Life with Papa

Just yesterday, in anticipation of Father’s Day, I was pondering the question of what might be the best father/son teams in crime fiction. And now here comes TV historian Ed Robertson with a few lists of paramount pops. Among those is a rundown of the “Top Five TV Father/Son Teams,” most of which, interestingly enough, come from crime dramas shown over the years:

5. Fred Astaire/Robert Wagner (It Takes a Thief)
4. James Gammon/Don Johnson (Nash Bridges)
3. Andy Griffith/Ronnie Howard (The Andy Griffith Show)
2. E.G. Marshall/Robert Reed (The Defenders)
1. Noah Beery/James Garner (The Rockford Files)

To that list I’d like to add David Wayne/Jim Hutton of the 1975-1976 NBC-TV series Ellery Queen, adapted from the stories by cousin crime novelists Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, and Jack Warden/John Rubinstein from the 1984-1986 CBS series Crazy Like a Fox. Does anybody else have other suggestions?

READ MORE: “It’s Murder, He Wrote,” by B.V. Lawson (In Reference to Murder).