Bullet Points: PWG, TV, and DVDs Edition

Wow, it seems like forever since I’ve found time to compose a crime-fiction news wrap-up post, but it’s actually only been a little more than two weeks. During that period, I’ve accumulated myriad items of interest, but I’ll offer just a few of them here.

• Today may or many not be the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ investigative associate and chronicler, Dr. John H. Watson--depending on which sources you believe. I wrote about this in a post for The Rap Sheet years ago, which you can still enjoy here.

• UK critic-author Mike Ripley talks with Duncan Torrens, for Shots, about the work that went into releasing Mr. Campion’s Farewell (Severn House), a novel featuring Margery Allingham’s gentleman sleuth, Albert Campion. As Les Blatt notes in his blog, Classic Mysteries, Farewell is “a continuation of a book begun by Allingham’s husband, Pip Youngman Carter, after his wife’s death. Carter died after writing only a few chapters, and the manuscript was never finished or published. Now, Mike Ripley has completed it, and I believe it has just been published by Severn House in the UK. It’s scheduled to be released in the U.S. on July 1st.” You will find Shots’ conversation with the honorable Mr. Ripley here.

• I’m sorry to learn, from Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare, that Book ’Em Mysteries in Pasadena, California, will close on April 30 after 24 years in business. Co-owner Barry Martin is quoted as saying, “You reach a point in your life when you feel you’ve accomplished something. We are heartened by our customers who have supported us over the years. Many are more than customers. They’re friends.”

• Oh, no, not again! After going dormant for some months, it looks as if the Webzine Plots With Guns is closing down--but not until after the release of “one last, big issue.” It seems that creator Anthony Neil Smith had a heart attack and was in the hospital for a while, and as he explained on Facebook, “Sean O’Keefe, Erik Lundy, and Gonzalo Baeza, the current editorial staff and braintrust, have also decided it’s time to move on.” Before the band breaks up, though, they’re soliciting contributions to a blockbuster final issue. The deadline for submissions is Thursday, April 10. You may recall that PWG already tried to sign off once, at the end of 2004, with its editors complaining that “we’re tired.” But it was reborn at the start of 2008, and has been turning out fine editions ever since. Let’s hope this latest termination effort is as unsuccessful as the previous one, and that we haven’t heard the last of PWG. Meanwhile, I’ll let you know when the current editors’ close-out issue is posted.

• Lee Child answers some readers’ questions.

• R.I.P., Lorenzo Semple Jr. The screenwriter who developed the 1960s live-action TV series Batman died on March 28 at age 91. Coincidentally, that was only two days before the 75th anniversary of Batman’s debut as a crime-fighting comic-book hero.

• MysteryPeople chats with Steven Saylor about his recently released historical mystery, Raiders of the Nile.

• It’s official! The complete DVD collection of the 1975-1976 ABC-TV series Barbary Coast--about which I wrote here not long ago--is scheduled for release on June 3. Barbary Coast, you may recall, was a not great, but interesting Western-cum-crime drama starring William Shatner and Doug McClure. I’ve already placed an order for the set. I hope the show measures up to my memories of it.

• Meanwhile, I have no recollection of this 1970 legal drama.

• Mystery Scene’s Oline Cogdill bids farewell to two small-screen series, one of which--Psych--ended its eight-year run (really, that long?) last week, while the other--Justified--has a final, sixth season still to come. “The two shows,” writes Cogdill, “could not be more different--one a comic-drama mystery, the other a hard-charging, often violent series--yet each was/is completely satisfying in its own way with realistic characters who drew you in to their exploits, good plots and, especially in Justified’s case, crisp dialogue.”

• And I don’t think my local public-TV station has scheduled broadcasts of Father Brown, the BBC series starring Mark Williams. Which would be worse, if not for the fact that Criminal Element blogger Leslie Gilbert Elman thinks that program “has little in common with its source material” and shouldn’t be held “to any standard of historical accuracy.” Read her full overview of Father Brown here.

How’s This for Forgotten TV?

I never thought I’d see this happen: RLJ Entertainment is planning to release a DVD set of Barbary Coast, the long-unavailable 1975-1976 ABC-TV series starring William Shatner as a disguise-obsessed government agent working to fight crime in 19th-century San Francisco. The series also starred Doug McClure as his reluctant, saloon-owning partner. TV Shows on DVD says this four-disc set will go on sale June 3, priced at $59.99, and offers this précis of the show:

Golden Globe winner William Shatner (Star Trek, Boston Legal) is Jeff Cable, an undercover agent patrolling the wild streets of 1880s San Francisco. Filled with casinos and saloons, this bustling slice of post-Gold Rush California runs on corruption, greed, and violence. And it’s Agent Cable’s job to crack down on the numerous criminals who have made a home there. Even top public officials can’t be trusted, so Cable weaves elaborate ruses to uncover the Barbary Coast’s many plots.

He also relies on the slick but beleaguered Cash Conover (Doug McClure, The Virginian), proprietor of the Golden Gate Casino. Conover reluctantly puts his business and well-being on the line for Cable time and again. The charismatic pair often find the cards stacked against them, but that doesn’t stop them from having a rollicking good time as they police a town mired in vigilante justice. Also starring Richard Kiel (The Spy Who Loved Me), this Emmy-nominated series is a playful take on traditional Westerns with a terrific cast.

TV Shows on DVD doesn’t specifically address the matter, but this forthcoming set may well contain the 1975 Barbary Coast pilot film, which was written by Douglas Heyes and starred Dennis Cole as a more laconic Cash. How else would this be a 14-episode offering? There were only 13 hour-long episodes shot, following the success of that pilot.

Meanwhile, Warner Archive has just released a DVD of the 1972 pilot for The Delphi Bureau, starring Laurence Luckinbill as Glenn Garth Gregory, a government agent possessed of a handy photographic memory. In the pilot, explains IMDb, Gregory “is assigned to solve the disappearance of an entire fleet of old Air Force planes.” Only eight episodes of the subsequent ABC series were produced, all shown as part of a Thursday night “wheel series” titled The Men. (The other two “spokes” of that wheel were Robert Conrad’s Assignment: Vienna and James Wainwright’s Jigsaw.)

A few years back, Mystery*File’s Michael Shonk reviewed the Delphi Bureau pilot, which was subtitled “The Merchant of Death Assignment” (even though almost all of the series’ later episodes ended in “Project,” not “Assignment”); you can read his remarks here. The new DVD is priced at $18.95 and can be purchased here.

Coast of Bad Dreams

Click above to watch the main title sequence from Barbary Coast as well as clips from the second episode, “Crazy Cats.”

(Editor’s note: This is my humble contribution to the weeklong William Shatner Blogathon, organized by Stacia Jones of She Blogged by Night.)

I’ve mentioned before that my fondness for San Francisco can be traced principally to four influences during my teenage years: (1) Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon; (2) Herbert Asbury’s wonderful book about the city’s criminal past, The Barbary Coast; and (3) a pair of American television series, McMillan & Wife and The Streets of San Francisco. Actually, though, there’s another reason, too, for my association with California’s most colorful burg: the short-lived series Barbary Coast.

That hour-long show, which debuted on ABC-TV in September 1975 and disappeared from the prime-time schedule just a dozen episodes later, in early January 1976, was set in 1870s San Francisco. It starred Star Trek alumnus William Shatner as Jeff Cable, the governor of California’s personal undercover investigator, and Doug McClure (formerly of Checkmate and The Virginian) as Cash Conover, the proprietor of a saloon and casino in the then rough-and-tumble town’s most notorious quarter, the Barbary Coast, which butted up against the Italian district of North Beach. The back-story, if I recall correctly, was that the well-connected Cable had saved gambler Conover’s bacon, after the latter killed (in a New Orleans duel) the son of a powerful nabob, and then “persuaded” Conover to help him clean up the Coast--“the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind,” as B.E. Lloyd opined in his 1876 book, Lights and Shades in San Francisco. Agent Cable was a master of disguise, who lived in a secret deluxe apartment on the casino’s second floor, entered through a hinged fireplace in Conover’s office.

At least initially, Barbary Coast seemed to have much weighing in its favor. Shatner and McClure were both fan favorites. The series’ creator was Douglas Heyes, whose screenwriting credits included episodes of 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, The Bold Ones, McCloud, and City of Angels. The program was the closest thing to a TV Western since Gunsmoke cantered off into the sunset in the spring of 1975. And the setting held considerable promise for quirky criminal adventures. As I wrote of the real Barbary Coast in my book San Francisco: Yesterday and Today,

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, this unabashedly wicked quarter--centered on Pacific Avenue (or “Terrific Street,” as habitués called it), and chock-a-block with groggeries and brothels--was an affront to everything clean-living San Franciscans wanted for their city.

A survey made in 1870 discovered that the Coast’s underworld population numbered 20,000--3,000 of whom made their living from prostitution. The rest spent their days separating fools from their money in gambling joints, “shanghaiing” drugged sailors and other ne’er-do-wells onto ships bound for Asia or South America, running ribald theaters, operating protection rackets, and managing a remarkable redundancy of drinking establishments. In 1875, the city of San Francisco issued some 2,000 liquor licenses, 304 of which went to places along the Barbary Coast. A single block of Pacific Avenue boasted 10 saloons. With such competition, watering holes had to be creative if they were to attract customers. One chained a live grizzly bear beside its entrance. Others, explained Scribner’s Monthly magazine in 1875, “have organs that invite patrons to dally. ... And some, in addition to a band, keep a female staff capable of waking thirst in a stone.” At one dive, a rank grotesque known as Dirty Tom McAlear would consume any noxious liquid or foul food you gave him, in exchange for the few pennies at the bottom of your pocket. McAlear was finally arrested for “making a beast of himself.”

But problems were quick to crop up. In the pilot film, directed by Bill Bixby of The Magician fame and shown originally in May 1975, Dennis Cole had starred as Conover, owner of the Golden Gate Casino. But critics deemed Cole too restrained and colorless in that role, so ABC dumped him in favor of the more boyish McClure. Personally, I preferred Cole’s performance as the suspicious and manifestly superstitious Cash, because he emanated a depth and restrained deviousness that McClure could never capture--if he even tried. With the substitution of McClure as Shatner’s partner in crime-solving, ABC also announced plans to retitle the show Cash and Cable; fortunately, that decision never went farther than the announcement. One choice that did go ahead, though, was the unfortunate one to schedule Barbary Coast in the same time slot--8-9 p.m. on Mondays--that had been home to the axed Gunsmoke. The real Barbary Coast had been a despicable, dank, and downright desperate place. Capturing and capitalizing on that reputation in a series slated for the “family hour” was well nigh impossible.

Some of the criminal cases these reluctant “pardners” tackled might have been intriguingly fleshed out, had the show’s writers (a few of whom had apparently been borrowed from the stable that made Mission: Impossible a hit) been allowed to incorporate more mature subject matter into their scripts. As the TV Acres Web site recalls, episodes focused on such subjects as “a crooked banker using counterfeit cash to inflate his account,” “recovering a hijacked shipment of rifles,” “retrieving a valuable pair of jade cats for the Chinese,” and “thwarting the assassination plot of a visiting Irish leader.” Heyes’ pilot offered a glimpse of what might have been, with its story line about vigilantes (who had actually terrorized historical San Francisco) wanting to take law enforcement into their own violent hands. But of course such dark material would have been unacceptable on a weekly basis when children were watching. Heaven knows, they might have been traumatized for the rest of their lives!

Television reviewers compared Barbary Coast with another 19th-century Western spy-crime series, The Wild Wild West, and found the former wanting. Shatner’s Cable wasn’t nearly as appealing as Ross Martin’s suave master of disguise and gadget maker, Artemus Gordon, and he could be downright annoying and campy. And McClure’s Conover--unconvincingly a smash with the female sex--lacked anything approaching the magnetism of Robert Conrad’s secret agent, James West. TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory was particularly unimpressed with the show. In his column of October 25, 1975, he wrote:

Barbary Coast is half adventure, half spoof and all complicated. The plots are so involved that it takes someone with nothing else on his mind to understand them. If there’s anything that makes a spoof go poof, it’s not knowing what’s going on--before they start making fun of it. There’s also another problem. Your heroes, William Shatner and Doug McClure, are evidently directed to be as cute as bugs, and, like all actors so directed since the prime of recorded time, sooner of later they begin to--well, bug you.

From the reviewers’ point of view, Barbary Coast probably outstayed its welcome. Even Shatner--who went on from this failure to do the Star Trek movies and then play a veteran police sergeant in T.J. Hooker (1982-1986)--has been dismissive of the show’s strengths in the 35 years since it was cancelled. However, I think Barbary Coast (which, unfortunately, is still not available in DVD format) had potential, and could have been a crowd pleaser--if only it had landed a later evening time spot and been allowed to actually depict the dangers and devilishness that the genuine Barbary Coast offered to both its habitués and the well-fixed young slummers who thrilled at the opportunity to wander its tawdry thoroughfares.

I can only imagine what director Martin Scorsese, who is in the process of developing the fall 2010 HBO-TV series Boardwalk Empire, set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, New Jersey, could do with a historical detective drama backdropped by a San Francisco locale that made Atlantic City look like a children’s playground. Would he at least sign the now 79-year-old William Shatner to do a cameo bit?

READ MORE: “A Cruise on the Barbary Coast,” by Albert S. Evans (The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco).

The Grim Reaper Stays on Task

Yesterday we reported on the death of Edward Woodward, star of The Equalizer. Now comes word of the passing this last Sunday of yet another actor, Dennis Cole, who was known for his work on at least two TV series of note to crime-fiction enthusiasts.

As blogger Ivan G. Shreve Jr. recalled in a post earlier today, the Detroit, Michigan-born Cole’s “best known television showcase was as the rookie Detective Jim Briggs on the ABC-TV crime drama Felony Squad, which had a respectable run from 1966 to 1969.” However, Cole also starred with Rod Taylor in the short-run, 1971 CBS western-detective series Bearcats! about two soldiers of fortune who roamed the American Southwest during the second decade of the 20th century, helping people in trouble. The program took its name from the automobile Taylor and Cole drove: a 1914 Stutz Bearcat.

Cole almost added a third series to his resume, but he was axed at the last minute. After starring in the May 1975 TV pilot film Barbary Coast--playing a slick but shady saloon owner in San Francisco’s pleasure quarter of the 1870s opposite William Shatner, whose role was that of a government agent and master of disguise--he was replaced before the show debuted in September 1975 in favor of Doug McClure. It wasn’t a smart switch; Cole had a bit of mysteriousness and danger about him as gambler-turned-businessman Cash Conover, while McClure substituted boyish exuberance that made the whole venture seem sillier than it should have been. (The show’s “family hour” scheduling didn’t help any, either.) Screenwriter Douglas Heyes created both Bearcats! and Barbary Coast.

As the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) notes, Cole appeared in the TV drama Bracken’s World and later guested on such shows as The Streets of San Francisco, Police Story, The Fall Guy, Mike Hammer, and Murder, She Wrote. Prior to becoming an actor, he was employed as a male model. And Cole was married for three years to Jaclyn Smith, on whose series, Charlie’s Angels, he was featured several times.

FOLLOW-UP: YouTube hosts a collection of promo spots for TV shows that premiered during the fall of 1975. Among those is one for Barbary Coast (slotted between ads for On the Rocks and Matt Helm). The spot concludes by telling viewers that “Doug McClure stars as Cash. William Shatner stars as Cable.” Only one problem: all of the clips seem to come from the pilot film, and show Dennis Cole in the Cash role. Oops.

Birthday Candles and Bikinis

As you may have noticed from all the hoopla hereabouts, today is The Rap Sheet’s first birthday. And we’ll resume our previously scheduled nominations of overlooked/underappreciated crime novels presently. But there are things going on elsewhere in the crime-fiction realm, too, that deserve attention.

• Speaking of birthdays, there will be Sherlock Holmes fans all over the world celebrating what would have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 148th birthday today (had he not died in the summer of 1930). But another birthday may be more easily forgotten. May 22 was also the birthday of Douglas Heyes (born in 1919), a screenwriter who worked on many films and TV shows of note. In addition to penning the screenplays for Beau Geste (1966) and Ice Station Zebra (1968), Heyes--who seemed to be a favorite of legendary producer Roy Huggins--wrote episodes of Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Checkmate, Alias Smith and Jones, Night Gallery, McCloud, The Bold Ones, City of Angels, and others. He also wrote a fine but largely forgotten 1969 teleflick called The Lonely Profession, which starred Harry Guardino as a San Francisco private eye embroiled in a case involving too much money and too few scruples. In addition, Heyes adapted Taylor Caldwell’s novel Captains and the Kings as a 1976 NBC miniseries, created the too-short-lived William Shatner-Doug McClure historical adventure Barbary Coast, and served as executive producer of the 1971 “post-Western” series Bearcats! Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: Heyes was a novelist. I own one of his books, a pretty exciting 1930s P.I. tale called The Kill (1985), but he apparently also wrote two previous novels, The Kiss-Off and The 12th of Never. Heyes died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles in February 1993.

• “BookBitch” blogger Stacy Alesi interviews author Alafair Burke on the subjects of her famous father, crossover crime characters, her Manhattan commute, and her forthcoming novel Dead Connection. Their exchange can be enjoyed here.

• Meanwhile, John Kenyon of Things I’d Rather Be Doing asks Michael Connelly about his remarkably short new novel, The Overlook.

• Have you ever wondered what author Ian Rankin’s work space looks like? Well, wonder no more.

• Christian Science Monitor writer Daniel B. Wood takes readers on “a gumshoe’s tour” of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, complete with “passage-quoting noir junkies.” Ride along with him here.

• And Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman readies us for summer with notes on a trio of older paperback novels that remind us of what is really important this coming sunnier season: bikinis and Berettas. You’ll find his comments here.