA GRAY was played by Helen Baxendale in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman on Mystery! in 2000.

ADDITION– McBain, Ed.   There was also a 1995 TV movie, Lightning, about the 87th Precinct, with Randy Quaid as Steve Carella, Alex MacArthur as Bert Kling, Ving Rhames as Artie Brown, Alan Blumenfeld as Ollie Weeks, and Ron Perkins as Meyer Meyer.

CORRECTION– Murphy, Warren and Sapir, Richard.   The name of the actor who played Remo Williams was Jeffrey Meek, not Jeffrey Weeks.

ADDITION– O’Donnell, Peter.   In 1982 ABC in the U.S. made an hour-long pilot film with Ann Turkel as MODESTY BLAISE and Lewis Van Bergen as WILLIE GARVIN.

ADDITION– Orczy, Baroness.   Anthony Andrews was SIR PERCY BLAKENEY, aka THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL in a 1982 British TV movie The Scarlet Pimpernel.

ADDITION– Parker, Robert B.   Robert Urich starred in several Spenser for Hire TV movies after the series ended, and then he was replaced by Joe Mantegna. Avery Brooks starred in his own TV series, A Man Called Hawk, on ABC in 1988-1989. One of Parker’s more recent character, POLICE CHIEF JESSE STONE has been played by Tom Selleck in two TV movies, Night Passage and Stone Cold. Polly Shannon played attorney ABBY TAYLOR.

ADDITION– Peters, Ellis (pseudonym of Edith Pargeter).   Tom Lowell played DOMINIC FELSE in the adaptation of her Edgar-winning novel Death and the Joyful Woman on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, April 12, 1963.

ADDITION– Quarry, Nick (pseudonym of Marvin H. Albert).   Though NICK QUARRY was not a series character in the books Albert wrote as “Quarry,” there was a 1968 TV pilot film, based on Albert’s work, starring Tony Scotti as Nick Quarry.

ADDITION– Rankin, Ian.   Ken Stott replaced Hannah as Rebus.

NEW– Reichs, Kathy.   Emily Deschanel is DR. TEMPERANCE BRENNAN in the current (2005-   ) TV series Bones.

NEW– Rogers, Samuel.   Ralph Roberts was PAUL HATFIELD in “Don’t Look Behind You,” an episode on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour Sept. 27, 1962.

ADDITION– Sayers, Dorothy L.   Richard Morant played Bunter during the 1980s.

ADDITION– Simenon, Georges.   Jean Richard played Maigret in a French TV series c.1970.

ADDITION– Smith, Martin (Cruz).   Ron Leibman was ROMAN GREY in The Art of Crime, a 1975 TV movie based on his novel Gypsy in Amber.

ADDITION– Spillane, Mickey.   Rob Estes was Mike Hammer in the TV movie Deader Than Ever (1996).

NEW– Stevenson, Richard.   Chad Allen played his DONALD STRACHEY in two TV movies Third Man Out (2005) and Shock to the System (2006) aired on the Here! Network.

ADDITION– Stout, Rex.   Also on the 2001 series, Colin Fox was FRITZ BRENNER; Kari Matchett was LILY ROWAN; Conrad Dunn was SAUL PANZER; Saul Rubinek was LON COHEN; Trent McMullen was ORRIE CATHER; R.D. Reid was SGT. PURLEY STEBBINS; Ken Kramer was DR. VOLLMER; and Fulvio Cecere was FRED DURKIN.

NEW– Thomas, Leslie.   Peter Davison, who also had played Albert Campion, was “DANGEROUS” DAVIES in the British series The Last Detective, based on Thomas’s book.

NEW– Valin, Jonathan.   Gil Gerard played HARRY STONER in the 1989 TV movie Final Notice, based on Valin’s novel.

NEW– Vickers, Roy.   His main series is THE DEPARTMENT OF DEAD ENDS. There are several detectives in this branch, most often Inspector Rason. However, in “The Crocodile Case,” which appeared on Alfred Hitchcock Presents on May 25, 1958, the detective is INSPECTOR KARSLAKE, played by John Alderson. In “The Impromptu Murder,” on the same show on June 22, 1958, it is Robert Douglas as INSPECTOR TARRANT.

ADDITION– Wallace, Edgar.   Hugh Burden played the title role of J.G. REEDER in The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder, a series for Thames Television in England 1969-1971. He also was one of the writers.

NEW– Willis, Ted.   Jack Warner played P.C. GEORGE DIXON in Dixon of Dock Street, a popular British series that ran from 1955 through 1976. Dixon first appeared in Willis’s 1950 novel The Blue Lamp.

NEW– Yates, Dornford.   In She Fell Among Thieves, originally on BBC2’s “Play of the Week” in 1978, Malcolm McDowell was RICHARD CHANDOS SMITH and Michael Jayston was MANSEL.

   This entry began life as a comment by Juri Nummelin to the obituary I did last weekend for Tige Andrews of “Mod Squad” fame, followed by a reply of my own. The combination grew lengthy enough that I decided both comment and reply deserved a post of their own. Juri goes first:

   My reply:

   From the L.A. Times comes word of the death of Tige Andrews:

   Mr. Andrews was born Tiger Androwaous on March 19, 1920 in Brooklyn, N.Y. His parents, immigrants from Syria, reportedly named him after a strong animal to guarantee good health.

   From VARIETY, some more about his career:

   Of the most interest to crime fiction fans, other series on which Mr. Andrews appeared are the ones below, beginning with his earliest. These are all guest appearances, although some may also have been short recurring roles:

   Kraft Mystery Theater, Inner Sanctum, U. S. Marshal, Playhouse 90 (as Frank Nitti), The Grand Jury, The Lawless Years, The Fugitive, The FBI, Police Story, Police Woman, Kojak, Vega$, CHiPs, Quincy M.E., Hawaiian Heat, Street Hawk, and Sledge Hammer!

               “One white…one black…one blonde.”

   Aimed at the youth market, The Mod Squad, in which three troubled youngsters fight crime as undercover agents for the police, was one of the those TV programs that was on the air at exactly the right time and struck precisely the right chord for its viewers. As a precursor to several such series that followed, such as 21 Jump Street, The Mod Squad was on for five seasons between 1968 and 1973.

    From the Mod Squad “unofficial” home page:

   More from the same source. I should apologize for quoting as much as I am here, perhaps, but why not, when someone else has said it this well:

   It was Tige Andrews as the straighter and narrower Captain Greer that pulled the show together, however. As the man in charge, he acted as both a mentor and father figure to the threesome. Gruff but caring, he added the essential balance which helped make the series a success.

   Mr. Andrews’ last appearance on television was on Murder, She Wrote, January 6, 1991, in an episode entitled “Family Doctor.” IMDB states that he played the role of Carmine Abruzzi, but that seems to be in error.

   From the online All Movie Guide comes both a synopsis and a revisionist approach to the credits:

   Personally, I like the All Movie Guide’s version better. I’d greatly prefer that the last time Mr. Andrews’ appeared in a movie or on television, it was as a cop, rather than as a villain. Not that he didn’t play villains during his career, I understand that, but it’s as a policeman that he’ll always be remembered.

          —

      MOD SQUAD – The Books

* Richard Deming:
      o The Greek God Affair (n.) Pyramid 1968
      o A Groovy Way to Die (n.) Pyramid 1968
      o The Sock-It-to-Em Murders (n.) Pyramid 1968
      o Assignment: The Arranger (n.) Whitman 1969
      o Spy-In (n.) Pyramid 1969
      o Assignment: The Hideout (n.) Whitman 1970
      o The Hit (n.) Pyramid 1970

* William Johnston:
      o Home Is Where the Quick Is (n.) Pinnacle 1971

                  Data from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

   As promised in the update at the end of the previous post, here are the appearances of Lt. Columbo in print. Some of these are becoming difficult to find, even with the assistance of the Internet to help track them down. I wish I were able to show you covers of all of them, but it would be rather crowded if I did, or if I could. Some I don’t have copies of myself.

LT. COLUMBO in book form –

* RICHARD LEVINSON & WILLIAM LINK:

* ALFRED LAWRENCE:

* HENRY CLEMENT:

* LEE HAYS:

* BILL MAGEE & CARL SCHENCK:

* WILLIAM HARRINGTON:

   Acknowledgments go as almost always to Allen J. Hubin, Crime Fiction IV, as the primary source for most of this data.

   I’ll also take this an opportunity to thank Mark Murphy one more time for pointing out where I could go on the web to keep finding more information about Lt. Columbo. In his most recent email to me, he added: “A guy named Mark Dawidziak wrote a book, The Columbo Phile, some years ago. It was quite authoritative. I’ve also found this link to an interview with him…”

   He’s right. There are commercials in this on-the-air interview, but you can skip them, and it’s very much worth listening to.

   To sum things up, I hope, without too many more updates, Columbo as a character has been around long enough, and he’s been popular enough, that there’s plenty of information out there on him, either in print or on the Internet. In these last couple of blog entries, I don’t imagine that I’ve added anything that’s really new about him, but hopefully I’ve presented what I’ve discovered in a straight-forward and useful fashion. I’ve also ironed out some of the contradictions popped up as I went along, and tried to set the record straight on a few statements I found that were either incomplete or simply not so.

   Or to put it another way, I certainly learned a lot.

   Here is but another of the alleys that researching can take you, if you are not wary, and even if you are. While looking up The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries — see the previous post — I found a short piece from the NY Times that suggested that Prescription: Murder, the first appearance of Lt. Colombo, the rumpled police detective made so famous by Peter Falk, made its first appearance on the Dow Hour.

   Not so, and I have Mark Murphy to thank for pointing me to a website that has the right stuff, or in other words, the correct information. Of course you can go there to read it for yourself, and in fact you should. I recommend it. But since I had it wrong in my previous post, it behooves me (I always wanted to say that) to at least set up the correct timetable of the events relating to Lt. Columbo in this one.

May 29, 1960. A drama anthology called The Chevy Mystery Show began on NBC. Hosted by Walter Slezak, new scripts were dramatized every Sunday. There were no recurring characters or actors.

July 31, 1960. “Enough Rope,” was that evening’s presentation, an original story written by William Link and Richard Levinson, introducing to the world a police lieutenant named Columbo, played by a veteran character player named Bert Freed, who received “second-to-last billing in the opening credits.” He is not even included in the IMDB listings for that episode.

1962. “Prescription: Murder” the stage play opened, with veteran movie and stage actor Thomas Mitchell playing Lieutenant Columbo. This was Mitchell’s last role: “He died while the show was touring the United States and Canada, before it reached its Broadway premiere.”
   It is not clear whether the play ever reached Broadway. Some sources I’ve seen so far say yes, others say no.

1968. Filmed in 1967, “Prescription: Murder” appeared as a made-for-TV movie, with Peter Falk in the starring role. It was intended to be a one-shot appearance for the character, but fate (and the character’s popularity) had a way of changing things.

March 1, 1971. The pilot for the Columbo TV series was aired: “Ransom for a Dead Man.”

September 15, 1971. Columbo began its regular TV slot as a rotating part of the NBC Mystery Movie, with the first episode entitled “Murder by the Book.” When that overall umbrella series ended, Colombo continued to appear in a series of made-for-TV movies on a irregular basis. “Columbo Likes the Nightlife” was telecast in 2003, a stretch of some 35 years since Columbo began his run back in 1968.

   Peter Falk is now 80 years old. No one could possibly fill his shoes (or raincoat), so this may mark the end of Lt. Columbo on the small screen.

UPDATE [01-26-07] It’s later the same day, and I see that I’ve forgotten to list the books in which Lt. Columbo has appeared over the years, mostly as novelizations of various screenplays, I believe, although I could be wrong on that. It’s late, though, and I think it will wait for another day. (Tomorrow, I hope.)

   If you’ve done any researching into matters bibliographical, you know how it goes. You’re looking up one thing, you find another. In the case at hand, I was trying to pin down some information on a performance of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White on TV in the early 1960s. I found it without too much trouble, but in the process I discovered that it happened to be an episode of a series that not only do I not ever remember seeing, I don’t even remember reading about it: The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries.

   It was on, as it turns out, while I was off in college in a town so small that there we could get only one channel, and even though the local station was an NBC affiliate, I don’t remember taking very many study breaks to watch television. Except for Johnny Carson late at night, I do admit, thinking back upon it, every once in a while.

   More investigating was in order. There’s nothing on the series in my only handy in-print resource, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946-Present, 3rd Edition, by Tim Brooks & Earle Marsh.

   So it was off to the computer and www.imdb.com, and lo, there it is. Here’s a list of the titles of the stories that IMDB says were adapted:

The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries. A series of seven television specials hosted by John Welch.

Season 1, Episode 1: The Bat [Mary Roberts Rinehart]
Original Air Date: 31 March 1960

Season 1, Episode 2: The Burning Court [John Dickson Carr]
Original Air Date: 24 April 1960

Season 1, Episode 3: The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins]
Original Air Date: 23 May 1960

Season 1, Episode 4: The Dachet Diamonds [Richard Marsh]
Original Air Date: 20 September 1960

Season 1, Episode 5: The Inn of the Flying Dragon [Sheridan Le Fanu]
Original Air Date: 18 October 1960

Season 1, Episode 7: The Great Impersonation [E. Philips Oppenheim]
Original Air Date: 15 November 1960

   But continuing on and doing some Googling around, I came up with the following, a short piece from the NY Times. Where does this fit in?

PLOT DESCRIPTION for Columbo [TV series]

and this, also from a Time magazine TV column:

   It doesn’t make sense for me to try to put anything more together if a episode log has already been done. If someone’s already done one, please let me know about it. My attention has been gotten.

[UPDATE 01-25-07] To answer my own question, yes, according to the BFI website, “The Cat and the Canary” is a Dow program and correctly should be number five in the series, contrary to IMDB, with “The Inn of the Flying Dragon” number six.

   Of course, to return to the theme I began at the beginning of this blog entry, while checking out the Dow series, I came across yet another series called Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries (1973-74), which is also not found in B&M, but is included on IMBD. What network it was on, or whether it was syndicated, I know nothing more.

   I never saw this one, either. Whatever you can tell me about it would once again be appreciated.

[UPDATE: 01-26-07] Mark Murphy sent me an email which addresses two issues. The first one deals with the genesis of the Lt. Columbo character — as hard as it may be to believe, the piece quoted above from the New York Times has gotten several of its facts wrong. Mark has led me to enough information about the origins of the character that I’ve decided to make a separate post out it. Look for it soon.

Mark also goes on to say, and I’m quoting here:

   Thank you, Mark. Yes, I remember when that “family hour” ruling came along, prompted by the FCC. It was early in 1975. Not only did it provide for the “family hour” between 7 pm and 8, but the network heads adopted a self-declared “family viewing” hour in the first hour of network evening prime-time (8:00-9:00 P.M., Eastern time). Quick to complain was Norman Lear producer of the popular but still controversial comedy, All in the Family. Follow the link to learn more about it.

[UPDATE 01-27-07] Taken from a followup email from Mark M. —

   That’s because those fellows have minds of their own. But all seriousness aside, it beginning to look as though someone (maybe even me) should do some annotations for the Orson Welles series. Who wrote the original stories, and who the cast members were for each episode, that sort of thing.

   Yes, it’s probably all on IMDB, but you have to work to find it. Which is also probably why I won’t get to it right away, either.