Kimble’s Stumbling First Steps

I try to keep a watch out for crime-fiction-related anniversaries, but I missed a big one yesterday. As Terence Towles Canote wrote in A Shroud of Thoughts, “It was sixty years ago that the running began. On September 17, 1963, the classic show The Fugitive debuted on ABC. The show starred David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, who had been wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder. While he was being shipped to death row, the train carrying him derailed and he managed to escape. Dr. Kimble then went on the run, all the while searching for the one-armed man who had really killed his wife. Pursuing him was Stafford Police Lt. Phillip Gerard, an officer dedicated to the enforcement of the law.”

Over the years, I have read occasional articles about The Fugitive. But I don’t remember learning how difficult it was for creator Roy Huggins to get that hour-long crime drama on the air. Again from Canote:

While Roy Huggins thought the had a great idea in The Fugitive, he initially had trouble interesting anyone in the concept. He showed it to fellow writer Howard Browne, with whom he had worked on such shows as Cheyenne and Maverick. Much to Roy Huggins’s surprise, Howard Browne thought it was a terrible idea for a show. Undeterred, Roy Huggins showed it to his agent … who had nearly the same reaction that Howard Browne had. After he had taken the position at 20th Century Fox, Peter Levathes, then in charge of 20th Century Fox’s television division, asked Roy Huggins for any ideas he had for television shows. He told him his idea for The Fugitive. In the biography Roy Huggins: [Creator of] Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, and The Rockford Files by Paul Green, Roy Huggins said, “When I finished he sat in stricken silence, staring at me as if I had just turned rancid before his very eyes.”

It was while Roy Huggins was still at 20th Century Fox that he received a call from Burt Nodella, who was the executive in charge of development at the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The two had become friends when Roy Huggins was still at Warner Bros., whose shows were aired by the network. Burt Nodella asked Roy Huggins to pitch some idea for TV shows for ABC. He then found himself in a Beverly Hills Hotel suite pitching the idea for The Fugitive to eight ABC executives. The ABC executive[s] sat in silence after Roy Huggins finished his presentation, then let him know that they thought it was a bad idea. Fortunately, Leonard Goldenson, the head [and founding president] of ABC, was also present at the meeting. The various executives turned to him to see what he had to say. Mr. Goldenson loved the idea, stating, “You know, Roy, that is the best f***ing idea I have heard for a television series in my life. When do you want to go to work?”

There’s much more to Canote’s post. Enjoy it all here.

Bullet Points: Happy Distractions Edition

If you can tear your eyes away from this week’s train wreck of a Republican Party convention in Cleveland, here are some crime-fiction-related items worth your attention.

• Please take a moment today to send good wishes in the direction of Alvin, Texas, author Bill Crider (Survivors Will Be Shot Again), whose 75th birthday is coming up on July 28. He reported in his blog yesterday that his doctor wanted him to “check into the hospital ASAP, as he thinks I might be having kidney failure. This can’t be good.” Crider, whose wife of 49 years, Judy, passed away in 2014, has always come across—in print and in person (on those several occasions I’ve seen him at Bouchercons)—as a fine and funny individual. His recent adoption of three abandoned kittens demonstrated his generosity, as well. Our thoughts are with you, Bill. Get well soon.

• Having gained renown for bringing out hard-boiled paperback crime fiction, Hard Case Crime is now preparing to launch a companion comic-books line in association with publishing partner Titan. “Kicking-off the imprint,” reports Comic Book Resources, “are two new crime series: Triggerman by writer Walter Hill, the acclaimed director of The Warriors, and artist Matz (Body and Soul), and Peepland from crime authors Christa Faust and Gary Phillips and artist Andrea Camerini (Il Troio). Also launching in 2017 is a comic adaptation of author Max Allan Collins’ Quarry, which is currently being developed for television.” News-a-Rama adds that Triggerman—which will debut in stores on October 5, “is an operatic Prohibition-era mini-series,” while Peepland—scheduled to be available a week later—is “a semi-autobiographical neo-noir mini-series with a punk edge set in the seedy Times Square peep booths of 1980s New York City.” In his blog, author Collins explains that “no artist has been selected” for his Quarry tale, “and I probably won’t start writing for two or three months; the graphic novel will likely be called Quarry’s War and will deal more directly with his Vietnam experiences than I’ve ever done in the novels.” It’s been many years since I was a regular reader of comic books, but these Hard Case releases are definitely of interest to me, if only because I know some of the writers involved. Also, the issues I’ve seen boast beautiful covers, one of which is shown on the right.

• By the way, that Collins post I just mentioned also features a new trailer for the coming Cinemax TV series, Quarry. It’s apparently narrated by South Africa-born actress Jodi Balfour, who plays Joni, the ex-wife of Collins’ protagonist—looking quite a bit less glamorous than she did in the Canadian series Bomb Girls, which my wife and I are currently in the process of watching on Netflix.

• Another graphic novel of interest: Last Fair Deal Gone Down (12 Gauge), an adaptation of Ace Atkins’ first story starring Louisiana footballer-turned-sometime private eye Nick Travers. The Crimespree Magazine blog says the artwork dramatizing Atkins’ story was done by Marco Finnegan, who is “a fan of the Travers stories and the genre of crime. You feel the mood and the atmosphere on every page.”

• MysteryPeople also weighs in on Atkins’ graphic novel.

• There are apparently three finalists vying for the 2016T. Jefferson Parker Mystery and Thriller Award: Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley (Grand Central); Orphan X, by Gregg Hurwitz (Minotaur); and The Promise, by Robert Crais (Putnam). The Parker award is given out annually by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. It is one of seven categories of prizes sponsored by SCIBA. Winners are expected to be announced during the SCIBA Trade Show to be held in Los Angeles, October 21-22.

• Jose Ignacio Escribano reports in A Crime Is Afoot that “The 2016 Dashiell Hammett Prize—awarded each year by the International Crime Fiction Festival, la Semana Negra de Gijón—has been bestowed to the novel Subsuelo, by the Argentine writer Marcelo Luján.”

• Blogger-editor Janet Rudolph needs submissions to her next edition of Mystery Readers Journal. She says that issue “will focus on mysteries featuring Small Town Cops,” and that she’s “looking for reviews, articles, and Author! Author! essays. Reviews: 50-250 words; articles: 250-1000 words; Author! Author! essays: 500-1,500 words.” The deadline for submissions is August 10. Learn more here.

• Just last month I mentioned on this page that I was very happy to see David Cranmer writing, in the Criminal Element blog, about Isaac Asimov’s trilogy of Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw yarns. Yesterday Cranmer completed his critiques of those science-fiction whodunits, posting this fine piece about The Robots of Dawn (1983) to add to his earlier remarks on The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957). Good going, Mr. Cranmer!

• This is an interesting development: “Steeger Properties, LLC, is pleased to announce that it has added the most prominent pulp magazine ever published, Black Mask, to its intellectual property holdings. As the periodical where the hard-boiled detective story was created and cultivated, Black Mask’s historical significance in popular fiction is unequaled. … Black Mask rejoins Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly in Steeger Properties, LLC’s holdings once owned by Popular Publications Inc. ... This marks the first time in over 50 years that all three titles [are] owned by one entity.”

• If you need a Caribbean mystery fix, check this out.

• Columbo star Peter Falk, who passed away in 2011 at age 83, will be the subject of this week’s installment of TV Confidential, Ed Robertson’s popular two-hour radio talk show. William Link (who, with Richard Levinson, created that NBC Mystery Movie series) and TV critic Mark Dawidziak will join Robertson on the show, which is set to air from Friday, July 22, through Monday, July 25, on a variety of radio stations. It will later be archived here for your enjoyment.

• It was two years ago yesterday that prolific actor James Garner died at 86 years of age. Quite to my surprise, I am still discovering new films and small-screen productions in which he starred. Just last week, for instance, I finally got around to watching 1997’s Dead Silence, adapted from Jeffery Deaver’s 1995 novel, A Maiden’s Grave, and starring Garner as a hostage negotiator.

• Author brothers Lee and Tod Goldberg have won valuable attention in Palm Springs, California’s Desert Sun newspaper for the fact that they “have pulled off a rare feat by both appearing on the same New York Times Best Sellers list at the same time for different books.” (Yes, I know I mentioned this previously.)

• The real reason Showtime’s Penny Dreadful was canceled?

• I was just thinking the other night about how much I’d like to rewatch last year’s thrills-packed Guy Ritchie picture, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—which I very much enjoyed at the time of its release—when what should appear in Bill Crider’s blog but this favorable assessment of that flick as an “overlooked movie.” (Crider also offered this trailer.) These stars having thus aligned, I now have The Man from U.N.C.L.E. stored in my TV queue for imminent viewing.

• Sadly, while Ritchie’s U.N.C.L.E. survived the first round of online voting in the 2016 MTV Fandom of the Year awards, it fell out of the running in round two.

• Stephen Bowie presents a superior write-up in The Classic TV History Blog about The Defenders, the often-acclaimed 1961-1965 CBS-TV legal drama, Season One of which was finally released in DVD format last week by Shout! Factory.

• Meanwhile, Ivan G. Shreve Jr. applauds Shout!’s recent release of Lou Grant: Season One. Lou Grant, you will recall, was the excellent 1977-1982 CBS series in which Edward Asner played the tough but thoughtful city editor of the (fictional) Los Angeles Tribune newspaper. He’d previously appeared as Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Lou Grant: Season Two will go on sale in August.

• Again on the subject of TV programs, have you heard about Wayne State University Press’ evolving collection of releases about such memorable boob-tube productions as Have Gun—Will Travel, The X Files, Maverick, The Fugitive, and Miami Vice? This might be something to keep a watch on for the near future.

• Some author interviews worth your attention: Underground Airlines’ Ben H. Winters goes one-on-one with Lori Rader-Day for the Chicago Review of Books; in that same publication, Lauren Sacks quizzes David Baker (Vintage); Todd Robinson (Rough Trade) chats with Crimespree Magazine; writer-publisher Jason Pinter submits to an interrogation by S.W. Lauden; MysteryPeople turns its attention to both Peter Spiegelman (Dr. Knox) and Douglas Graham Purdy (We Were Kings); James Henry, aka James Gurbutt, talks with Cleopatra Loves Books about his new UK release, Blackwater; Mystery Playground fires questions at Terrence McCauley (A Murder of Crows); In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel discusses the old Sergeant Cuff novels with Martin Edwards; and Camilla Way (Watching Edie) stops by for a bit of a palaver with Crime Fiction Lover.

• Seattleite Vince Keenan, the managing editor of Noir City (the Film Noir Foundation’s “house rag”), offers this short but snappy look back at the film and television career or Roy Huggins, the creator of Maverick and the co-creator of The Rockford Files.

• Despite its hype and publishing success, I found Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-themed Twilight series unreadable, so I won’t be buying her forthcoming adult thriller, The Chemist, which she describes as “the love child created from the union of my romantic sensibilities and my obsession with Jason Bourne/Aaron Cross.” But for those of you who are curious to know more, click over to this Omnivoracious post.

• Darn! I wish I could be in Britain this week to watch “BBC 1’s lavish new adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel, The Secret Agent.” (There’s a trailer at the link.) Fortunately, Wikipedia says this three-part mini-series, starring Toby Jones, will cross the Atlantic at some as-yet-unannounced date, courtesy of Acorn TV.

• In The Guardian, Mark Lawson calls Conrad’s The Secret Agent “a prescient masterpiece that has shaped depictions of terrorism and espionage.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment.

• For folks who like lists, try these on for size. Wolf Lake author John Verdon recommends the “10 Best Whodunits” in Publishers Weekly, while Joseph Finder (Guilty Minds) serves up his picks of the “10 Best Movie Thrillers” on the Strand Magazine Web site.

• Among Brooklyn Magazine’s list of “100 Books to Read for the Rest of 2016” are several crime and mystery fiction picks, including Good as Gone, by Amy Gentry, The Kingdom, by Fuminori Nakamura, and Underground Airlines, by Ben H. Winters.

• From In Reference to Murder: “There are plans afoot to bring the Idris Elba-starring crime drama Luther to the big screen. Luther creator Neil Cross indicated that the Luther movie would play as [a] prequel to the series, meaning that some of the characters from early in the show could return, including Luther’s old partner Ian Reed (Steven Mackintosh), and his sidekick Justin Ripley (Warren Brown). Cross added, ‘It will follow his career in the earlier days when he is still married to Zoe [Indira Varma], and the final scene in the film is the first of the initial TV series.’”

• With only two months to go now (yikes!) before Bouchercon 2016 kicks off in New Orleans, Louisiana, conference organizes have made all six of this year’s Anthony Award-nominated short stories available online here for your consideration.

• Finally, because Donald Trump & Co. are still huffing and puffing and blowing themselves up on stage in Ohio, here’s a note of interest from the online Seattle Review of Books: “Would you care to guess what Donald Trump reads? Is ‘not much of anything’ your answer? The good news is, you’re right! (The bad news is: you’re right.)” More about Trump’s anti-intellectualism can be found here.

Bullet Points: Discoveries and Losses Edition

• The next few days will bring plenty of welcome excitement to the American crime-fiction community. Tonight we can expect to hear which books and fortunate authors have won the 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, presented by the Mystery Writers of America (the list of nominees is here). And then, as Les Blatt reminds me, tomorrow begins this year’s Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, Maryland, during which the latest batch of Agatha Awards is to be handed ’round (click here to be reminded of the contenders). I’ll post the winners in both contests as soon as I receive the results.

• In Reference to Murder reports that “Harper Lee’s biographer, Charles J Shields, believes he’s found a new, previously unknown Harper Lee text, a feature article written for the March 1960 issue of the Grapevine, a magazine for FBI professionals. The article focused on the gruesome [1959] murders of Herb and Bonnie Clutter and their teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon, at their farmhouse in Kansas, the subject of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Lee accompanied Capote, her childhood friend, on his assignment for The New Yorker, reporting on how the community was reacting to the brutal murders.”

• This Sunday, May 1, will bring the sixth and last episode of Grantchester, Season 2, a PBS-TV Masterpiece offering based on James Runcie’s Grantchester Mysteries. (A third season has already been ordered. You will find recaps of the second-season eps here.) Beginning on Sunday, May 8, Masterpiece will begin hosting the final, three-episode run of Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander. Omnimystery News has a brief synopsis of the show; a preview clip is below.



• Here’s something I haven’t seen in, oh, four decades, and might not have spotted even now had it not been for a tip from author-publisher Lee Goldberg. As you may know or perhaps remember, from the fall of 1975 through most of 1978, Robert Wagner and Eddie Albert starred in a CBS-TV detective drama titled Switch. They portrayed Los Angeles private-eye partners, Wagner’s Peterson T. Ryan being an erstwhile con man, while Albert played retired bunco cop Frank McBride. A few years ago, I managed to purchase a bootleg copy of the Season 1 episodes of Switch (the show’s best year, from what I recall), but the guy who sold it to me didn’t also have available the series’ 90-minute pilot film, Las Vegas Roundabout (originally shown on March 21, 1975). Ever since, I’ve been on the lookout for that pilot—and thanks to Goldberg, I finally found it! Click here to watch the movie for yourself. It co-stars Sharon Gless, Charlie Callas, Charles Durning, Jaclyn Smith, and Ken Swofford.

• In addition to carrying early reviews of Shaft: Imitation of Life, Part 3, the latest graphic-novel collaboration between by David F. Walker and artist Dietrich Smith, Steve Aldous—author of The World of Shaft—has posted in his blog Dynamite Entertainment’s Robert Hack-painted cover for the paperback reprint of Ernest Tidyman’s original, 1970 novel, Shaft, due out in August.

• Vince Keenan has a splendid piece in his blog about screenwriter and novelist Roy Huggins (1914-2002), who’s best known for creating TV series such as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, and The Rockford Files, but who also scripted the 1949 noir film Too Late for Tears.

• Critic-anthologist Sarah Weinman notes, in the latest edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady, that

Masako Togawa, icon of Japanese cabaret and of crime fiction, died earlier this week in her mid-80s (I’ve seen reports of her being 83 and 85). Her work was woefully under-translated into English; just four of dozens of novels, and a single short story that [Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine] published in the late 1970s. My own favorites are The Master Key and Lady Killer, dark, psycho-sexual examinations of femaleness and oppression that were weird and prescient, and both fit well within American and UK domestic suspense and also blasted right past. I also wish I could have seen the TV show she starred in and produced, Playgirl, which essentially predicted Charlie’s Angels but without the overseeing male specter; it was all badass women. It’s sad to think Togawa’s death might spur some enterprising publisher to translate and issue her work in a proper manner, but if that’s what it takes, then somebody do that. (Also see Jiro Kimura’s short obit and reminiscence.)

• My favorite cover of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man.

• Congratulations to Linda Boa and her crime fiction-oriented blog Crimeworm, which today turns two years old.

• Let’s also hear a hearty round of applause for Patricia Abbott’s weekly “forgotten books” series, which celebrated its eighth anniversary a few days ago. The Rap Sheet’s many contributions to that series can be enjoyed here.

• I noted earlier this month that Ian Fleming’s onetime literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith, had passed away at age 93. But now author Raymond Benson, who revived Fleming’s James Bond series long after the creator’s death, offers up a short tribute in CinemaRetro.

• Since I recently interviewed Con Lehane, author of the April series opener Murder at the 42nd Street Library, I was very interested to read his summation of that particular New York City library’s abundant “wonders,” posted in Criminal Element.

• Yeah, yeah, it’s only the end of April. But Bill Ott, who reviews crime, mystery, and thriller fiction for the American Library Association’s Booklist, has already selected what he says are the best crime novels of 2016 (as reviewed in Booklist from May 1, 2015, through April 15, 2016). Included among his picks: Don Winslow’s The Cartel, Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele, and Lori Rader-Day’s Pretty Little Things. In addition, Ott chooses—at the same link—a number of standout crime-fiction debuts, among them Nicholas Seeley’s Cambodia Noir, L. S. Hilton’s Maestra, and Scott Frank’s Shaker. This is certainly a thoughtful rundown of recent genre releases, but I think I’ll wait until December to assemble my own subjective tally of the year’s “bests.” (Hat tip to Randal S. Brandt)

• Registration is now open for NoirCon 2016, which is set to take place in Philadelphia, October 26-30. If you wish to attend but haven’t yet registered, you can do so either online or via snail-mail.

• R.I.P., James Bond film director Guy Hamilton.

• Republican former House Speaker John Boehner’s recent remarks about underdog GOP presidential contender Ted Cruz being “Lucifer in the flesh … I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” inevitably reminded me of a post I composed last November for my Killer Covers blog.

• Alex Segura, author of the recent Miami-set novel, Down the Darkest Street, has put together a list, for Mental Floss, of his eight favorite Florida crime-fiction characters.

• Here’s a perfect gift for fans of historical true crime.

• While we’re on the subject of weird history, consider this tale from The Lineup about a husband who had so much trouble being parted from his deceased wife, that he eventually moved right into her mausoleum at Brooklyn, New York’s Evergreen Cemetery.

• Wow, the roster of guest performers scheduled to appear in the coming Twin Peaks revival (set to air on Showtime at some as-yet-undecided date in 2017) has grown immensely.

• Meanwhile, the first trailer is available for the film adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (which was one of my favorite crime novels of 2015). The action has apparently been moved from London to New York City, but the trailer suggests that most of Hawkins’ original intent has been maintained on screen. This film, which is due for release in early October, stars Emily Blunt as Rachel Watson, “a heavy-drinker who develops an obsession with a couple she regularly sees while on her commute to work,” explains The Guardian. “After the woman disappears, Rachel becomes entangled in the investigation.” Watch the trailer for yourself here.

• From Mystery Fanfare: “Dean Street Press announces the first 10 Patricia Wentworth novel reissues will be out on May 2. This is part of a major project to republish all 33 of her non-Miss Silver mysteries, some of which haven’t been in print or available for many decades. The remaining 23 will be published in a further two batches in June and July. The first 10 include the four Benbow Smith mysteries, featuring the eminence grise Benbow Smith, and his loquacious parrot Ananias. The first batch also includes Silence in Court from 1945, which is an exceptional courtroom mystery.”

• Although he wasn’t technically invited to contribute to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s “John D. and Me” series of posts, all celebrating the coming July 24 centennial of John D. MacDonald’s birth, educator-turned-novelist Bill Crider decided to post his own remembrance of MacDonald’s influence on his reading and writing life.

• The next time I read a new work described as a “fiction novel,” I’m going to haul my sorry ass out to some secluded spot and scream at the top of my lungs. Pay attention, people! Think before you write!

• Tipping My Fedora blogger Sergio Angelini decided to poll his readers on the subject of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films from each decade of the director’s career. He wound up with 11 selections, including Blackmail (1929), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Birds (1963), Psycho (1960), and Rear Window (1954). You’ll have to click here to see which production won the most votes.

• Jordan Foster, formerly an editor at The Life Sentence, chooses 10 of her favorite police-procedural writers for Library Journal. I’m pleased to see both John Ball (author of the Virgil Tibbs novels) and Elizabeth Linington (aka Dell Shannon, creator of the Lieutenant Luis Mendoza series) make the cut.

•  A few interviews worth checking out: Laura Lippman talks with Baltimore magazine about her brand-new standalone thriller, Wilde Lake; Dan Fesperman gives Speaking of Mystery’s Nancie Clare the lowdown on his new historical mystery, The Letter Writer; Allison Brennan talks with Crimespree’s Elise Cooper about her psychologically intense new tale, Poisonous; and Chet Williamson addresses questions from Crime Fiction Lover about Robert Bloch’s Psycho: Sanitarium, his follow-up to Bloch’s 1959 novel.

• And it’s quite pleasing to see another reader fall for the multiple delights of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series (The Other Side of Silence). “I think there are three elements that make the books so fascinating,” David Edgerley Gates writes in SleuthSayers. “The first is historical irony. In more than one novel, actually, the story’s framed with a look back, from the later 1940s or the early 1950s. Secondly, there’s a constant sense of threat, the Nazi regime [being] a bunch of backstabbers ... One dangerous patron is Reinhard Heydrich, a chilly bastard who meets an appropriate end. And thirdly, Bernie is really trying to be a moral person, against all odds. You go along to get along, to simply survive, in a nest of vipers, and hope it doesn’t rub off on you. After seeing the Special Action Groups at work in Russia, and himself participating, Bernie is sickened by the whole enterprise. He suspects, too, that the handwriting’s on the wall.”

Bullet Points: Something for Everyone Edition

• Every Secret Thing, the film based on Laura Lippman’s 2004 standalone novel of that same name, debuted at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and is being prepared for a nationwide release on May 15. But until today, I hadn’t spotted a trailer for this picture starring Elizabeth Banks, Dakota Fanning, and Diane Lane. Click here to see the preview in Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare blog.

• The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books begins tomorrow on the University of Southern California campus and continues through Sunday. If I lived in L.A., I’d be present for all the festivities, especially since they’re free to the public. But at least I can report on the 2015 Times Book Prize competition, the winners of which will be announced on Saturday night. Here are the five contestants in the Mystery/Thriller category; a list of all the nominees is here.

• Earlier this week I was paging through The Seattle Times, when I happened onto this front-page story about Roy Price, the 47-year-old vice president of Amazon Studios, which you’ll know is behind the Michael Connelly-created crime drama Bosch (covered here and here). What most interested me, though, was this sentence: “His grandfather, Roy Huggins, was a legendary television writer who created such classic series as Maverick, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files.” Holy crap! I’ve long been a fan of Huggins’ work, both his television projects and his early endeavors as a novelist. I didn’t know I was living in the same city--Seattle--where his grandson can often be found laboring over a desk. I might have to come up with some way to interview Price in the very near future …

• I need the first volume mentioned in this Bookgasm review!

• Bouchercon organizers announced on their Facebook page that they’ve chosen a “brand-new logo for Bouchercon National! Each year--including 2015 in Raleigh--will still have their own logo, but this one will cover the organization as a whole.” I’ve embedded that new artwork on the left.

• As somebody who was very fond of British author Paul Johnston’s series of near-future-set thrillers starring Edinburgh senior cop-turned-private eye Quintilian Dalrymple (last seen in 2001’s The House of Dust), it’s pretty exciting to know the author is returning with a new, sixth installment of that series, Head or Hearts, out this month in the UK from Severn House and due in U.S. stores come July. Euro Crime has posted a synopsis of the new yarn.

• By the way, if you haven’t read Ali Karim’s 2003 interview with Paul Johnston, in which they talk about the Quint books, do so now.

• I never owned a Pet Rock, but I do remember when those low-commitment companions first rolled onto the market in the mid-1970s. So I was saddened to hear that Gary Dahl, the creator of the Pet Rock fad (which Newsweek called “one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever”) died recently at age 78.

• Over in the Killer Covers blog, we have posted a look back at the “sexpionage” novels of Ted Mark, published mostly during the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the latest entry in our still-new “Friday Finds” series, which highlights “context-free covers we love.” Today’s pick: The Flesh and Mr. Rawlie (1963).

• Back in February, I mentioned that the blog Criminal Element was launching a regular short-story competition called “The M.O.” The initial deadline for tales was March 6 and the theme for all submissions was “Long Gone.” Readers of Criminal Element were asked to vote for their favorite entries. Today the blog has posted the winner of its first “M.O.” contest, “Fix Me,” by Los Angeles “writer and drummer” S.W. Lauden. According to its schedule, Criminal Element will announce its next short-story contest--with a new theme--on May 1.

• Honey West star Anne Francis melted hearts looking like this.

• MSNBC-TV host Rachel Maddow did an excellent interview last night with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), during which they talked about Reid’s long political history, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “historic candidacy” for president of the United States in 2016, and the current Republican leadership in Congress (“I think they’ve been absolute failures”). You can now watch it all here.

• These are some of the most spectacular aerial shots ever! They come from a Web site called AirPano, where you can find still more breathtaking photos. Copy them to your computer now!

• California author J. Sydney Jones has made an excellent reputation for himself over the last half-dozen years penning mystery novels set in early 20th-century Vienna. However his new release, Basic Law (Severn House)--the first entry in a trilogy--is a more contemporary thriller featuring “expat American journalist Sam Kramer.” To better acquaint readers with Kramer, he’s just posted “Body Blows,” a short story featuring the same protagonist.

• Author Declan Burke recently introduced me to a new blog called Crime Fiction Ireland, which he says “pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin. Edited by Lucy Dalton, the blog covers crime and mystery fiction of all hues, TV and film, provides author profiles and a ‘What’s On’ slot, and also offers a Short Fiction selection.” I’ve added Crime Fiction Ireland to The Rap Sheet’s selection of links.

• I haven’t yet seen any notices about PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! umbrella series picking up the concluding three-episode season of Foyle’s War, the wonderful Michael Kitchen/Honeysuckle Weeks period drama from British broadcaster ITV that debuted in 2002. That last season began showing in the UK back in January, and is available to people who subscribe to the online viewing service Acorn Media. (You’ll find all Foyle’s War episodes here.) National Public Radio’s John Powers posted a fine wrap-up of Foyle’s final run here, and you can purchase a DVD set of the series’ last three eps here. But for Americans like me who prefer to watch Kitchen’s show on Masterpiece for free, all of this just adds up to a painful reminder of what we’re missing. C’mon, PBS, step up and add this one last Foyle’s War run to your summer 2015 schedule!

• Here’s one reason why you can’t trust amateur online reviews.

• Finally, my old friend Matthew, who has spent years talking up Sinbad and Me, the 1966 adventure/mystery novel for children by Kin Platt (author of the Max Roper detective series), reports that the book is back in print this month after being commercially unavailable for decades. Sinbad and Me captured the 1967 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery Fiction. The new edition is available from Amazon in both hardcover and paperback, but Matthew--who shares my adoration for books--asked me to “encourage your readers to order from their local independent bookseller.” I can’t but endorse that suggestion. Amazon, for all the purchasing advantages it offers, has proved to be a killer of small neighborhood stores, whether they sell books or other goods. I provide links from The Rap Sheet to Amazon pages, but that’s simply for the convenience of my readers. I always try to buy from independent bookstores. And you should too.

No. 1 on the “77” Hit Parade

I can’t say this for certain, but I do not believe I ever saw the pilot/opening episode of 77 Sunset Strip until earlier today. Titled “Girl on the Run,” it first aired on ABC-TV on October 10, 1958. The screenwriter was Marion Hargrove (who’d go on to script episodes of several James Garner series, as well as I Spy, The Name of the Game, and The Magician). However, the principal driver behind “Girl on the Run” was writer-producer Roy Huggins, whose private-eye creation, Stuart Bailey--introduced in Huggins’ 1946 novel, The Double Take--served as the protagonist in “Girl on the Run” (played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) and was carried over into the series.

As Paul Green explains in his recently released biography, Roy Huggins: Creator of Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, the Fugitive and The Rockford Files (McFarland & Company), in 1958 the Warner Bros. TV studio commissioned a pilot from Huggins for a gumshoe series he proposed titling 77 Sunset Boulevard. So pleased were Warner execs with the results, “Girl on the Run,” that they asked him to expand it beyond its 60-minute length. This gave the studio the option of releasing “Girl on the Run” as a theatrical feature; it eventually showed for a single week in a West Indies theater before introducing ABC’s retitled 77 Sunset Strip. (You will see a promotional poster for that film on the left. Note its “Not Suitable for Children” warning.)

Huggins was concerned that such a release represented part of a Warner Bros. scheme to cut him out of any royalties for the future small-screen series, by claiming that 77 Sunset Strip had been inspired by the film, rather than Huggins’ own literary efforts. Warner Bros. “was also planning another move to enforce [its] ownership of Huggins’ creation,” Green explains. “His third novel, Lovely Lady, Pity Me [1949], was bought by Warner Bros. and a script written [for 77 Sunset Strip] that included Stuart Bailey even though there was no private eye in the original novel.” It seems Huggins’ fears were justified; the studio ultimately refused to pay him royalties for his creation, and he took the studio to legal arbitration over the matter. After Huggins lost, he bowed out of the weekly series 77 Sunset Strip. But the show went on--through six seasons, in fact, the last one being a noirish departure from its predecessors.

Not long ago, I happened across an abundance of 77 Sunset Strip episodes on YouTube (watch those shows now--while you still can!), and the 71-minute version of “Girl on the Run” was among that trove. I’ll let you watch the show for yourself, below, but will offer this synopsis of the plot from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb): “A private investigator is hired to find and protect a singer who witnessed the murder of a union official and is being stalked by the killer. What he doesn’t know is that he has actually been hired by the killer himself.” Just wait until you see which subsequent 77 Sunset Strip cast member plays the vicious, hair-obsessed shooter, Kevin Smiley!


See Part I of “Girl on the Run” above. For the rest, click here.

Triple Treat

News reported here recently that the pilot film for the 1972-1973 ABC-TV crime/adventure drama The Delphi Bureau has been released by Warner Archive dredged up from my memory the “wheel series” of which Delphi was merely one element. So I went looking through YouTube, and discovered the 1972 Fall Preview video--posted above--which introduced Delphi and its two other alternating shows, all of which were broadcast under the umbrella title The Men.

For those who aren’t old enough to remember, The Delphi Bureau featured Laurence Luckinbill as Glenn Garth Gregory, a handsome guy with a photographic memory who’s employed by an indistinctly defined U.S. government agency that does obscure “research” work for the president. “Its actual role was counter-espionage,” recalls Wikipedia, “and its main operative was Gregory, whose liaison with the group’s unnamed superiors was Sybil Van Lowreen (Anne Jeffreys), a Washington, D.C., society hostess. (Celeste Holm had played Sybil Van Lowreen in the series’ pilot film.)” Unfortunately, only seven episodes of Delphi were shot before The Men was cancelled.

In NBC Mystery Movie fashion, Delphi had rotated in a 9-10 p.m. Thursday (later Saturday) slot with a couple of other programs that should have been more successful than they were. The first of those was Jigsaw, which found familiar character actor James Wainwright playing Lieutenant Frank Dain, a determined but kindhearted plainclothes detective with the California State Police Missing Persons Bureau, whose cases took him all over the Golden State. Although this Universal Studios production was created by Robert E. Thompson, a screenwriter with heavy-duty experience in the field of small-screen dramas (his credits included scripts for Have Gun, Will Travel, Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Name of the Game), Jigsaw--not to be confused with Jack Warden’s 1976 NBC crime drama, Jigsaw John--did not fare well with viewers. Ted Fitzgerald recalls on The Thrilling Detective Web Site that

After six episodes were produced, the studio or the network brought in Roy Huggins to punch things up. Huggins began by jettisoning the cop format. The vehicle for the change was Howard Browne’s oft-filmed [1954] novel Thin Air (which would later be the basis of episodes of The Rockford Files and Simon & Simon, among others) in which a man is suspected of murder after his lady friend walks into a restaurant and vanishes into … you guessed it. Stephen [J.] Cannell wrote the script [for that episode, “Kiss the Dream Goodbye”], which ended with Dain clearing his name and getting his private ticket. Huggins plotted the next episode, then the network ran the final unaired cop episode and the show vanished. My memory of the series in general and the P.I. episodes in particular was that it was well-done and played straight; no Rockford-style humor. Huggins and Cannell undoubtedly would have done a good job with a low-key lone-wolf character and the missing-persons hook, but ABC gave them Toma to do instead. And, of course, a year later NBC provided them the Rockford opportunity. In the larger scheme of things, as promising as the still-born Jigsaw might have been, The Rockford Files was, to say the least, the better path for Huggins and Cannell to follow.

The last and perhaps best-remembered segment of The Men was Assignment: Vienna, about which I’ve written on this page before. It starred ex-Wild Wild West lead Robert Conrad as Jake Webster, “an American expatriate in Vienna who was the operator of Jake’s Bar & Grill, an American-style establishment near the scenic heart of the [Austrian capital] city,” Wikipedia explains. “In fact, the business was a cover for Jake’s actual reason for being in Vienna. He was involved in tracking down various spies and international criminals at the behest of U.S. intelligence, which apparently held something against him which, if disclosed, would have resulted in his being deported from Austria and apparently then incarcerated in the United States. Jake’s liaison with U.S. intelligence was a Major Caldwell (Charles Cioffi).”

Assignment: Vienna--which followed a 1972 pilot film, Assignment: Munich, featuring Roy Scheider in the Webster role--seemed to offer considerable promise. As I remarked in my previous post about that show: “It had the talented pair of Eric Bercovici and Jerry Ludwig (who’d worked previously on episodes of Mission: Impossible) as its creators and executive producers. It had a terrific, intrigue-filled theme by jazz pianist and composer Dave Grusin (who had composed the theme music for Burt Reynolds’ Dan August and Robert Wagner’s It Takes a Thief, among others).” And in Conrad it boasted a bankable star, a pretty boy who nonetheless carried a tough demeanor suggesting he’d taken a few punches in his time and knew how to throw more of his own. (In fact, Conrad had been a pop and rock singer before he embarked on an acting career.) Furthermore, this final spoke of the Men wheel was shot in European “locations of intrigue and adventure,” giving it a freshness that other programs filmed around New York City or Los Angeles lacked. Yet, once more, Assignment: Vienna was yanked from the TV schedule after only eight episodes.

Warner Archive’s DVD release of The Dephi Bureau pilot gives me hope that it will follow up with a complete packaging of the series. And maybe that will incite the sale of both Assignment: Vienna and Jigsaw in the same format. I’d love to see them all once more--complete with the Isaac Hayes theme that originally introduced The Men.

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The video clip embedded at the top of this post comes from a longer ABC Fall Preview--the first of two parts--found here. An episode-by-episode index of The Men is here.

Chasing After Fame

It was 50 years ago today that The Fugitive, the American drama series created by Roy Huggins and starring David Janssen, debuted on ABC-TV. That program about a physician accused of his wife’s murder, and his subsequent struggle to track down the One-Armed Man he’s convinced holds the answers to her slaying, eventually ran for 120 hour-long episodes over four years, becoming one of the most respected small-screen productions in history. Stephen Bowie opines in the A.V. Club blog that it “may be the perfect television drama.

That’s not to say that The Fugitive is superior to today’s best dramas, or even to its finest contemporaries, like The Defenders and Ben Casey. But The Fugitive achieved a perfection of form that was unique: It was part crime procedural, part action-adventure, and part character-driven melodrama. It was fusion TV. The push and pull between the contrasting generic elements meant that episodes were highly varied, but with so many different traditions to draw from, nearly always satisfying. The Fugitive achieved a phenomenally consistent level of quality--which makes this a particularly tough list to compile.

You will find my own tribute to The Fugitive--posted four decades after its final episode aired, on August 29, 1967--by clicking here. And in celebration of today’s 50th anniversary, Bowie provides an interesting alternative ending to Richard Kimble’s saga here.

Invitation to “Trouble”

Several years ago on this page, I reviewed the 1946 novel The Double Take, written by Roy Huggins. He, of course, would go on to become a popular TV series creator and producer, responsible for such shows as 77 Sunset Strip, The Rockford Files, and City of Angels. And The Double Take would have an extended life of its own, becoming the source material for episodes of several of Huggins’ shows.

Apparently the earliest adaptation of that novel, though, was as the 1948 big-screen picture I Love Trouble, starring Franchot Tone--an American actor, despite his name--as Los Angeles private eye Stuart Bailey (the same character Huggins later employed in 77 Sunset Strip). Huggins composed the script for Columbia Pictures, an effort that introduced him into the Hollywood movie industry.

In his review for the Web site Film Noir, Tony D’Ambra writes:

This is one helluva movie. A gem that sparkles like the eyes of the hot dames that swagger, pout, smolder, and snap their high heels across the screen. A joyous L.A. romp in Marlowe territory which has it all. ...

There are laughs and smooth-as-nylons repartee, but the melodrama is hard-hitting and typically noir: guys get slapped hard, drugged, and slugged from behind. In one scene the face of a murder victim under a Malibu pier is highlighted by torch-light at night. A particularly impressive scene is where a guy is under the threat of a gun, which is shown from the holder’s viewpoint, as it moves with the frightened target as he staggers backward and across the screen in a small room.

At the time I wrote about The Double Take, I’d not had the opportunity to see I Love Trouble. A print of it has been shown at noir-oriented film festivals, and it has undoubtedly appeared at some point on late-night television. But it isn’t available on DVD.

So I was delighted to find all 94 minutes of I Love Trouble on YouTube yesterday. It is an imperfect print, too dark in places, and the story might seem confusing at first; however, I think old-movie fans will get a kick out this early effort from a man who would become an important figure in the evolution of small-screen P.I. dramas.

Click here to watch the whole thing.

Ross to the Rescue

Although I have read Lou Cameron’s 1969 paperback novel, The Outsider, I’ve never actually seen the 1968-1969 NBC-TV series on which that book was based. Yes, I understand: This almost disqualifies me from membership in the Ceaseless Defenders of Old TV Crime Dramas Club--especially given The Outsider’s estimable pedigree (it was novelist-producer Roy Huggins’ precursor to The Rockford Files). But that’s something I am going to have live with, at least for now.

While McGavin’s equally short-lived Kolchak: The Night Stalker has become a cult favorite, with prominent DVD releases, no official set of The Outsider has been brought to market. And though I know that some of the 26 episodes of The Outsider--which starred Darren McGavin as “low-rent ex-con turned resigned, wistful private eye David Ross”--are available in bootleg versions on the Web, I haven’t yet brought myself to plunk down the money for their acquisition.

So I was surprised over the weekend to discover two video clips from The Outsider on YouTube. They take in the beginning and end of a late-series episode titled “Periwinkle Blue” (originally shown on April 2, 1969). They were posted by someone who signs him- or herself “Shmoytz,” and operates a YouTube page devoted to the late American actress Lois Nettleton, who guest-starred in “Periwinkle Blue.”

The early minutes of this episode (which find Ross telephoning to complain about an inadequate takeout serving of fried chicken) definitely remind me of what Huggins--who is credited here under the pseudonym “John Thomas James”--was able to accomplish with The Rockford Files. But it’s impossible to make more thorough comparisons without actually seeing the episode in toto.

Maybe I shall have that chance someday. For now, I’ll have to be satisfied with these two small tastes of The Outsider.





UPDATE: As of July 29, 2014, the entirety of “Periwinkle Blue” can be enjoyed on YouTube. Click here to watch.

READ MORE: “A TV Movie Review by Michael Shonk: The Outsider (1967)” (Mystery*File); “A TV Series Review by Michael Shonk: The Outsider (1968-69)” (Mystery*File); “FFB: The Outsider--Lou Cameron,” by Randy Johnson (Not the Baseball Pitcher).

I Didn’t Know That Either

In a post yesterday, I mentioned my fondness for the old movies-of-the-week. Today on his Facebook page, Ed Robertson, host of the boob tube-nostalgia radio program, TV Confidential, points me toward a piece in The New York Times about efforts to reinvigorate that format, but he adds this note:

A point of clarification, though: While the article interviews Barry Diller, and credits him for coming up with the concept of the Movie of the Week, the idea actually originated with Roy Huggins--a fact corroborated by founding ABC president Leonard Goldenson in his memoir, Beating the Odds [1991].

Huggins, of course, was the novelist, screenwriter, and producer who created such memorable TV series as The Rockford Files, City of Angels, 77 Sunset Strip, and The Fugitive.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Double Take,” by Roy Huggins

(This marks the 38th installment of The Rap Sheet’s ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but largely forgotten books. Previous recommendations can be found here.)

I heard about this hard-boiled, 1946 detective novel long before I managed to procure a copy. As crime-fictionist Max Allan Collins has noted in a few places (including here), The Double Take provided its author, future television writer and producer Roy Huggins, with source material for at least two of his small-screen detective series: 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964) and City of Angels (1976-1977).

Initially, it seems that the former show owes this book the greater debt. Los Angeles private detective Stuart Bailey, the star of The Double Take (as well as a few short stories Huggins saw published during the post-World War II years), was also the principal sleuth in 77 Sunset Strip--though, as he was portrayed by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Bailey was a classy cut above the gumshoe Huggins originally conceived, becoming a former government agent, fluent in foreign languages and quite familiar with the cut of a bespoke suit. In fact, though, the under-appreciated City of Angels shows more obvious influences from The Double Take. Set in L.A. during the Great Depression, it featured a perpetually down-on-his-luck private eye, Jake Axminster (played by ex-M*A*S*H co-star Wayne Rogers), whose ditzy secretary also ran a switchboard for call girls and whose chief nemesis--the crooked, overweight, and cigar-chomping Lieutenant Murray Quint (played by Clifton James)--got most of his exercise threatening Axminster with a truncheon. Those basic characters, plus an incident from The Double Take, where Bailey buys himself a bit of protection by having a quick report done on his health, all eventually found their way into City of Angels.

None of that takes away from the enjoyment of reading The Double Take, however. This is one shiny little gem of a tale, borrowing from the mid-20th-century pulp-fiction traditions and influenced by Raymond Chandler’s literary pretensions, but suggesting that Roy Huggins might have had a bright future in penning detective novels, had he not chosen instead to put his talents to work on the aforementioned TV shows 77 Sunset Strip and City of Angels, as well as The Rockford Files, The Outsider, and so many others.

The plot starts out looking deceptively simple. Ralph Johnston, a late-30s advertising exec with lofty political aspirations, hires our man Bailey to poke around in the history of his “quiet, refined” young spouse, Margaret. It seems that some unidentified male had dialed him up recently, inquiring as to “how much it would be worth for him to keep quiet about my wife.” It put Johnston on edge. He tells Bailey what he knows of his ever-lovin’s background and asks him to check out her past. Quietly. Just in case. Just to be sure there’s no real potential for blackmail there.

Well, of course it takes no time at all for Bailey to begin turning over rocks that should have remained inert and raising questions that nobody’s too thrilled to answer. The picture our hero starts putting together of the former Margaret Bleeker shows her to have been coldly ambitious and coquettishly fetching (“Luscious as a pomegranate, and twice as acid,” to quote one former associate). She is apparently an ex-showgirl who traveled under the stage name “Gloria Gay” before trying to re-create herself as a college coed and prime marriage material. Bailey’s probe, though, also leads to his being clobbered over the head, tailed (not so covertly), and falling under suspicion by Lieutenant Quint and his fellow cops. Later, his life is threatened, he wakes up in bed with a curvaceous, naked young blonde (heck, some guys have all the luck), and the wife he’s investigating disappears, leaving a dead ex-friend behind. It’s enough to make even the toughest private dick wonder why he got out of the sack that morning.

But Stu Bailey, or at least author Huggins, has a wit that won’t quit. Like so many American crime novelists of the mid-20th-century, he stacked up cynical observations like they were cordwood.

Here, Bailey cools his heels while he waits to be summoned into an audience with a wealthy marine biologist:

Doctor Cherkin left me in a large room at the front of the house. I had been in cozier and more inviting rooms--the fossil room at the New York’s Museum of Natural History, for instance. ...

I heard a sound behind me like a butterfly sighing and turned around. There was a dark-haired, dark-eyed little thing standing in the vaulted doorway. She was wearing a black uniform that looked suspiciously like silk and I got the impression she would flit away if I did anything unusual like blowing my nose.

Later, in one of my favorite sections, the P.I. is picked up by a fast-driving young woman who’s his ticket into an exclusive club:

I had showered, changed into a dark blue suit, eaten some pork and beans, and was strapping on my shootin’ arm when Irene Neher called. She would be coming by for me as soon as she could make up her mind whether to wear her yellow dress or just nothing at all. I told her it was a warm night and it wouldn’t make a lot of difference. Twenty-five minutes later she was at the lobby phone downstairs.

I said, “Anyone who drives here from Brentwood in twenty-five minutes I’m afraid to ride with. Lock up your car. We’ll take mine the rest of the way.”

She was a lovely young thing, standing beside a low-cut Cadillac convertible, the dim light from the entrance-way softening the hardness about her mouth. She was wearing a cornflower blue dress under a nice set of furs--the furrier probably closed the sale and then retired. The hair was somebody’s eight-hour day, and it was as theatrical as a glob of grease paint. But I liked it. And there was nothing synthetic about the deep golden glow of her skin. I thought I could smell her all the way over the steps. From there she smelled nice.

Although The Double Take was published originally by William Morrow and Company in 1946, Huggins or maybe some now long-forgotten editor seems to have diddled with the dates mentioned in the 1959 Pocket Books paperback edition I own. Perhaps to capitalize on 77 Sunset Strip, and bring this book more in line with that show’s debut, the time-frame for this novel has been updated. There are mentions of things happening in the early 1950s, for instance, which wouldn’t have existed in the original novel. Those are only slightly jarring, however. And understanding the commercial motivation behind such alterations makes them altogether acceptable. Especially in a novel that has as much going for it as this one does. Sure, there were occasions when I felt a bit left behind by the onrush of investigative discoveries, or disoriented by the profusion of characters introduced; but I also remember feeling that way sometimes while watching The Rockford Files and Baretta, another Huggins production from the 1970s. Stick with it long enough, and you finally manage to catch up. Only, in the case of The Double Take, to have your expectations blown by this story’s conclusion, which demonstrates that even the smartest guys can be awfully damn dumb now and then.

I’m sorry that there’s only the one Stuart Bailey novel in existence (which was apparently filmed in 1948 as I Love Trouble, a picture I’m going to have to find and rent in the near future.) While Roy Huggins was as susceptible as any other crime-fictionist of his generation to falling back on gritty clichés, he had a generally tight, visually oriented storytelling style that didn’t depend for its reader engagement on the convenient extraction of loaded guns every five or six pages. It would’ve been interesting to see what he might have accomplished, had he stuck with novels rather than turning to a life of crime dramas. But then we would presumably have missed out on watching Jim Rockford and Tony Baretta and, of course, Richard Kimble from Huggins’ original The Fugitive series. And that would’ve been more regrettable still.

Sacrifices must sometimes be made.

READ MORE: “Forgotten Books: The Double Take, by Roy Huggins,” by Evan Lewis (Davy Crockett’s Almanack).

“You Meet the Highbrow and the Hipster”

Continuing my recent observance of TV crime drama anniversaries (see here, here, and here), let me note that today marks 50 years since the debut of ABC’s 77 Sunset Strip, heralded as the first hour-long private-eye show to be broadcast on American television. That 1958-1964 series was cooked up by Roy Huggins--who would later give us The Fugitive, The Rockford Files, and Baretta--and featured Stuart Bailey (played on the show by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), a Chandleresque character in Los Angeles who’d appeared in one novel (1946’s The Double Take, later made into the 1948 film I Love Trouble), as well as several short stories by Huggins. Also integral to the series was P.I. Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith), a trained attorney and, like Bailey, a former U.S. government agent.

“They worked out of swank digs at 77 Sunset Strip, next door to Dino’s Restaurant, where French secretary Suzanne [Fabray, played by Jacqueline Beer] handled the phones,” explains Kevin Burton Smith in The Thrilling Detective Web Site. “Hanging around for comic relief were racetrack tout Roscoe [Louis Quinn], and hair-combing, Dino parking lot attendant and beatnik P.I. wanna-be Kookie [Edd Byrnes]. Comb sales soared. So much for Huggins’ hopes for a straight P.I. series. Hard-boiled drama was out and gimmicks were in.” So, too, was humor, often of the self-deprecating sort.

Explains Wikipedia:

Many of the episodes were named “capers.” The catchy theme song, written by the accomplished team of Mack David and Jerry Livingston, typified the show’s breezy, jazzed atmosphere. The song became the centerpiece of an album of the show’s music in Warren Barker-led orchestrations, which was released in 1959.

The Edd Byrnes character Kookie became a cultural phenomenon, with his slang expressions such as “ginchy” and “piling up Zs” (sleeping). When Kookie helped the detectives on a case by singing a song, Edd Byrnes began a singing career with “Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb” (based on his frequent combing of his hair). When his demands for more money were not met, Byrnes left the show, but he came back as a full-fledged partner in the detective firm in May 1960; in 1961, Robert Logan became the new parking lot attendant, J.R. Hale, who usually spoke in abbreviations. In 1960, Richard Long moved from the recently canceled detective series Bourbon Street Beat with his role of Rex Randolph, but he left the program in 1962. ...

In 1963, as the show’s popularity waned, the entire cast except for Zimbalist was let go. Jack Webb was brought in as executive producer and William Conrad as director. The character of Stuart Bailey became a globe-hopping investigator, with lavish international sets. The show was canceled at the end of the year.

Before it went off the air, though, 77 Sunset Strip served as a magnet for young Hollywood talent. Actors and actresses who appeared on the show at one time or another included William Shatner, Dyan Cannon, Marlo Thomas, James Garner, DeForest Kelley, Mary Tyler Moore, and Elizabeth Montgomery. Its success also led to the creation of several other network programs that bore a distinct stylistic similarity, including Hawaiian Eye, Surfside Six, and the aforementioned Bourbon Street Beat. Which is certainly cause for Smith to call 77 Sunset Strip “one of the most influential private eye shows in history.”

READ MORE: In a mini-celebration of this series, blogger Evan Lewis posted the following pieces in Davy Crockett’s Almanack: “Forgotten Books: 77 Sunset Strip, by Roy Huggins” and “77 Sunset Stuff”; “77 Sunset Strip Reunion from America--1985” (YouTube); “The 65th Anniversary of 77 Sunset Strip,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts).