Milestone for Milner

Actor Martin Milner, who portrayed peripatetic young Tod Stiles in the TV series Route 66, before teaming up with Kent McCord in the 1968-1975 cop drama Adam-12, turns 81 years old today.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, on this date in 1931, Milner lived part of his boyhood in Seattle, where he first took up acting. He subsequently moved with his family to Los Angeles, and in 1947 had his screen debut in Life with Father. His first TV role was in a 1950 episode of The Lone Ranger. Milner met actor (later director and producer) Jack Webb--who would cast him in Adam-12--in 1950 on the set of a Richard Widmark/Jack Palance World War II picture called Halls of Montezuma.

But military service interrupted his acting career after he celebrated his 21st birthday. Wikipedia explains,

In 1952, Milner was drafted into the U.S. Army. In Special Services at Fort Ord on California's Monterey Bay peninsula, he directed training films and, with fellow actor/soldier David Janssen, emceed and performed in skits to entertain the soldiers. Milner and Janssen encouraged fellow soldier Clint Eastwood to pursue an acting career when his time in the Army ended. While in the Army, Milner continued working for Jack Webb, playing “Officer Bill Lockwood” (briefly the partner of “Sgt. Friday”) and other characters on the Dragnet radio series on weekends. He also appeared on six episodes of Webb’s Dragnet television series between 1952 and 1955.

In addition to his performances on Route 66 and Adam-12, Milner starred (with a very young Helen Hunt) in the short-lived Irwin Allen small-screen series Swiss Family Robinson. He also did turns on Felony Squad, Police Story, and Murder, She Wrote. I remember Milner from the 1974 disaster teleflick Hurricane, in which he played a courageous pilot taking on a brutal storm, and he holds the distinction of having been the first murder victim in the regular run of Peter Falk’s Columbo, playing a successful mystery novelist in the September 15, 1971, episode, “Murder by the Book.”

Both IMDb and Wikipedia state that Milner’s final acting job was in a 1997 episode of Diagnosis: Murder titled “Murder Blues,” with him playing an LAPD detective. However, he co-hosted Let’s Talk Hook-up, a San Diego, California-based radio talk show about the wonders of fishing (one of his passions), from 1993 to 2004.

I hope that wherever Martin Milner is on this day at the very tail end of 2012, he’s enjoying the hell out of his retirement.

(Hat tip to Frederick Zackel.)

Of Comebacks, Classics, and Commandments

• Tonight will bring Episode 2 of the latest Wallander series, “The Dogs of Riga,” starring Kenneth Branaugh. That 90-minute broadcast begins at 9 p.m. ET/PT as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery!

• Speaking of Masterpiece Mystery!: Three new installments of the very popular World War II-era crime drama Foyle’s War, starring Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks, are currently being filmed for Britain’s ITV and are expected to show in the States sometime next summer

under the Mystery! umbrella. Omnimystery News catches us up a bit on what to expect from those fresh episodes.

• It seems rather early to be announcing this, but registration is now open for ThrillerFest VIII, scheduled to take place from July 10 to 13, 2013, in New York City. According to a press release, “This year, spotlight guests will include 2013 ThrillerMaster Anne Rice, 2011 ThrillerMaster R.L. Stine, T. Jefferson Parker, and Michael Connelly.”

• Although it has zero to do with crime fiction, it’s worth noting that tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the debut of M*A*S*H.

• Better late than never: Yesterday was the 79th birthday of Henry Darrow, described by the Los Angeles Times as “the first Puerto Rican star of an hour-long TV series, playing the charismatic and devilish Manolito Montoya on the 1967-71 NBC western The High Chaparral.” Many of us, though, will recall Darrow best for his role as San Diego Police Lieutenant Manuel “Manny” Quinlan on Harry O.

• Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai picks Hollywood’s top seven femmes fatales for The Huffington Post. In the course of it, he manages to promote only two of his popular line’s titles.

• As Shotsmag Confidential notes, British publisher Orion has launched The Murder Room, “a dedicated Web site which makes out-of-print and hard-to-find classic crime novels available as e-books.” A list of available titles can be found here.

• There certainly are plenty of supposed “commandments” in regards to the writing of crime, mystery, and detective fiction. Here are several such lists, none of which--in my humble opinion, anyway--need to be followed slavishly.

• In advance of Bouchercon, taking place this year in Cleveland, Ohio, from October 4 to 7, the blog Murder, Mystery & Mayhem recaps the lists of contenders for a wide variety of commendations to be given out during that convention.

• As part of its “Classics in September” series, the blog Crime Fiction Lover features an interview with editor, publisher, and bookstore proprietor Otto Penzler. His interrogator doesn’t ask enough questions, and Penzler is too brief in his responses, but the results are still worth reading here.

• Another installment of “Classics in September” is this new tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.

• Blogger Rhian Davies reports that Charles Cummings has won the inaugural Scottish Crime Book of the Year award.

• It’s been a long while since I watched the pilot for the 1984-1986 private-eye TV series Riptide, starring Perry King, Joe Penny, and Anne Francis. But it has suddenly appeared on YouTube in its entirety, along with the introductory film for another Stephen J. Cannell series, Hardcastle & McCormick, and the pilot for the Cybill Shepherd/Bruce Willis series, Moonlighting. Sheesh! If you’re not careful, you could spend all day just watching old TV shows on the Web.

• Or maybe you’d prefer lower-tech entertainment.

• As a veteran newspaper guy, I’m glad to see that U.S. publishers remain optimistic about the future of their printed news medium. With the intent of helping out, I’ve recently returned to my tradition of spending a couple of hours just reading The New York Times on Sunday mornings. It’s much more peaceful than finding news online.

• And not long after I posted a list on this page of book-oriented blogs that deserve greater attention, the author of one such product--Jedidiah Ayres from Barnes & Noble’s Ransom Notes--wrote to tell me that “I got my pink slip this afternoon--no more Ransom Notes for me.” Ayres adds: “I’m not sore. Of course I’d rather continue with that gig, but I think they made a business decision and I couldn’t speak to the advisedness of that.” Well, at least Ayres still has his personal blog, Hard-boiled Wonderland.

We Can Dig It!

Actor Richard Roundtree, who starred as ass-kicking New York City private eye John Shaft in three feature films as well as a short-lived TV series, turns 70 years old today.

READ MORE: “The Rap Sheet: Man of Muscle, Ice and Anger--Shaft!” by J. Kingston Pierce (Kirkus Reviews).

Bullet Points: Musings and Memories Edition

• If you live around Harrogate, England, you have the opportunity to enter a contest sponsored in part by the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which is to be held this year at the Old Swan Hotel, July 19-21. If I understand this challenge correctly, the goal is to compose “crime stories [of] no more than 300 words” long that can be featured in local buses. Entry details are here.

• Suddenly, G.K. Chesteron’s parish priest-cum-sleuth seems to be everywhere. Penguin’s handsome new 768-page volume, The Complete Father Brown Stories, is due out at the end of next month. And Mark Williams, who played Arthur Weasley in the “Harry Potter” films--has reportedly been cast

as Chesterton’s protagonist in a 10-episode BBC-TV drama set to air in early 2013.

• By the way, Omnimystery News mentioned in its item about Weasley’s hiring that “A pilot for a U.S. crime drama, Sanctuary of Fear with Barnard Hughes as Father Brown living in Manhattan, aired in 1979 but was not developed further.” While I don’t remember watching that pilot, YouTube hosts its introductory segment, which I am embedding on the left. Guest starring Kay Lenz and Fred Gwynne, it couldn’t have been all bad. Does anyone out there remember seeing that teleflick?

• The online mag Obit features a good background piece on Patricia Highsmith’s career and her tendency toward “violent thoughts.”

• Writers Gary Phillips and Tony Chavira are combining their respective Webcomics--Bicycle Cop Dave and Brand & Reese, both of which were published on the Los Angeles housing/development Web site FourStory.org--in a single volume,titled Beat L.A., which they hope to produce through the crowd-funding site Kickstar. You can learn more about their project, and help contribute, here.

• The Web site ForeWord Reviews has announced the winners of its 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Awards in dozens of categories, including Mystery and Thriller/Suspense. In addition, the Editor’s Choice Prize for fiction was given to a murder mystery, All Cry Chaos, by Leonard Rosen (The Permanent Press).

• Author J. Sydney Jones presents, in his blog, an excellent interview with British writer Michael Jecks, the author of 31 books in his Knights Templar series and a “master of the medieval murder mystery,” to quote Jones. You will find their exchange here.

• I remember Doug McClure best for his roles in Checkmate, Barbary Coast, and even The Judge and Jake Wyler, but prefer to overlook performances in such films as this one.

• Another thing I recall fondly: CBS newsman Christopher Glenn’s Saturday morning “In the News” segments, which were geared toward young people and broadcast from 1971 to 1986. In case you didn’t know, Glenn died in 2006 at age 68.

• Mark your calendars, folks: This year’s Poisoned Pen Conference, organized by Arizona’s Poisoned Pen Bookstore, will take place at Phoenix’s historic Biltmore Hotel on Friday, July 13. Guests scheduled to participate include Joseph Kanon, Timothy Hallinan, Alex Kava, Jesse Kellerman, Martin Limon, and Dana Stabenow. The price to attend is just $20. More information is available here.

• Happy (if belated) anniversary to Snubnose Press!

• I’m tardy too in sending out best birthday wishes to Lindsay Wagner, who not only starred in The Bionic Woman (perhaps not her finest moment, all things considered), but put in two appearances on The Rockford Files. Wagner turned 63 years old last Friday.

• And there’s more for Rockford fans: The Second Annual Rockford Files Fest will be held on Saturday July 21, at Paradise Cove in Malibu, California. Among the guests taking part in this celebration will be Jon Winokur, the co-author (with James Garner) of The Garner Files; Garner’s longtime stuntman, Roydon Clark; and Ed Robertson, author of Thirty Years of The Rockford Files: An Inside Look at America’s Greatest Detective Series. If only I lived in Los Angeles ...

• Robert Mitchum, Richard Dreyfuss, Shirley MacLaine, and Jimmy Stewart (partly because of his 1973-1974 CBS-TV mystery series Hawkins) are all featured on Flavorwire’s rundown of “10 Movie Stars Who Bombed on TV.” Speaking of Stewart, if you pay close attention to Flavorwire’s clip from his 1971-1972 sitcom, you’ll spot actress Kate Jackson--beautiful and bare-midriffed in her early 20s (pre-The Rookies, pre-Charlie’s Angels)--guesting as a college student in a fix.

• I, for one, had forgotten that Michelle Pfeiffer starred in the very short-lived, 1980 police drama B.A.D. CATS. “An obvious ripoff of Starsky & Hutch (and executive-produced for the same network by Starsky’s Aaron Spelling), B.A.D. CATS pitted the two male detectives--one blond and one brunette, natch--of the Burglary Auto Detail, Commercial Auto Thefts squad (!) against various hijackers, terrorists, dope fiends, and auto thieves,” writes Marty McKee. “Because Nick and Ocee happen to be former race car drivers, their method of busting crime involves endangering innocent civilians and destroying lots of private property.”

• Even the British are struck by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s reputation for mendacity. “Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business,” observes The Guardian’s Michael Cohen. “But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.”

• It will be good to see 1940s comic-book industry troubleshooter Jack Starr return in Seduction of the Innocent, by Max Allan Collins, due out from Hard Case Crime in September.

• Michael Connelly, Robert Dugoni, and David Ellis are the nominees for the 2012 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.

• And I really do have to rent the DVD set of Burke’s Law sometime. That cop series, originally broadcast on ABC-TV from 1963 to 1965, seems to have lots of fans, but I’ve only seen a few episodes.

Jack the Giant

Today we celebrate the 75th birthday of American actor John Joseph “Jack” Nicholson, born on this date back in 1937. And we’re celebrating it in appropriate style, we think, with previews from Chinatown, the 1974 film in which he plays a sleazy, 1930s gumshoe, J.J. “Jake” Gittes, who gets mixed up in a knotty case involving power, passion, and paternity. The Moviefone blog recently declared Chinatown to be the second best film Nicholson has ever made, following his 1975 comedy/drama, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and we’re not about to disagree.

The first two video frames below feature trailers for Chinatown (a film that was finally followed, in 1990, by a sequel: The Two Jakes). The third offers Jerry Goldsmith’s fabulous Chinatown theme.

Celebrating Garner

Television historian Ed Robertson tells us that tonight’s edition of TV Confidential, his two-hour radio program, will celebrate the fast-approaching (on April 7) 84th birthday of American actor James Garner, the star of Maverick, The Rockford Files, Bret Maverick, and numerous films. Joining Robertson will be Jon Winokur, co-author of Garner’s wonderful, 2011 autobiography, The Garner Files.

The show can be heard this evening, beginning at 8 p.m. ET (5 p.m. PT) on Detroit’s WROM. Log on here to listen in.

Also included in this evening’s show, Robertson explains, will be “encore presentations of our conversations with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The F.B.I., My Dinner of Herbs) and star car researcher Jim Suva (Pioneers of Television) ...”

Oh, and if you miss hearing it tonight, this episode of TV Confidential will be repeated several times over the next week on affiliated stations. Click here to find the full schedule.

You Don’t Know Shat!

Today is actor William Shatner’s 81st birthday. It reminds me that I participated two years ago in a fun, weeklong Shatner blogathon, organized by Stacia Jones of She Blogged by Night. Most features of that blogathon can be found here. My own humble contribution, about the 1975-1976 ABC-TV series Barbary Coast, can be found here.

The film-oriented blog, The Lightning Bug’s Lair, has organized its own tribute around Shatner’s latest birthday. Click here.

My father’s 88th birthday would also have been today. Unfortunately, he passed away back in 2004, leaving me, finally, parentless.

The Age of Jackson

It’s not strictly crime fiction, but I have posted in one of my other blogs a 70th-birthday tribute to Sherry Jackson. The Idaho-born actress went on from a particularly sexy role in the original Star Trek (she played the android Andrea) to make guest appearances in such shows as 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason, The Rockford Files, Matt Helm, and The Streets of San Francisco. You’ll find my piece here.

What the Dickens?

It seems not to have passed too many people by, that had he not perished way back in 1870, English author Charles Dickens would today be celebrating 200 years of life (though how cheerful a 200-year-old man might really be is anybody’s guess).

I had thought to write a colorful defense on this page of Dickens as a mystery and suspense novelist--which he unquestionably was, though not exclusively--perhaps peppering into my argument a few choice passages from Bleak House (1853) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (still uncompleted at the time of his death), and adding others from his 1865 work, Our Mutual Friend, which I am only now reading for the first time. Of course, I would also have found a way to name-drop Dickens’ famous protégé, Wilkie Collins, who is remembered these days mostly for his mystery fiction (having penned 1860’s The Woman in White and The Moonstone, 1868).

But there have been so many posts devoted to Dickens’ birthday today, that I shall simply mention four I think are worth your attention:

• “The Dark Side of Dickens,” in which fiction writer and reviewer David Abrams--while applauding Dickens’ books--recalls the author’s sometimes disagreeable personality. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that Charles Dickens the Writer was a genius,” Abrams begins, “but Charles Dickens the Man was an asshole.”

• “Charles Dickens, Crime Writer,” which has Criminal Intent contributor Terry Farley Moran making the argument I had thought to put forth, and making it well. “Charles Dickens,” she explains, “didn’t become famous as a writer of mystery/detective fiction, as it was not a commonly defined genre during his lifetime. But as we look back, he was definitely a master of the craft.” I couldn’t agree more.

• “Charles Dickens at 200: Still the Great British ‘Idol.’” As reluctant as I am to recommend anything from USA Today (the most white-bread and dull of American newspapers), reporter Bob Minzesheimer does offer a fairly good overview of Dickens’ continuing influence on our entertainment media.

• “Charles Dickens’ Birthday and the Age of Verbosity,” in which Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri proffers a spirited tribute to Dickens’ persistent long-windedness. “Dickens ... took an awfully long time to say whatever it was he was going to say,” she notes. “And he had an incentive to do it. He published his books in installments, in the pulp form of the serial--cheaper than full-bore novels, and far more addictive. On the bright side, this makes his books useful for stopping doors and ironing recalcitrant skirts. On the downside, you really feel, upon emerging, that you know everything that can possibly be said on the subject of allegorical knitting.”

Elsewhere on the Web today, you’ll find lists of “The 10 Best Charles Dickens Characters of All Time” and “Five Myths About Charles Dickens,” as well as The Guardian’s “fiendishly difficult” Dickens birthday quiz and search engine Google’s nod to the Victorian Age’s greatest novelist in the form of a page-top “doodle”.

(Hat tips to Mystery Fanfare and Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

READ MORE: “Charles in Charge,” by Kent Jones (The Maddow Blog); “The 200th Anniversary of Charles Dickens’ Birth,” by Mercurie (A Shroud of Thoughts).

Happy Birthday, John Steed!

That is, let us all rise in applause for veteran English actor Patrick Macnee, who starred as suave Steed in the 1961-1969 UK TV series The Avengers, during three years of which he played opposite the captivating (and oft-catsuited) Diana Rigg.

Macnee--who turns 90 years old today--went on to feature in a short-lived revival of The Avengers, do a fine turn as Doctor John Watson in the 1976 teleflick Sherlock Holmes in New York (with Roger Moore portraying Holmes), appear beside Robert Urich in the TV crime-adventure drama Gavilan, act in the 1985 James Bond film A View to a Kill (again billed with Roger Moore) as Agent 007’s ally Sir Godfrey Tibbett, guest-star in an unusual episode of Columbo, accept a less-than-career-making role in Dennis Weaver’s The Return of Sam McCloud, live to regret his involvement in the Hulk Hogan action-adventure series Thunder in Paradise, and ... well, let’s just say that his résumé runs to more than a mere page or two.

Wherever you are, Mr. Macnee, we wish you the best today.