The Baritone Turncoat?

Grammy and Tony award-winning singer-actor Robert Goulet, who died yesterday at age 73 while waiting for a lung transplant, isn’t generally associated with crime and mystery fiction. Yet in 1966, he starred in a rather remarkable ABC-TV spy drama called Blue Light. Writing in his blog today, Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin remembers that series, which lasted just half a season:

In a role that was perhaps inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Goulet played David March, an American newspaper reporter who had renounced his citizenship and gone to work as a Nazi propagandist--but secretly he was a double agent, reporting back to an American espionage group known only by its codename, Blue Light.

In an age when Hollywood preferred its spies slick and fanciful à la James Bond, Blue Light was grim and gritty, a dark exploration of the dynamics of betrayal. David March had to fear not only Nazi counterintelligence--which knew of the Blue Light organization and was ruthlessly hunting down its agents--but his own countrymen, who all believed him a traitor. The show wasn’t about gadgets or girls, but the real mean streets of intelligence. Of course, the biggest lesson in betrayal to me was when ABC canceled Blue Light, the first of a million heartbreaks to come from swinish network programmers.

I believe a few Blue Light episodes have been edited into a movie with the wretched title I Deal in Danger, which is available on DVD. It deserved better.

A list of the 17 half-hour episodes of Blue Light can be found here.

READ MORE: “Robert Goulet, Robert Goulet, My God, Robert Goulet!” by Jamie J. Weinman (Something Old, Nothing New).