Bullet Points: Various and Sundry Edition

• With production on the 25th James Bond film having been pushed back, and the picture’s release now delayed until April 2020, that leaves extra time for rumors to fill in where facts are so far absent. Talk that Agent 007 (again played by Daniel Craig) will be killed off in the next movie is probably bogus. But word that the still-untitled film might be shot, at least partly, in Jamaica appears to be true. The Spy Command reports that “The government of Jamaica on March 29 confirmed it’s in ‘advanced’ talks about having Bond 25 shooting on the island nation.” This wouldn’t be the first time 007 has invaded the lush land of reggae and jerk spices. Spy Command managing editor Bill Koenig writes, “Both Dr. No (1962) and Live and Let Die (1973) were filmed in Jamaica (it doubled for the fictional San Monique in the latter movie). Ian Fleming also wrote the first drafts for his 007 stories while in Jamaica during the winter.”

• Sadder Bond-related news: The Spy Command brings word that English actress/model Tania Mallet, “who had a small but key role in Goldfinger, has died at 77.” It goes on to tell that “In 1964’s Goldfinger, Mallet played Tilly Masterson, sister to Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), who had been killed by being ‘painted gold,’ causing skin suffocation. Tilly seeks to avenge her sister’s death and is tailing Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) in Switzerland. She takes a rifle shot at Goldfinger but almost hits Bond (Sean Connery).” Following that big-screen debut, Mallett (a cousin of actress Helen Mirren) resumed modeling, though she did appear as herself in several TV shows, and took an uncredited role in “The Midas Touch,” a 1978 episode of The New Avengers.

• Britain’s Piccadilly Publishing, which usually specializes in Westerns and men’s adventure yarns, will be making at least some of the numerous tales about newhound-turned-private eye Larry Kent available in e-book format—with their original “good girl” artwork. (See Curves Can Kill on the right.) Kent, if you don’t remember, began life on a 1950s Australian radio drama series (created by Ron Ingleby), then became a phenomenon in print—initially in a succession of novelettes, but ultimately in hundreds of novels, all of them with high body counts. More info is on the Piccadilly Web site.

• Criminal Element continues to roll out its posts revisiting books that, over the last 65 years, have won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Although the quality of entries is inconsistent, and some participating critics have insisted on judging works according to modern viewpoints rather than historical ones, in general, the series has offered an interesting look back at wonderful—if sometimes forgotten—criminal yarns. The latest installment, contributed by novelist Philip Margolin (The Perfect Alibi) re-examines The Quiller Memorandum (aka The Berlin Memorandum), the first book in Adam Hall’s 20-volume series starring the spy known only as Quiller. Margolin writes:

The Quiller Memorandum is in many was an experimental novel. It is narrated in a stream of consciousness style by Quiller, and the narrative is frequently exhausting as we are forced to read page after page detailing the mechanics of losing a tail and other spycraft. What saves the book is Hall’s description of the Nazi horrors that motivate Quiller to find the Nazis in hiding and bring them to justice. There are some good twists and an interesting relationship between Quiller and Inga, the mysterious femme fatale. I moved back and forth between fascination, boredom, and misbelief while reading the novel, especially the interrogation sequences.

If you’ve fallen behind in reading Criminal Element’s Edgar Awards series, you can catch up with all of the posts here.

• Philip Kerr’s Metropolis, his 14th and final Bernie Gunther novel, won’t go on sale for another week. But its welcome is already in full swing. Crime Fiction Lover has posted a handy guide to the series, all of the books—whether set in Europe, South America, or Cuba—starring Gunther, a mordantly humorous, half-Jewish, Nazi-hating Berlin homicide detective turned (sometimes reluctant) private eye. Meanwhile, the Rap Sheet’s UK correspondent, Ali Karim, has posted this video of the book’s official launch at London’s Daunt Books, well attended by publishing types and critics pleased to celebrate author Kerr, who died a year ago, at age 62. On hand, too, were Kerr’s editor, Jane Wood, and his wife, journalist-novelist Jane Thynne, who delivered a warm, revealing tribute to her late husband.

• While I remain skeptical of the whole enterprise, I’m not surprised by this news: HBO-TV has greenlighted a new “Perry Mason origin series, starring Matthew Rhys as the titular icon.” Deadline Hollywood notes that “prolific TV director, writer, and producer Tim Van Patten (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones) has been tapped to direct and executive produce” the show.

• I wish this Rockford Files diorama was widely available.

• Sopranos fans, looking forward to the September 25, 2020, release of David Chase’s prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark, will be interested in a tidbit contained in B.V. Lawson’s latest “Media for Murder” column, explaining that the movie “has cast its final major lead role. Michela De Rossi, the Italian-born actress who made her debut in Boys Cry, has been set to join Alessandro Nivola, Vera Farmiga, Ray Liotta, Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, John Magaro, Michael Gandolfini, and the just-cast Leslie Odom Jr. in the ensemble drama for New Line.” A bit more information about De Rossi can be found in Entertainment CheatSheet.

• I’ve been a fan of James McClure’s novels ever since college. Beginning with 1971’s The Steam Pig, this author—who died in 2006—composed eight police procedurals set in apartheid-era South Africa, all starring a racially mixed pair of sleuths, Afrikaan Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Murder and Robbery Squad and his Zulu assistant, Sergeant Mickey Zondi. If you haven’t yet discovered these works, definitely check out Neil Nyren’s briefing on his fiction.

• It was nice to see the 1986-1988 TV series Crime Story receive a little love recently from New York magazine’s Vulture site. Comparing that 1960s-set Michael Mann drama with another, better-known Mann project, Miami Vice, Nathan Smith opines:

Where Miami Vice brought the police procedural into the future—flashy clothes, big tunes, heaps of style—Crime Story went back in time, and even if it’s the lesser-known of the two series, it revolutionized the genre on a molecular level, whereas Miami Vice achieved the same only on the surface. Two decades before The Sopranos and The Wire, Crime Story was one of the very first serialized prime-time dramas to ditch the procedural format and tell a season-long story. …

Crime Story unlocked the gates for shows like Wiseguy, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files, the wayward step-children of the police procedural. Its gritty realism would be carried on by the likes of Homicide: Life on the Street and NYPD Blue. But its most important contribution, the three words “to be continued … ” at the end of every single episode, influenced nearly every subsequent drama on prime time. Though Crime Story wasn’t the first series to flash those words across the screen—every show from Dallas to The Brady Bunch had done a multi-episode arc—the idea of a story that continued seemingly without end or resolution in sight, was new.

• For your amusement, from Flavorwire: “Classic Songs Reimagined as Vintage Pulp Book Covers.”

• During the mid-1960s, the American TV network NBC broadcast a 26-episode animated series called The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. It starred the popular elderly, short, and extremely near-sighted character Quincy Magoo (voiced by Jim Backus of Gilligan’s Island fame), who in this show played an actor appearing in abbreviated stage productions of classic works of fiction. “The series was originally shown in prime time …,” explains Wikipedia, “therefore certain more mature elements were present. These included death threats (William Tell, Robin Hood, Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes), children in danger (Treasure Island, Gunga Din, William Tell), insanity (Don Quixote, Moby Dick), heroic self-sacrifice (Gunga Din), religious themes (Noah’s Ark), and realistic (although mostly bloodless) violence including swordplay, shooting, clubbing, drowning, and character deaths (most episodes).” I remember watching reruns of the episodes based on Frankenstein, Cyrano de Bergerac, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Count of Monte Cristo. But I’d forgotten until this last weekend that there was a Sherlock Holmes episode, featuring Magoo as the faithful Doctor John H. Watson. (Thank you to the Man from U.N.C.L.E.—Spies & Detectives Facebook page for reminding me.) The case undertaken in that episode, writes Scott Monty in his blog I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, “is a clever little mystery that includes touches of a number of Sherlock Holmes stories, including The Sign of Four, ‘The Speckled Band,’ ‘The Musgrave Ritual,’ and ‘The Six Napoleons’ to name a few.” Providing the voice of Holmes was actor Paul Frees, who also voiced antagonist Boris Badenov on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The episode is only 23 minutes long, and at least for the nonce, can be enjoyed here.

• This year’s Mystery Fest Key West won’t take place until late June, but its publicity minions are already heralding its scheduled components. This year’s headliner will be psychological suspense master Jeffery Deaver, with special host Heather Graham. And a Whodunit Mystery Writing Competition has been organized in association with the convention. From a news release: “Sponsored by Absolutely Amazing eBooks, candidates wishing to compete are invited to submit the first three pages (maximum 750 words) of a finished, but unpublished manuscript to whodunitaward@mysteryfestkeywest.com no later than April 15, 2019. There is no fee to enter; finalists will be notified by May 1, and will have until May 10 to submit full manuscripts.” You will find more news about the 2019 Mystery Fest here.

• There’s been a lot written of late about Jack the Ripper—not bad for a guy (presumably) whose claim to infamy dates back more than 130 years. Media reports in March suggested that DNA analysis had finally identified the Ripper as being “Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old barber of Polish descent who lived in London at the time [1888],” but was subsequently committed to an insane asylum. Proof, it was said, could be found in seminal fluid left behind on a shawl belonging to Catherine Eddowes, the killer’s fourth recorded victim. However, doubts were soon raised as to whether Eddowes had ever owned such a scarf, and whether DNA found upon it could be trusted, given that it would’ve been “handled by countless people over the years.” In the midst of these debates, British social historian Hallie Rubenhold’s latest work of non-fiction, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, was published in the UK (with a U.S. edition due for release next week). The Guardian greeted the book as “a landmark study [that] calls time on the misogyny that fed the Jack the Ripper myth.” Reviewer Frances Wilson writes:

Few women have had the moment of their deaths returned to more often, and with as much relish, as Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. In each case their throats were cut, and four of them had their entrails removed. Kelly, the only one of “the canonical five”, as Jack the Ripper’s known victims are called, to die in her bed, was completely mutilated. Forests have been felled in the interests of unmasking the murderer, but until now no one has bothered to discover the identity of his victims. The Five is thus an angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth.

It is astonishing how little we know about these five, apart from their names. Hallie Rubenhold fleshes out their stories from the scraps that are available: coroner’s inquests (three of which are missing); “a body of edited, embellished, misheard and re-interpreted newspaper reports”; parish registers; court registers; birth, marriage and death records; rate books and the archives of the London workhouses. For accounts of poverty in London she turns to Francis Place, Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth; she gets facts and figures from Mrs Beaton. With the documentary veracity of a set of Hogarth prints, Rubenhold follows the victims’ doomed footsteps from birth to death. Except that there is no attempt to imagine each woman’s last moments, or describe the state of her body, or further the search for their killer. Instead she asks how it is that these women—all of them somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s lover—ended up alone and destitute on the streets of Whitechapel.

• Happy 80th birthday, Batman!

• Speaking of Gotham’s Caped Crusader, it seems his family’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, is about to get his own 1960s spy show, appropriately titled Pennyworth. The Double O Section informs us that “In the 10-episode drama series, Alfred Pennyworth (The Imitation Game’s Jack Bannon), described by Deadline as ‘a former British SAS soldier in his 20s,’ forms a private security company ‘and goes to work with young billionaire Thomas Wayne (Fleabag’s Ben Aldridge), who’s not yet Bruce’s father, in 1960s London.’” Pennyworth is set to premiere this summer on EPIX. By the way, that Double O Section post includes a very brief trailer for the series.

• In a new piece for CrimeReads, author Stephanie Jo Harris (The Poet Recusant) contends that Victor Hugo’s 1862 masterpiece, Les Miserables, both “created a model for police procedurals” and, in the person of Inspector Javert, gave us a “standard for the unyielding, driven law enforcement officer obsessed with justice.”

• I was surprised to learn, while reading Bill Selnes’ Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan, that Margot Kinberg “has decided to cease writing her blog,” Confessions of a Mystery Novelist. Selnes notes: “For almost 10 years Margot provided a daily post. By my calculations she wrote over 3,000 posts. She highlighted at least 500 different authors!” I would have included a link here to Confessions of a Mystery Novelist, so that people less than familiar with Kinberg’s work could check out what she had accomplished. However, it seems she’s not just stopped writing her blog, but has removed it entirely from the Web. What a shame, not only because good blogs like Kinberg’s can still provide useful information to readers, even when they’re no longer being updated, but because all of the links other blogs established to hers over the last decade are now broken. I have sifted through the full run of The Rap Sheet, scouting for links to Confessions of a Mystery Novelist, and have changed most of them to connect instead with pages in the Internet archive Wayback Machine, but a handful remain inoperative. I don’t mean to criticize Kinberg for her actions; I’m sure they made sense to her at the time. However, I really wish that when bloggers stop working on their sites, they would simply leave them dormant, rather than deleting them entirely.

• Maybe, though, I’m just more sensitive to these matters than most people. I cannot imagine deliberately scrubbing The Rap Sheet from the Web. I have put far too many hours of work into writing and editing this blog to see it all disappear. Unless the world experiences electronic catastrophe, I expect The Rap Sheet to outlast me.

• Despite its impersonal salutation (“Dear Journalists”), I was intrigued recently by a letter sent my way by Bloomsbury Publishing, promoting a forthcoming biography called Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan. The author is Buchan’s granddaughter, Ursula Buchan. Bloomsbury offered this brief on her work:

John Buchan’s name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past one hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous adaptations for film, television, radio and stage, beginning with the celebrated version by Alfred Hitchcock.

Yet there was vastly more to “J.B.” He wrote more than a hundred books—fiction and non-fiction—and a thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul—given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada.

His teenage years in Glasgow’s Gorbals, where his father was the Free Church minister, contributed to his ease with shepherds and ambassadors, fur-trappers and prime ministers. His improbable marriage to a member of the aristocratic Grosvenor family means that this account of his life contains, at its heart, an enduring love story.

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps is due out on June 18.

• An entirely different letter informed me that Crossroad Press, a North Carolina-based digital publishing venture, last month reissued the 1967 spy novel The Man from Pansy, by Don Rico. Now, you may be shocked to learn this, but I’d never heard of such a book or its star, Pentagon agent Buzz Cardigan. Crossroad helpfully characterized it as a “Swingin’ ’60s spy spoof—think James Bond with LOTS of snark—a time capsule for genre fans and fun for any reader.” What makes the three-book series distinctive, too, is that Cardigan (as in the sweater?) is “a dedicated straight spy [who] must take on the role of a gay man to root out enemies of the U.S. who lurk in the shadows of the sexual revolution.” In addition to The Man from Pansy, Crossroad has made its sequels, The Daisy Dilemma (1967) and The Passion Flower Puzzle (1968), available to Kindle users. If any Rap Sheet followers have read these novels, and can offer their opinions I hope they’ll do so.

• Here’s another series that tried to capitalize on the 1960s interest in spy fiction, this one starring Dan Walker, “a businessman and former Naval Intelligence Officer who takes periodic assignments from the CIA where he saves the world and gets laid.”

• Chris Sullivan, who writes the blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, has created two YouTube playlists showcasing the music featured in all three TV series based on or inspired by Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories. If you click here, you can listen to either the opera music or the other classical music heard in all of those shows.

• More than a few fine author interviews have sprouted up on the Web recently. Among them are conversations with Joe R. Lansdale (The Elephant of Surprise), Betty Webb (Desert Redemption), Max Allan Collins (Girl Most Likely), Jacqueline Winspear (The American Agent), Harlan Coben (Run Away), Jane Stanton Hitchcock (Bluff), Tim O’Mara (Down to the River), Edith Maxwell (Charity’s Burden), Glen Erik Hamilton (Mercy River), and Megan Collins (The Winter Sister).

• Along with so many others, The Rap Sheet’s Google+ page disappeared earlier today, never to be seen again.

• And though I’m not a big reader of spooky yarns, the new anthology Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense, edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger (Pegasus), certainly has me intrigued. That’s because it includes lesser-known stories by such authors as Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain right alongside “overlooked works” by horror-fiction favorites such as Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James. Co-editors Morton and Klinger introduce their collection with this essay.

Farina Steps Off the Stage

I was saddened to read this morning that Chicago cop-turned-performer Dennis Farina has passed away at age 69. This comes from The Hollywood Reporter:

The actor, whose body of work included TV roles on Law & Order, Luck and New Girl, and such films as Saving Private Ryan, Out of Sight and Snatch, died Monday in Scottsdale, Ariz., from a blood clot in his lung.

That publication should also have added to Farina’s numerous credits the TV series Crime Story (1986-1988) and short-lived Buddy Faro (1998), both of which I enjoyed immensely.

READ MORE: “Dennis Farina Dead at 69” (Chicago Tribune); “Dennis Farina (1944-2013),” by Edward Copeland (Edward Copeland’s Tangents).

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #7

Series Title: Crime Story | Years: 1986-1988, NBC | Starring: Dennis Farina, Anthony Denison, Bill Smitrovich, Steve Ryan, Paul Butler, Bill Campbell, Stephen Lang, John Santucci | Theme Music: Del Shannon

In the mid-1980s, with two successful years behind him as the executive producer of ratings winner Miami Vice, screenwriter and director Michael Mann decided that his next TV series would take him from the pastel hues, string bikinis, and glass cliffs of Florida’s largest city back to the place of his birth: Chicago, Illinois. On September 18, 1986, NBC debuted Crime Story, his underworld saga that substituted a grim, malevolent verisimilitude for Vice’s stylishness and more distant violence, and wound up being touted by Time magazine as one of the decade’s best small-screen treats.

The series’ two-hour pilot movie, which like the rest of the early episodes was set in 1963, established this program’s tone and pace. As The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor wrote after seeing it:

During a robbery in progress at a flashy Chicago club, a customer is killed by a vicious thug, who then starts taking hostages. Rushing to the scene, a police lieutenant, Mike Torello, warns the murderer that if anyone else is hurt, “I’m gonna kill whoever you love most--your mother, your father, your dog.”

Then comes the inevitable highway chase, complete with a thumping rock score, during which one of [the] screaming hostages, a gorgeous blonde, is shoved through the bullet-shattered back window to hang onto the trunk of the speeding car. Finally, trapping his quarry in a quiet residential neighborhood, Torello puts a bullet through the killer’s head as two children in pajamas watch silently from a nearby window. It is a bit like Steven Spielberg gone gory. And we haven’t even got to the opening credits yet.

To play the lead in Crime Story, Mann and the show’s creators, Miami Vice veteran (and ex-Windy City cop) Chuck Adamson and former Wall Street international investment banker Gustave Reininger, enlisted a relative newcomer to Hollywood, Dennis Farina. With a dark mustache broad enough to sweep streets and a pockmarked face that looked like it had been reclaimed from the scrap heap at Mount Rushmore, Farina made a most convincing Mike Torello--and why not, since he had actually served 18 years with Chicago’s police force before moving into film consulting and then acting. There was impatience, cynicism, and perpetual disgust in Farina’s heavy-lidded gaze. Viewers had little trouble accepting him as the head of the Chicago Police Department’s Major Crime Unit (MCU), “an elite cop squad that goes after big scores and high-ticket crooks,” to quote from TV Guide’s 1986 Fall Preview edition write-up on the series. Other notable MCU members included Torello’s second-in-command, Sergeant Danny Krychek (played with volcanic authority by Bill Smitrovich) and cigar-chomping Detective Walter Clemmons (Paul Butler), who kept his thoughts--and his guns--close to his chest.

With a story arc that followed Torello and his ever-underpaid law-enforcement colleagues from America’s Rust Belt to its spit-shined buckle at Las Vegas, Crime Story reveled in period details. The automobiles sported whitewalls, bat-wing tail-fins, and front grilles as broad as shark grins. Furnishings bore sleek lines and often exaggerated, futuristic configurations. The cops seemed to have been issued fedoras and baggy overcoats along with their badges, and white socks peeked out beneath their black shoes, while the crooks--the climbers and the jamokes both--favored pricey sharkskin suits and hair slicked back with Brylcreem. The women either dressed demurely, like June Cleaver, or--if they were riding the high times with some punk--like exaggerations of whatever Vogue had most recently declared chic. It was an era when boys pitched pennies on street corners, gasoline cost a whopping 25 cents per gallon, and cigarette smoking was still considered stylish. Into the neon-lit nights, hi-fi players carried the rhythms of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” and Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are.”

The art department for this show was frequently compelled to run newspaper advertisements in search of just the right atmosphere-producing accouterments, but the extra effort (while expensive) paid off in terms of transporting viewers backward through the decades. If it didn’t “slavishly re-create the early ’60s ...,” Dick Fiddy, a TV historian and consultant to the British Film Institute, told The Daily Telegraph in 2004, “it always had a tang of authenticity.” The fact that Crime Story was filmed in Chicago, at least until the action moved west partway through Season One, also gave it gritty credibility.

The series’ plots turned primarily on three characters, as the Times’ O’Connor explained: “Torello ..., the tough cop who can be as sadistic as the criminals he stalks; Ray Luca (Anthony Denison), the young and completely amoral mobster on the rise; and David Abrams (Stephen Lang), a liberal lawyer who, through his own criminal father, is keenly aware of all the justice that money can buy.”

Most of Crime Story’s tension was born from the rivalry between Torello and the pompadour-topped Luca, a good-versus-evil relationship that claimed victims on both sides, physically as well as emotionally. Torello’s dick-swinging pursuit of the flashier but equally hot-tempered thug-on-the-rise consumed him entirely, and was a contributing factor in the failure of this cop’s “beauty and the best” marriage. Torello’s brainy wife, Julie (Darlanne Fluegel), whose role early in the series was to tease out his post-Neanderthal humanness, remarked to him in the pilot that “They haven’t invented the hard time we can’t handle.” Yet she eventually grew tired of playing second-fiddle to Torello’s 24-hour job and putting up with his growing detachment and jealousy. Complaining that she wanted “attention and affection,” she first had an affair on him, and then abandoned Torello entirely, leaving our hero to become, I think, a less-dimensional figure, a blunt instrument to be wielded against the wiseguys of the world.

Meanwhile, Lang’s bespectacled courtroom advocate played a more nuanced and evolving part in this crime drama. For all of his self-doubts about what he was doing, whether he was really making a difference in terms of upholding the law and helping people, David Abrams was in many respects a reflection of Torello’s conscience--at least in the beginning, before he, like the lieutenant, was changed by the very corruption he’d sworn to overcome. Abrams also helped to illuminate some of the social and justice issues that confronted Americans during the 1960s. For instance, in one particularly good first-season episode, “Abrams for the Defense,” the lawyer defends a poor black apartment dweller on trial for assaulting his Polish slumlord. The case looks like a loser from the opening gate, but Abrams is too idealistic to bow to the odds against him; instead, he goes about the business of gathering evidence to demonstrate how the living conditions his client and that man’s family have had to endure provoked his aggression. And over the course of it, Abrams becomes enamored of an African-American investigative journalist, portrayed by former blaxploitation actress Pam Grier (later the star of Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, Jackie Brown). In those days, inter-racial relationships were frowned upon--often by both sides--and even Abrams isn’t blind to his violating cultural taboos in the name of love.

Mann told reporters that the concept of Crime Story had been influenced by scripts he’d worked on for Police Story, an acclaimed 1973-1978 NBC anthology drama created by cop-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh. He wanted his new series to contain long story- and character-development arcs, rather than depend on standalone episodes, and he predicted it would have a five-year lifespan. According to the movie blog Radiator Heaven:

Mann said that the first season of the show would go from Chicago in 1963 to Las Vegas in 1980 where the characters would have “very different occupations, in a different city and in a different time.” He said, “It’s a serial in the sense that we have continuing stories, and in that sense the show is one big novel.” Mann and Reininger’s inspiration for the 1963-1980 arc came from their mutual admiration of the epic 15+ hour film, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mann said, “The pace of our story is like the speed of light compared to that, but that’s the idea--if you put it all together at the end you’ve got one hell of a 22-hour movie.”

Things didn’t go quite as Mann had planned. Yes, Torello and company made it to Vegas, becoming federal agents--shades of The Untouchables!--still in hot pursuit of Ray Luca, who’d been sent by godfather Manny Wisebord (Joseph Wiseman) to establish mob operations in the casino capital. But all of that transpired with unbelievable speed--the series never did move forward through the 1970s, but instead remained in the “hip” ’60s. And yes, Crime Story offered some outstanding episodes, including the aforementioned “Abrams for the Defense” and a cliffhanger ending to Season One, in which Luca and his loyal but dimwitted henchman, Pauli Taglia (John Santucci), tried to escape by driving across Nevada’s Yucca Flats--just as an atomic bomb was being tested! (The story goes that the producers didn’t think this series would be renewed, so wanted it to go out with a bang.) However, Season Two was rather a disappointment, despite interesting twists such as the launching of a high-profile investigation into American organized crime (modeled on Estes Kefauver’s 1950 hearings, but with Kevin Spacey playing a more John F. Kennedy-like U.S. senator).

Thanks in part to Mann’s clout, Crime Story drew scores of distinguished guest performers, among them David Caruso (who did an excellent turn in the pilot as a mob boss wannabe), Julia Roberts (in her first TV appearance), Ving Rhames, Laura San Giacomo, Stanley Tucci, and even jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

It also boasted one of television’s coolest opening sequences. Singer Del Shannon provided the theme song--a reworking of his 1961 hit, “Runaway”--while the visuals leaned toward period imagery. The original version, shown below, combined historical film footage from Chicago (cops on motorcycles, airplanes landing at Midway

Airport, commercial neon, etc.) with cuts of the flashing lights and chrome embellishments on vintage gas guzzlers.

After Crime Story’s action moved out west, its main title sequence--embedded at the top of this post--shed what had been dark and moody elements in favor of bursting, effervescent neon from the Las Vegas Strip, combined with appreciative sweeps over gambling tables. Mike Torello and his squad were literally outshone by all the flash and dazzle of Sin City at its glamorous height. (It may be no coincidence that this second opening sequence for Crime Story is reminiscent of the main titles to Robert Urich’s first private eye drama, Vega$, which Michael Mann created.)

Despite these and other strengths, Crime Story failed to live up to NBC’s inflated expectations. As Radiator Heaven recalls:

When the show debuted on September 18, 1986, following Miami Vice, the two-hour pilot had a 20.1 national Nielsen rating and a 32 percent audience share. The ratings dipped when it was counter-programmed against ABC’s Moonlighting. By October, the show dropped below a 22 Nielsen share, where a series is deemed a “failure.” Despite low ratings, Crime Story was picked up by NBC to finish the 1986-87 season. This prompted the network to move the show to Friday nights after Miami Vice on December 5, 1986, where its ratings improved but it still lost to Falcon Crest. NBC temporarily pulled Crime Story off the schedule on March 13, 1987. In order to get more people to watch, Farina and other cast members promoted the show in five U.S. cities.

It was a noble effort, to be sure--enough to win the show a second season. But the optimism didn’t last. The final episode of Crime Story--another cliffhanger, in which most of the regular cast appeared to have been killed when their plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean--was broadcast on May 10, 1988.

So, was that the end of Mike Torello, Ray Luca, and the rest? Viewers will never know. Executive producer Mann went on to make one more TV series, the police procedural Robbery Homicide Division (2002-2003), but was also responsible for such films as Heat (1995), Miami Vice (2006), and this year’s Public Enemies. Dennis Farina continued doing television, starring in the short-lived comedy-detective series Buddy Faro and then a not-half-bad sitcom called In-Laws before joining the cast of Law & Order for a two-year stint. Shaking off the psychotic killer-rapist mantle he’d worn as Luca, Anthony Denison portrayed an undercover agent in Wiseguy and now plays a cop on Kyra Sedgwick’s TNT-TV crime drama, The Closer. Stephen Lang is currently the co-artistic director of the Actor’s Studio in New York City, and can be seen in the new comedy film, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Despite periodic calls for a full-length theatrical film that would answer the questions left dangling after Crime Story signed off for the last time 21 years ago, no such production appears to be in the offing. We’re left to watch, and rewatch, the DVD releases of Season One and Season Two and wonder, What happened next?

READ MORE: “What a Crime (Story)!,” by Robert Lewis
(Criminal Element).