Bullet Points: Almost Mother’s Day Edition

• The Strand Magazine has gained fame in recent years for unearthing previously unpublished works by well-recognized authors, among them James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Shirley Jackson. Its latest issue includes “First Squad, First Platoon,” a story penned in the 1940s by future Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. As The Guardian explains, this 70-year-old tale “concerns the experiences of American paratroopers in the Philippines towards the end of [World War II].” Serling had fought with the U.S. Army against Japanese forces in the Philippines, and as National Public Radio relates, “First Squad, First Platoon” was “one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war ‘out of his gut.’”

• In its mammoth preview of the finest new TV crime series coming to British screens in 2024, The Killing Times mentioned ITV’s After the Flood. starring Sophie Rundle and Philip Glenister. That program debuted on the other side of the pond in January, and will finally make its way to BritBox beginning on Monday, May 13. Its six episodes, we’re told, are “set in a town hit by a devastating flood. When an unidentified man is found dead in a lift in an underground car park, police assume he became trapped as the waters rose, and as the investigation unfolds PC Joanna Marshall [Rundle] … becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to him. How did he get in the lift and why does no one know who he is? The mystery unfolds across the series while we also see the real impact of climate change on the lives of residents in this small town. The floods threaten to expose secrets, and fortunes and reputations are at stake. But how far will people go to protect themselves?” After the Flood’s first two episodes will drop on May 13, with two more due on successive Mondays until May 27.



• The recent announcement of 18 nominees longlisted for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year prize has drawn criticism, due to an absence of books by authors of color. Part of the reason for said dearth, a spokesperson for the Theakston Old Peculier crime writing festival in Harrogate told The Guardian, is that “of the books submitted for the awards this year, just 7% were by known authors of colour ... ‘This year’s longlist is unusual—the longlist for the awards over the last six years have all featured writers of colour—but not something we take lightly.” Author Vaseem Khan, chair of the British Crime Writers’ Association and last year’s Theakston festival programming chair, told the newspaper: “I have seen, first-hand, the efforts the committee has made to bring more writers from minority communities on to the programme. While these efforts have seen more writers of colour being programmed in recent years, we haven’t yet seen as many submitted for the awards. This is something the committee is acutely aware of and is actively working with the industry to find solutions to.” The winner of the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel is scheduled to be declared on Thursday, July 18.

• Sherlock Holmes fans are already looking forward to the premiere, in August, of Nicholas Meyer’s sixth novel featuring the great detective, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (Mysterious Press), and Bonnie MacBird’s The Serpent Under (Collins Crime Club), coming in January 2025. Now, In Reference to Murder brings word that “The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has approved a new novel from thriller writer Gareth Rubin [The Turnglass] that will focus on Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s greatest nemesis, endorsing Rubin’s book, Holmes and Moriarty, as a worthy successor. ‘Gareth has drawn these characters very well, including Colonel Moran, who is key to this story,’ said Richard Pooley, Conan Doyle’s step-great-grandson. ‘Moran was once described by Holmes as “the second most dangerous man in London,” and he tells half of this new mystery. As Moriarty’s right-hand man, he only crops up in a couple of original Holmes stories, I believe.’” Publisher Simon & Schuster plans to release Holmes and Moriarty in the UK on September 12.

• Iowa author Max Allan Collins says a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign will be launched imminently in support of True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks, “a fully immersive audio production based on the first book in the series, True Detective. I am writing all ten scripts myself.” The drama will star Todd Stashwick (Star Trek: Picard) as Depression-era Chicago gumshoe Heller. “It’s truly odd returning to True Detective (no relation to the HBO show that came after) for the first time in over forty years (!),” writes Collins. “Also the form is one that has special challenges. The story has to be told in completely audio terms. Its length ultimately will be three times longer than a film adaptation, but still substantially shorter than the 100,000-word novel I’m adapting.” Click here to listen to a “proof-of-concept audio” based on the first chapter of Collins’ 1991 novel Stolen Away.

• Here’s a new book destined to find a place on my shelves: Jon Burlingame’s Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn, and Music for TV (BearMedia). Spy Vibe quotes a press release as saying:

Henry Mancini (1924-1994) is renowned as the Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer of such timeless standards as “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” as well as such memorable instrumental themes as “The Pink Panther” and “Baby Elephant Walk.” But preceding all of them was the wildly popular theme from Peter Gunn, a television series whose soundtrack won the very first Grammy ever awarded for Album of the Year. Award-winning author and journalist Jon Burlingame chronicles the back-story of Peter Gunn and how its music propelled Mancini to fame and fortune, launching a decades-long collaboration with filmmaker Blake Edwards that encompassed nearly 30 movies, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Victor/Victoria and beyond.

Burlingame (author of six books including The Music of James Bond and Music for Prime Time) relates the untold story of Peter Gunn and its companion series Mr. Lucky; examines the music Mancini wrote for both series and their chart-topping success as modern jazz albums; and tells how this 1958-61 period in TV history set the stage for one of the most remarkable careers of any American composer in the Twentieth Century.

• With Mother’s Day coming on Sunday, Janet Rudolph has updated her list of associated mysteries for the blog Mystery Fanfare.

• From The Guardian: “Three of the four leading roles in the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestselling mystery book [The Thursday Murder Club] have now been cast, with A-listers Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley set to play septuagenarian sleuths in a retirement community.”

• I had forgotten that Apple TV+ commissioned an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1987 novel, Presumed Innocent, as an eight-part limited series starring and executive produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. But Crimespree Magazine has posted a trailer for it. The show itself will premiere on Wednesday, June 12.

• And British network ITV confirms that the coming 14th season of Vera, the TV mystery series starring Brenda Blethyn and based on popular novels by Ann Cleeves, is going to be its last. The Killing Times says that that new season, to air initially in early 2025, “will comprise two feature-length episodes.”

• Released yesterday: The Spring 2024 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. Its cover story looks at the career of best-selling Northern Irish writer Steve Cavanagh, the author most recently of a standalone thriller titled Kill for Me, Kill for You. Other contents include a profile of British crime-fictionist Cara Hunter (Murder in the Family); the early nominees to DP’s “Best of 2024” list; Kevin Burton Smith’ wrap-up of recent private-eye yarns; Robin Agnew’s cozy-crime and historical-crime reviews; Craig Sisterson’s interview with Michael Bennett, author of Better the Blood and Return to Blood; and Mike Ripley’s retrospective on English litterateur Nevil Shute. Subscriptions to Deadly Pleasures are available here.

• Late last month, when I posted the longlists of contenders for this year’s Dagger Awards, sponsored by the British Crime Writers’ Association, I neglected to mention that the CWA had also announced its shortlist of a nominees for the 2024 Margery Allingham Short Mystery prize. Those candidates are:

— “Olga Popova,” by Susan Breen
— “The Pact,” by Kirsten Ehrlich Davies
— “A Quarrel Between Friends,” by Emma O’Driscoll
— “The Ladies’ Tailor,” by Meeti Shah
— “Horses for Courses,” by Camilla Smith
— “Right Place Wrong Time,” Yvonne Walus

Tales submitted to this annual contest must be under 3,500 words in length and follow the spirit of English author Allingham’s rule that “The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.” This year’s winner will be declared on Friday, May 10, during an evening Daggers shortlist reception at CrimeFest, in Bristol, England.

• I’m very sorry to hear about the passing of Frederick W. Zackel at age 77. In addition to his two decades spent as a teacher of literature, writing, and the humanities at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, Zackel published a variety of crime-fiction works, beginning with the 1978 private-eye novel Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978), which was adapted as a TV movie in 1983 starring O.J. Simpson. In this long-ago piece for January Magazine, he recalled how he got start in fiction writing with help from the great Ross Macdonald. Zackel periodically sent me e-mail notes about pieces in The Rap Sheet, and was generous in his encouragement of my efforts to stay apprised of developments in the crime-fiction field. I believe the last time I heard from him, though, was at the end of 2022. He died on December 24, 2023, but it was only a recent note from blogger-author Patti Abbott’s that brought his demise to my attention. Rest in peace, my friend.

• And a moderately less-belated farewell to New York City-reared actor Terry Carter (born John Everett DeCoste), who breathed his last on April 23 at age 95. Although I remember him best for his seven years spent playing Dennis Weaver’s sidekick, Sergeant Joe Broadhurst, on the NBC Mystery Movie segment McCloud, Carter first became widely known as a weekend newscaster—“the first Black TV news anchor for Boston’s WBZ-TV Eyewitness News, where he also became their first opening night drama and movie critic,” recalls Variety. His initial small-screen TV entertainment break came with his casting as Private Sugie Sugarman on the 1955-1959 CBS sitcom The Phil Silvers Show. He went on to guest spots on Naked City, The Defenders, and The Bold Ones before landing his McCloud gig. Carter subsequently took the regular role of Colonel Tigh on the original Battlestar Galactica series, and also appeared on The Jeffersons, The Fall Guy, and One West Waikiki. But his career was not spent only in front of the cameras; as The New York Times notes, “Mr. Carter formed his own production company in 1975 and made educational documentaries. In the 1980s, he expanded into more sophisticated documentaries for PBS, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1988, his two-part documentary, A Duke Named Ellington, for the PBS American Masters Series, became the United States entry in television festivals around the world.”

NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: “There Ya Go!”

(Editor’s note: This contribution to our Mystery Movie tribute comes from Georgia’s Ivan G. Shreve Jr. Due to his almost-lifetime obsession with classic films, vintage television, and old-time radio, Shreve declares himself “not fit for normal employment.” Therefore, he spends most of his time writing the nostalgia blog Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, as well as contributing essays to Edward Copeland on Film ... and More and editing the “Classic Chops” feature at The Large Association of Movie Blogs. Occasionally Shreve scores a paying gig as a freelance writer for Radio Spirits, the world’s largest old-time radio mail-order company, for which he is currently working on liner notes for a collection of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon programs, to be released later this fall.)

I was 9 years old when I was allowed to stay up a little past my bedtime in order to watch The NBC Mystery Movie on Sunday nights ... a pretty heady deal for a kid that age, though at the time I could only see the first half of each episode and wouldn’t learn the denouement until I got older and could catch the reruns on CBS’ late-night schedule. I vividly remember the flashlight in the main title sequence and Henry Mancini’s piercing theme music--and while I was probably too young to enjoy the nuances of Peter Falk’s Columbo (again, a series I revisited later on in life), I always enjoyed the romantic comedy banter of San Francisco Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan (Rock Hudson) and his ditzy wife, Sally (Susan Saint James), on McMillan & Wife, trading quips while at the same time solving baffling mysteries in the Bay Area.

But when I think back on The NBC Mystery Movie, the series that made the most indelible impression on me was McCloud. I don’t know why--it could be the iconic image of the main character, Sam McCloud (played by Dennis Weaver), riding horseback through the streets of the Big Apple, or it could be that whenever New York City Chief of Detectives Peter B. Clifford (J.D. Cannon) bellowed “McCloud!” because the relocated New Mexico marshal did something to incur his wrath (which didn’t take much) it always made me laugh out loud. To this day, whenever I catch the prolific Cannon in any movie or TV show guest role I find myself shouting the very same thing.

I’m a die-hard Gunsmoke fan, and have been since I was able to wobble over to the TV set and turn it on. But when Gunsmoke was still on in prime time and not yet put out to pasture at the ol’ Syndication Ranch, Matt Dillon’s faithful deputy was Festus Haggen; I wouldn’t see the earlier episodes with Chester Goode--the role that made actor Weaver a household name--until much later on ... and as a fierce partisan of the radio Gunsmoke, I have to come clean and confess that Weaver’s interpretation of the character made famous by radio veteran Parley Baer simply wasn’t up to snuff. There was something sort of phony about Weaver’s Goode, from his gimpy leg to his Texas drawl (indeed, Dennis hailed from Missouri)--his 1959 Emmy Award be damned. I’ve never seen the series that Weaver left Gunsmoke for (Kentucky Jones), and as far as Gentle Ben

goes, all I remember is wanting the bear to eat annoying child actor Clint Howard.

(Left) Clips from Coogan’s Bluff. It gave McCloud its premise.

So McCloud remains for me the series with which I strongly identify Dennis Weaver ... a gig that fit him like a glove. The “fish-out-of-water” concept of the series certainly wasn’t anything new (it had actually been borrowed from a 1968 film, Coogan’s Bluff, starring Clint Eastwood), but Weaver’s portrayal of the down-home New Mexico lawman-philosopher experiencing the culture clash that was New York City was simply sublime; McCloud’s good-natured unflappability (he rarely took umbrage at an insult hurled in his direction) made him a most welcome presence in TV households, and like the celebrated Lieutenant Columbo, he projected a sort of country-boy naïveté that left people with whom he came into contact bewildered and off-guard while he was putting his analytical police skills to good use. McCloud also belied his clodhopper origins by demonstrating a suavity with the ladies, frequently romancing the show’s female guest stars and in many installments Diana Muldaur (who played his steady girlfriend, newspaper writer Chris Coughlin).

Before Atlanta, Georgia, affiliate WSB-TV swapped out the Retro Television Network for Me-TV, I could return to those great boob-tube experiences of the past because RTN would rerun McCloud episodes (alternating with McMillan & Wife and George Peppard’s Banacek) on Saturday evenings ... and to my surprise, the show still holds up as solid as ever. It serves as a historical document of what NYC was like in the late 1960s/early 1970s (a metropolis on the eve of an economic crisis) and features a superlative cast not only in J.D. Cannon, but also Terry Carter as the world-weary Sergeant Joe Broadhurst (Sam McCloud’s reluctant partner) and a young Teri Garr as the endearingly wacky Sergeant Phyllis Norton. But atop it all is Dennis Weaver, heckbent for leather as he straddles his steed through the Naked City, riding herd on the bad guys and criminal element that would threaten his beloved (if adopted) city. It made me a Weaver fan for life.

NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: Dennis Weaver Shunned the Celebrity Life

“I guess I live pretty much like anybody anywhere,” McCloud star Dennis Weaver told TV Guide’s Tom Burke, when he interviewed the actor for that magazine’s June 30, 1973, issue. The piece mentions Weaver’s growing up in Joplin, Missouri, his big Broadway break, the Gunsmoke years that “made him rich,” and his fondness for meditation and clean living. Oh, and also raw milk.

Click on these pages for more readable enlargements.

NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: “McCloud”

(The second entry in our long-running succession of posts highlighting shows featured in the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series.”)

Title: McCloud

Starring: Dennis Weaver

Original Run: 1970-1977 (45 episodes, plus pilot), NBC-TV

Premise: Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud of Taos, New Mexico, is assigned on a semi-permanent basis to the New York Police Department in order to study big-city law-enforcement practices. McCloud’s outsider perspective and laid-back, sometimes seat-of-the-pants approach to bringing down malefactors often lead to his cracking cases that the regular Manhattan constabulary might have found more daunting. However, the marshal’s methods and persistently folksy manner also put him at odds with his supervisor, by-the-book Chief of Detectives Peter B. Clifford.

Background: McCloud actually debuted a year before the NBC Mystery Movie was introduced. Following a two-hour pilot film that aired on February 17, 1970, the opening episode of McCloud was broadcast on September 16, 1970, as part of Four-in-One, a one-hour “wheel series” that comprised a quartet of unconnected dramas, all sharing NBC’s 10-11 p.m. slot on Wednesdays. The three other rotating shows were Night Gallery, an anthology of horror stories hosted by Rod Serling; San Francisco International Airport, which starred ex-Sea Hunt hunk Lloyd Bridges as the manager of Northern California’s largest and most hectic landing field; and The Psychiatrist, with Roy Thinnes playing Dr. James Whitman, “not your ordinary run-of-the couch” therapist, whose often unorthodox technique “brings him into conflict with the Establishment.” Four-in-One was a no less unorthodox wheel series. Rather than its shows alternating week to week, they each ran for six weeks straight. So audiences were treated initially to half a dozen installments of McCloud, before that late-Wednesday time slot was handed off to Bridges’ San Francisco International Airport, and on down the line. (When they were all rerun in the summer of 1971, however, those four programs were interspersed with each other).

It was a novel approach to programming, but not completely successful. Only two of the four series proved sufficiently popular to win renewals: Night Gallery, which took over the 10 p.m. spot on Wednesdays in the fall of 1971; and the crime drama McCloud, which was folded into the new NBC Mystery Movie.


The 1970 TV Guide Fall Preview spread introducing McCloud as part of the “wheel series” Four-in-One. Click for an enlargement.

The “cowboy in a big city” premise of McCloud bears a remarkable similarity to the plot of director Don Siegel’s 1968 film, Coogan’s Bluff, which starred Clint Eastwood as an Arizona deputy sheriff who’s dispatched to New York City to extradite a captured fugitive wanted for murder in the Grand Canyon State. In fact, Herman Miller, who wrote the script for Coogan’s Bluff, is credited as the creator of McCloud.

Actor Fess Parker, who starred in the 1960s TV series Daniel Boone, said he was offered the role of Sam McCloud, but turned it down. Instead, the part went to former Gunsmoke and Gentle Ben co-star Dennis Weaver, whose down-home demeanor seemed a perfect match. “McCloud is not a bumbler,” wrote Richard Meyers in his book TV Detectives (1981), “he is just an affable, matchstick-chewing, cowboy-hatted and -booted Westerner who carries a walnut-handled six-gun and says ‘There ya go’ a lot. It was as if Deputy Chester Goode of Gunsmoke (who Weaver played) had lost his limp and gotten promoted.” Even Parker stated later that “Dennis Weaver did a great job with [McCloud]; I would never have pulled it off like he did.”

All of this series’ basic elements were established in the pilot (which was originally titled simply McCloud, but has been rerun variously as “Portrait of a Dead Girl” and “Who Killed Miss USA?” ). It found Deputy Marshal McCloud flying from New Mexico to Manhattan to return a runaway witness who was scheduled to give testimony in an upcoming murder trial, only to lose his charge to mysterious kidnappers. McCloud then refused to go home again until he’d recaptured the witness--much to the irritation of Chief Clifford (played by Longstreet alumnus [Peter] Mark Richman), but the delight of Chris Coughlin (Diana Muldaur), a well-off and well-connected author and writer for the New York Chronicle who helped the lawman get his man (back). Stanford Whitmore, who’d worked on Ironside and The Wild Wild West, was responsible for the pilot’s story, but the teleplay was penned by Richard Levinson and William Link, who would soon be better known as the creators of Columbo.

(Left) From the 1970 McCloud pilot film

Strangely, when McCloud became a series, its premise was altered slightly. Rather than the lawman having been introduced to Gotham through that extradition case, the introductory episode included a voice-over in which Chris Coughlin informed viewers that she’d first met and become fond of Sam McCloud during a vacation to New Mexico, and had persuaded him to come to New York to study its policing.* (Why executive producers Glen A. Larson and Leslie Stevens thought this change was necessary is beyond my understanding.) The other modification made was in casting: Richman was out as irascible Chief Clifford, replaced by J.D. Cannon, a past stage actor with credits from Mission: Impossible, Alias Smith and Jones, and the movie Cool Hand Luke. Cannon had also won a certain acclaim for playing the witness who finally cleared Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) of murder in the last episode of The Fugitive.

Additional Notes: Dennis Weaver said at least once that McCloud “allowed me to do what I got into the business to do: to play the leading man.” In a 1973 interview with TV Guide, he described what he saw as his character’s attractions:

He keeps on caring about people in a callous town that doesn’t, and he’s kept his nice, dry, rural sense of humor. And I think his popularity has grown because he’s kept right on cutting through all the red tape, not playing by the rules, even though, in New York, that gets him into all kinds of trouble. We’ve managed to keep him an underdog--a rural man in a very sophisticated situation--and, at the same time, he keeps winning. He’s emerged a hero, and, of course, he’s grown to be something of a romantic ...

Women viewers, presuming that Marshal McCloud’s country charms were shared by the man portraying him on the small screen, wrote Weaver “mash notes.” But it wasn’t exclusively the feminine set who appreciated McCloud. Nielsen audience ratings from the early ’70s (see examples here, here, and here) show the series helping to lead Sunday’s NBC Mystery Movie into the weekly top 10.

McCloud, with his sheepskin coat, bolo tie, and cowboy hat was a classic sort of unflappable western hero transplanted to the modern mean streets. He was a skilled shot, a self-effacing guy seemingly impervious to cynical insults, and--despite exhibiting a bit of sexism at times--he was also a gentleman (which, even back in the early 1970s, was a trait sadly going out of style). Furthermore, the marshal proved himself over and over again to be a sharp investigator--“a sagebrush Sherlock Holmes,” as Chief Clifford once cracked.

Television audiences enjoyed the repartee between McCloud and Clifford, who was constantly trying to saddle his rambunctious “trainee” with boring, out-of-the-way assignments--only to have the New Mexican discover criminality where no one expected it. Viewers also liked McCloud’s evolving friendship with Sergeant Joe Broadhurst (Terry Carter), his usual partner at the 27th Precinct--a more cautious cop who was supposed to keep McCloud out of trouble, but somehow allowed himself to be roped into one unsanctioned investigation after another. And every time Sam McCloud hopped a horse and galloped off after some bad guys--especially when he rode down crowded Manhattan thoroughfares--the show’s ratings spiked. (One such scene became part of the series opening--see below). McCloud even got to lasso some cattle thieves in “The Colorado Cattle Caper” and go up against Jesse James-style train robbers in “Butch Cassidy Rides Again.” Other episodes found the deputy marshal trying to stop a hit man from taking out a tycoon, hunting a killer in Central Park, facing off against rings of auto thieves and female cat burglars, and going undercover into a prison to expose drug traffickers.

Although most of McCloud’s cases kept him in New York City, which in those days suffered from financial declines and escalating crime, he managed to get away to Hawaii, Mexico City, Sydney, and even Paris on occasion. The character’s aw-shucks schtick seemed to work wherever he hung his Stetson, and the program’s writers learned to exploit it to maximum humorous effect. In a 1971 episode titled “Somebody’s Out to Get Jennie,” for instance, there’s a brilliant moment in which a woman says to the marshal, referring to an orchestral composition by Ferde Grofé, “I just love anything Western. The Grand Canyon Suite is one of my favorites.” To which McCloud innocently replies: “Never could afford much more than a room and a bath, m’self.”

Along with Columbo and McMillan & Wife, McCloud remained part of The NBC Mystery Movie throughout its six-year run, winning Dennis Weaver four Emmy Award nominations. Following its cancellation, Weaver joined three other TV series: Stone (1979-1980), which had him playing “a Joseph Wambaugh-esque police sergeant turned crime novelist”; the soap-opera-ish Emerald Point N.A.S. (1983-1984), in which he portrayed the patriarch of a family mired in military traditions and prone to scandals; and a hospital drama called Buck James (1987-1988). None of those, though, caught fire with viewers, not in the way McCloud once had. So in 1989, Weaver was willing to reprise his best-known role in The Return of Sam McCloud. According to the Web site TV Acres, in that teleflick McCloud--now a U.S. senator from New Mexico--“investigates the murder of his niece, who was gathering facts on Chemtel, a nefarious chemical manufacturer” that was “also responsible for a car bomb and a sniper’s bullet that targeted him for assassination.” The movie brought back the series’ old cast, and had part of its action in London. It certainly didn’t measure up to the original, but then who really expected it could?

In 2003, the USA Network announced plans to “reimagine” McCloud for a new generation, casting comedienne Brett Butler (Grace Under Fire) as the marshal who goes to Manhattan. Fortunately, the idea went nowhere. Sam McCloud was allowed to maintain his dignity. And when Dennis Weaver finally passed away from complications of cancer in 2006, at age 81, it was McCloud for which he was best remembered.

Next up: McMillan & Wife

Below is the introduction to the September 21, 1975, episode of McCloud, titled “Park Avenue Pirates.”



* Chris Coughlin’s voice-over introduction to “Man from Taos”: “Two years ago, my cousin the police commissioner of New York City and I decided to spend our vacation in the ancient Indian town of Taos. Naturally, the first place my cousin wanted to visit was the sheriff’s office. That’s how we met Sheriff Sam McCloud. It was the happiest holiday I ever had. Sam and I spent wonderful hours together on the mesa, and through his eyes I learned the beauty of nature. With Sam on my mind, I returned to Taos the next year. This time, I was able to convince Sam that an orientation with New York police modern methods and equipment, under its trainee program, would be of great benefit to his office. In this way, I was able to entice Sam to New York.”

(The 1970 TV Guide preview spread was provided by Brian Sheridan. It’s part of the collection in the Communication Department at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. It is used with permission.)

READ MORE: “McCloud,” by Stephen Bowie (The Classic TV History Blog); “There Ye Go,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); “Marshal Sam McCloud,” by Steven Thompson (Booksteve’s Library).

NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: McCloud’s Boss Was an Angry Man on a Mission

In a cover profile for the May 25, 1974, edition of TV Guide, McCloud co-star J.D. Cannon talked about his youth in Idaho, his theatrical experiences with producer-director Joseph Papp, and his preference to live in New York rather than L.A.

Click on these pages for enlargements.

Get Wheel

I’ve been waiting for months to post this YouTube video, and with the 2007 fall television season beginning in earnest this week, now seems like the right moment.

Yeah, yeah, I know: There’s been a good deal of boob-tube nostalgia suffusing this page of late, what with our tributes to Columbo and its star, Peter Falk; our midlife mooning over The Fall Guy’s gal, Heather Thomas; and our remarks on how much better the 1972 television season was than the one before us. But allow me one more indulgence, for it was on this date, 35 years ago, that I officially became a crime-fiction enthusiast. That night, which was a Sunday, marked the season premiere of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, a “wheel-format” series that featured four quite different 90-minute TV mysteries in monthly rotation. Two had debuted together on Wednesday evenings during the 1971-1972 season. One had actually been introduced in 1970. And the last was brand new. All of them stirred my imagination and conspired to make me the crime-fiction fan I am today.

As originally configured, the Mystery Movie comprised a trio of series. The first of these had been introduced by a February 1970 TV flick called McCloud: Who Killed Miss USA? As Richard Meyers recalls in his 1981 history, TV Detectives, that feature found Dennis Weaver playing a matchstick-chewing marshal out of Taos, New Mexico, “who comes to New York to extradite a subpoenaed witness, only to see the witness shanghaied and find himself handcuffed to a fence along a highway. From there he gets involved with the murder of a pageant contestant and runs afoul of the NYPD ...” Inspired by Clint Eastwood’s 1969 film Coogan’s Bluff, and penned by the legendary team of Richard Levinson and William Link (who had previously created the private-eye drama Mannix), this teleflick spawned a series the following fall, part of NBC’s “umbrella rotation,” Four-in-One. It was a peculiar collection, as Four’s three other hour-long, Wednesday night components--Night Gallery, a horror anthology hosted by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling; San Francisco International Airport, which found ex-Sea Hunt stud Lloyd Bridges managing (and just as often policing) the Bay Area’s busy travel hub; and The Psychiatrist, with Roy Thinnes as an unorthodox “shrink”--had nothing to do with crime fiction. Only McCloud and Night Gallery survived their first year; the latter took over Four-in-One’s 10 p.m. slot by itself in 1971, while McCloud--which NBC apparently liked, but did not think could survive on its own--was tucked in with a pair of newcomers in a rotating, 90-minute slot on Wednesdays, just before Night Gallery.

The first of those two raw recruits was the aforementioned Columbo, which was also created by Levinson and Link, and starred Emmy Award winner Falk, who’d received critical acclaim but lesser ratings in a previous TV series venture, The Trials of O’Brien (1965-1966). Columbo was the first show to debut in mid-September 1971 in the NBC Mystery Movie’s new 8:30-10 p.m. slot.

The other series was McMillan & Wife, which came along just in time to save longtime film star Rock Hudson from early retirement. As TV Detectives puts it, “Hudson had proved his acting ability in The Spiral Road (1962) and Seconds (1966), but people still thought of him as Doris Day’s screen husband. When he reached middle age, his roles began to dry up, but he remedied the problem by going into TV ...” McMillan cast Hudson, then in his mid-40s, as lawyer-turned-San Francisco police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan, whose lovely but trouble-magnet spouse was played by former The Name of the Game regular Susan Saint James, then in her mid-20s. (Much was made on the show, at least in early episodes, of this May-December coupling). Created by writer-producer Leonard B. Stern, McMillan & Wife has been described before as part The Thin Man, part Burns and Allen, with “Sally ... as wacky as Gracie and as prone to finding corpses as Nora (or Mrs. North, for that matter),” to quote Richard Meyers. With John Schuck as a well-intentioned but often bumbling police sergeant, and comedienne Nancy Walker as the McMillans’ housekeeper, the show was “so frothy and watchable that disbelief was suspended ...”

For reasons I no longer recall, but that undoubtedly had to do with the fact that Wednesday was a school night and I was still a young teen, I didn’t catch these three series in their first year. It wasn’t until the 1972 fall TV season--when Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife were relocated on the programming schedule under the modified umbrella title The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, to make room for a second rotating sequence of mystery dramas, The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie (which initially comprised Banacek, Cool Million, and Madigan)--that I finally caught up with them.

That was the same year a fourth series joined Columbo, et al.: Hec Ramsey. Produced by Dragnet’s Jack Webb, it starred Richard Boone (Have Gun--Will Travel) as a previously quick-to-draw lawman, Hector “Hec” Ramsey, who had developed a great interest in the aborning science of forensics. After taking the job of deputy police chief in an ambitious Oklahoma railroad town called New Prospect, in 1901, Ramsey set about employing his newfound knowledge to solve murders that seemed, on their face, anyway, to present no clues. In his efforts, he was hampered by an inexperienced but earnest young boss, Oliver B. Stamp (Rick Lenz), but helped by an imperturbable town doctor (played by Webb’s old Dragnet partner, Harry Morgan).

The video at the top of this post is of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie’s main title sequence, either from 1972 or 1973, after Hec Ramsey was integrated into the mix. Even after all these years, I still get a thrill whenever I hear that dramatic theme music, composed by American arranger-conductor Henry Mancini (probably best remembered for writing the themes for The Pink Panther and Peter Gunn, and the song “Moon River” for Breakfast at Tiffany’s).

Unfortunately, times change. And TV shows--even memorable ones--disappear. By the 1974-1975 season, the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie was no more, and its Sunday sister would revert to being called, simply, the NBC Mystery Movie again. Meanwhile, Hec Ramsey had been canceled, supposedly because of “unresolvable disagreements between Boone and Universal Studios,” which produced the western detective drama. It was replaced in the fall of 1974 by Amy Prentiss, an Ironside spin-off series in which Jessica Walter played the San Francisco Police Department’s first female chief of detectives--a position that forced her to do battle with institutional sexism (sometimes pitched her way by an overconfident detective portrayed by William Shatner), at the same time as she worked to solve crimes and rear her pre-teen daughter, Jill (played by Helen Hunt). But only a year later, Amy Prentiss was gone and McCoy, headlined by Tony Curtis, had taken its place. You don’t remember McCoy? Well, you’re probably not alone. The Web site American Classic TV Series offers this brief synopsis:

The McCoy character was a curious concept--a con man with a gambling addiction decides to turn over a new leaf and become a latter-day Robin Hood--to help those who have been financially victimized to regain their money and put the perpetrators in jail.

The concept may have had more than a passing co-incidence with that of the hit 1973 movie “The Sting” in which a con man cons a notorious mob figure and card cheat.

Only four episodes of McCoy were broadcast, before it too went to that great cutting room in the sky. The hole left behind was filled during the fall 1976 season by Quincy, M.E., starring The Odd Couple’s Jack Klugman as a Los Angeles County medical examiner who lived on a houseboat and seemed unable to resist investigating crimes that he, if nobody else, thought were damnably suspicious. Quincy lasted half a year on the Mystery Movie before being cast off as a separate hour-long, weekly series. (It continued showing on NBC till 1983.) After that, the new fourth member of the Sunday rotation was Lanigan’s Rabbi, based on Harry Kemelman’s then-popular Rabbi Small novels (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, etc.). It starred Art Carney as a small-town California police chief who solved crimes with a modicum of divine assistance from his friend, amateur sleuth Rabbi David Small (Bruce Solomon).

Carney always proved to be a watchable performer, but Lanigan’s Rabbi (which was also created by Leonard B. Stern) may have been doomed from the outset, because the Mystery Movie formula was then in its last throes. That same season, Susan Saint James finally divorced herself from McMillan & Wife, leaving Hudson to limp along (and I do mean limp--the show was never the same) in the retitled McMillan. (Wife Sally’s obvious absence was explained by a deadly plane crash.) In 1974, all of the rotating shows had been boosted from their original 90-minute format to two hours long, and many of the stories thereafter seemed rather flabby. Other wheel series had come and gone, and collectively they seemed to have worn out their welcome. Even I, by 1976, was tuning in the NBC Mystery Movie less regularly. The prime-time U.S. TV schedule was blessedly rife with P.I. and police shows by then, and the Mystery Movie series no longer seemed as remarkable as they once had.

Yet now, 35 years later and at a time when most crime/mystery series are either too cute or overly repetitive for my taste, Columbo, McMillan & Wife, McCloud, and their companions are looking awfully good again. All it takes for me is to hear the bouncy theme from McCloud or watch the introduction to McMillan & Wife once more, and I am overcome with nostalgia for those character-driven, often quirky Mystery Movie installments that helped turn my curiosity about crime fiction into a lifelong interest.

READ MORE: “The NBC Mystery Movie” and “A Short History of
Umbrella Series,” by Mercurie (A Shroud of Thoughts); “NBC Mystery Movie Series Guide.”