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.

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LT. COLUMBO in book form –

* RICHARD LEVINSON & WILLIAM LINK:

o Prescription: Murder. French, 1963, pb. [Three-act play.]

* ALFRED LAWRENCE:

o Columbo. Popular Library, pbo, 1972.
o The Dean’s Death. Popular Library, pbo, 1975.

* HENRY CLEMENT:

o Any Old Port in a Storm. Popular Library, pbo, 1975.
o By Dawn’s Early Light. Popular Library, pbo, 1975.

* LEE HAYS:

o A Deadly State of Mind. Popular Library, pbo, 1976.
o Murder by the Book. Popular Library, pbo, 1976.

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* BILL MAGEE & CARL SCHENCK:

o Columbo and the Samurai Sword. Black, hc, 1980. Note: This is one of the very few First Editions published by the Detective Book Club [known for their three-in-one editions, of which this is one, or a third thereof] and as such is rather scarce and hard to find.

* WILLIAM HARRINGTON:

o Columbo: The Grassy Knoll. Forge, hc, 1993.
o Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders. Forge, hc, 1994.
o Columbo: The Hoffa Connection. Forge, hc, 1995.
o Columbo: The Game Show Killer. Forge, hc, 1996.
o Columbo: The Glitter Murder. Forge, hc, 1997.
o Columbo: The Hoover Files. St. Martin’s, hc, 1998.

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   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.