Happy Father’s Day

Appropriate to this occasion, Janet Rudolph has posted a list of Father’s Day-related mysteries for your reading pleasure. I’m almost ashamed to say that I have read none of those works. However, I can at least add another title to her list: John Calvin Batchelor’s 1994 political thriller, Father’s Day, which has to do with a U.S. president who temporarily relinquishes his office under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, only to be blocked by his ruthless vice president when he tries to return to the Oval Office. It’s not the most relaxing weekend read, as I recall.

This being Father’s Day in many countries, I got to musing on the subject of dads as fictional detectives. There aren’t very many, as compared with the number of loner gumshoes and dysfunctional bachelor cops out there. The explanation for this may simply be that the demands of fatherhood can conflict too severely with the rigors of dogged detection. Tying one’s sleuth down to a wife and children limits the character’s ability to become intimately involved with femmes fatales, and it makes him consider something beyond his fervid pursuit of malefactors. He may not as willing as the socially unconnected investigator to compromise his life in order to resolve a case.

I started to make a list of detectives in crime fiction who are also fathers, or whose fathers are connected with their professional work. But in the course of it, I realized that most such characters come from television, rather than books.

As I recall from my recent reading of Rennie Airth’s third and latest John Madden novel, The Dead of Winter (an excellent work that’s due out in the States next month), his protagonist, a former Scotland Yard inspector, has reared two children with his wife since he was first introduced in River of Darkness (1999), yet he continues to involve himself in perilous investigations. Pre-World War II German Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, who made his initial appearance in Jonathan Rabb’s Rosa (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2005), also has a couple of boys, both of whom are given intriguing larger roles in his second adventure, this year’s Shadow and Light. “Gumsandal” Gordianus the Finder, featured in Steven Saylor’s 10-book series of 1st century B.C. Roman whodunits, is responsible for one natural daughter and a couple of adopted sons. Novelist-snoop Ellery Queen--the brilliant but quirky creation of cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay--might have been a much less compelling character without his pater and sidekick, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police Department. Private eye Tom Hickey, who made his debut in Ken Kuhlken’s The Big Adios (1991), has since relinquished his mystery-solving duties to his son, Clifford Hickey (The Do-Re-Mi, 2006). And let’s not forget that “salvage expert” Travis McGee discovered, at the end of his 21st adventure, John D. MacDonald’s The Lonely Silver Rain (1985), that he had a teenage daughter, Jean (the progeny of his long-ago love affair with Puss Killian in 1968’s Pale Gray for Guilt), about whom he’d known nothing. The supposition is that Jean Killian would have reappeared in MacDonald’s subsequent McGee novels, and had some impact on that troubleshooter’s development. But of course, there were no later McGee stories (despite rumors to the contrary).

If crime novels have given us few examples of father-offspring relationships, television has been rather less stingy. Consider, as an excellent example, The Rockford Files (1974-1980), in which Los Angeles P.I. Jim Rockford (James Garner) was alternately annoyed and assisted by his papa, retired truck driver Joseph “Rocky” Rockford (Noah Berry Jr.). Or Crazy Like a Fox (1984-1986), which found the wonderful actor Jack Warden playing a private dick who was a bit too prone to soliciting help from his less adventurous son, attorney Harrison Fox Jr. (John Rubenstein). We can’t forget, either, about Tenafly (1973-1974), the promising and too-short-lived NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie segment that starred James McEachin as an ex-cop turned corporate detective, who also happened to be a family man, with a much-forgiving wife and two young children, as I remember it. There was also The Feather and Father Gang (1977), in which Stefanie Powers played a successful lawyer, Toni “Feather” Danton, who solved crimes with the aid of her con-man parent, Harry Danton (Harold Gould). No doubt just as forgotten by now was Faraday and Company (1973-1974), another short-run NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series. It found dancer-actor Dan Dailey portraying Frank Faraday, a 1940s shamus who, after he escaped from a quarter-century of unjustified incarceration in a South American prison, entered into a sleuthing partnership with the illegitimate son he never knew, Steve Faraday (James Naughton). In the third and final season of It Takes a Thief (1968-1970), another prominent dancer, Fred Astaire, joined the cast as Alistair Mundy, the equally light-fingered father of protagonist Alexander Mundy (Robert Wagner). E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed played father-son attorneys in the acclaimed 1961-1965 TV drama, The Defenders, while in the 1996-2001 police drama Nash Bridges, Don Johnson’s San Francisco police inspector lived with (and had to periodically protect) his retired longshoreman father, played by James Gammon.

I’m sure there are other examples of fathers figuring prominently in crime novels and TV series, but they escape me at the moment. Give me some help in the Comments section of this post.