Consider This Our Valentine’s Gift

• American publisher Grove Atlantic announced recently that it is launching Atlantic Crime, “a new imprint bringing together all our mystery, thriller, and crime titles.” Publishers Weekly adds that the project will be led by senior editor Joe Brosnan, and it is expected to release “approximately 18-24 titles per year. Grove Atlantic’s current crime fiction backlist of more than 300 titles will be moved to the new imprint. … Atlantic Crime is scheduled to publish five frontlist releases in its inaugural season this fall: The Predicament by William Boyd, What About the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski, Silent Bones by Val McDermid, The Whisper Place by Mindy Mejia, and We Had a Hunch by Tom Ryan. The imprint will make its official debut on September 2 with What About the Bodies, Jaworowski's second novel; his first, Small Town Sins, published by Holt in 2023, was an Edgar Award nominee.”

• I’m not sure I have ever watched the original series, but I hope to sample this new version sometime. From In Reference to Murder:

Bergerac is returning with a 2025 makeover and plenty of global networks are welcoming the iconic detective back. The original series starred John Nettles as the titular crime fighter, Jim Bergerac, and ran for nine seasons between 1981 and 1991. Unlike that show, which had a new storyline in each episode, the modern series from writer Toby Whithouse follows one character-led murder mystery. Bergerac begins the series as a broken man, grappling with grief and alcoholism following his wife’s death. His mother-in-law (Zöe Wanamaker) is concerned he is not putting his daughter (Chloé Sweetlove) first, and when a woman from a wealthy Jersey family is murdered, he has to go through personal struggles to become the formidable investigator he was. Philip Glenister also stars.

Wikipedia says this six-episode show will air in Britain “on U&Drama and be available to stream for free on U in February 2025.” There’s no word yet of an American presentation. Amazon Prime and BritBox already stream the Nettles series. (UPDATE: George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, suggests I remind readers that venerable British author Andrew Taylor composed half a dozen tie-in novels to Nettles’ Bergerac back in the late 1980s, using the pen name Andrew Saville. Those books are now out of print, but Easter says, “I picked three of them up on a trip to England in the 1980s and was impressed by them. I didn’t find out until later that they were written by Andrew Taylor.”)

• Timothy Olyphant, of Deadwood and Justified fame, is slated to star alongside Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit) in Lucky, a forthcoming limited series for Apple TV+ based on Marissa Stapley’s 2021 novel of that same name. According to publisher Simon & Schuster’s description of Lucky’s plot, the story follows Lucky Armstrong (to be played here by Taylor-Joy), “a tough, talented grifter who has just pulled off a million-dollar heist with her boyfriend, Cary. She’s ready to start a brand-new life, with a new identity—when things go sideways. Lucky finds herself alone for the first time, navigating the world without the help of either her father or her boyfriend, the two figures from whom she’s learned the art of the scam. When she discovers that a lottery ticket she bought on a whim is worth millions, her elation is tempered by one big problem: cashing in the winning ticket means she’ll be arrested for her crimes. She’ll go to prison, with no chance to redeem her fortune. As Lucky tries to avoid capture and make a future for herself, she must confront her past by reconciling with her father; finding her mother, who abandoned her when she was just a baby; and coming to terms with the man she thought she loved—whose dark past is catching up with her, too.” Deadline notes that Olyphant has been cast in this mini-series as Lucky’s father.

• The online entertainment publication Collider reminded us recently that, decades before Justified hit the airwaves in 2010, another neo-Western cop drama, this one starring Dennis Weaver, was a huge success for NBC-TV: McCloud. That NBC Mystery Movie offering, writes Michael John Petty, “ran for seven seasons in the 1970s … and featured plenty of exciting (and often mysterious) adventures. If you’re looking for a new Western to binge that feels a bit more modern in nature, then look no further than McCloud.”

• All of which brings to mind another Mystery Movie segment, Richard Boone’s Hec Ramsey, which as Collider explains, “followed an old gunslinger as he sought to use more modern methods of criminal investigation to solve crimes on the open frontier. In a way, it was sort of like NCIS meets the Wild West.” Did you know that Rick Lenz, who played by-the-book police chief Oliver Stamp during Hec Ramsey’s two seasons (1972-1974) and has since appeared in both films and small-screen series, is also an author? Now 85 years old, he has what I believe is his fourth novel due out from Chromodroid Press later this month. Mit Out Sound is not a work of crime fiction, but instead tells the story of an aspiring movie producer who sets out to complete a legendary, long-lost film starring James Dean and John Wayne.

• I didn’t realize that author Tom Robbins had turned 92 years old last July! However, the fact that he’d achieved such longevity doesn’t make his passing this week any easier to accept. I met Robbins only once, in Seattle, and later sought his contribution to a magazine I was editing at the time. But his books were a significant feature of my young life. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), Skinny Legs and All (1990)—I devoured every one of those at some point or another. I realize now, though, that I never got around to reading Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994). So let me add that to the list of present ideas for my upcoming birthday.

• And as tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, Janet Rudolph has updated her lists of both crime fiction related to this annual celebration of affection and of the genre’s many “sweetheart sleuths.”

Hec of a Deal

My guess is that these fine offerings won’t last long before the “YouTube police” descend and purge them from the site. But for the time being, at least, you can watch, online, eight of the nine episodes made of Hec Ramsey (1972-1974). Part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie rotation, that series starred Richard Boone as a grizzled Old West lawman, once infamous for his gun-fighting talents, who’s now working as a forensics-savvy deputy sheriff in an Oklahoma railroad town at the start of the 1900s. Also available online is the Hec Ramsey pilot film (often shown under the title The Century Turns).

Begin viewing that 90-minute pilot right here. Or search from there for the eight regular series episodes, all of which have been broken into multiple parts for easy YouTube uploading.

By the way, many people who--like me--have purchased bootleg copies of Hec Ramsey on the Web, only to discover that the January 1973 episode “The Mystery of the Yellow Rose” is not included in the set, will be interested to learn that that installment is among those accessible on YouTube. On the other hand, I don’t see “The Detroit Connection” (December 1973) listed as having been uploaded. Oh, well. As the saying goes, you can’t have everything.

Long Gone, Long Remembered

It was 50 years ago today, on January 10, 1961, that American detective-story writer Dashiell Hammett--who’d invented enduring characters such as The Continental Op and Sam Spade, and in the course of it, changed the character of detective fiction itself--perished of lung cancer at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital. He was only 66 years old, but had contracted tuberculosis during World War I and then damaged his health still further by persistently over-consuming alcohol and cigarettes. As The New York Times recalled in its obit the next day:

Mr. Hammett won his fame as an author in the late Nineteen Twenties and Thirties. He put his name to a series of detective novels whose characters were, by modest estimate, at one remove from stuffy, formal sleuths who moved through the mystery fiction of the day, disdaining evil. Before him paragons had trapped scoundrels in the dark lair of their own duplicity.

Mr. Hammett brought the form a step closer to reality. His detectives were tough or urbane or both, but they were by no means inaccessible to the common temptations of man. They were drawn in part from the writer’s eight years of experience as a Pinkerton agent.

A less formal, more heartfelt encomium to Hammett appeared on the Times’ editorial page two days after his passing. It began with a reference to Charles Poore, an author and one of the newspaper’s regular book reviewers:

Charles Poore remarked that one of the most uncomfortable trips he ever took was an ocean voyage on which he had read a defective copy of a Dashiell Hammett novel. The last few pages were missing.

This is about the best that can be said for a writer, although many another more resounding statement might be made about Dashiell Hammett. His prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction. His stories were as consistent as mathematics and as intricate as psychology. His gift of invention never tempted him beyond the limits of credibility. The Latin scholar responded to the classic precision of his language and the comic strip reader to the excitement of his plots.

Dashiell Hammett died the other day, and it is this sad news that leads us to make a prediction: Years from now his stories will be in print.

Hammett was born on a tobacco farm in southern Maryland on May 27, 1894. He later moved with his family to Baltimore, where in 1915, he answered a want-ad that led him to the local headquarters of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and into a short career as a sleuth. To commemorate Hammett’s connection with Maryland’s largest burg, Patrick Maynard, a runner and regular blogger for The Baltimore Sun’s Web site, recently mapped out a 10-mile-long course past “some of the Baltimore sites related to [the] famous mystery author ...,” and wrote in the paper’s Exercists blog about following that route. Among the landmarks he passed were the Continental Building (now One Calvert Plaza), where Hammett applied for employment with the “Pinks”; “the location of the now-gone Rennert Hotel, which stood on Saratoga Street and acted as the headquarters for Hammett’s political boss in The Glass Key”; and the “former Pratt Library Branch at Hollins and Calhoun streets, where Hammett allegedly vowed to read every book.”

You’ll find Maynard’s enjoyable piece here.

Also in association with this anniversary, Don Herron--a San Francisco writer and raconteur, who’s led walking tours of Hammett-related sites in that city ever since 1977--has launched “a new incarnation” of his Web site, Up and Down the Mean Streets. Herron is a font of Hammett knowledge and esoterica, in addition to being a hell of a nice guy. When I took an abbreviated version of his downtown San Francisco tour during last fall’s Bouchercon, I found myself scribbling down information in my notebook that I didn’t already know about Sam Spade’s “father”--and there was a lot of it. I expect Up and Down the Mean Streets will develop into a welcome resource about both Hammett and the Northern California city with which he’s deservedly associated.

Finally, today might be a good day to visit (or revisit) January Magazine’s tribute to Dashiell Hammett, posted in 2005 to honor the 75th anniversary of the release of The Maltese Falcon.

* * *

Meanwhile, today also marks 30 years since the death of Richard Boone. The Los Angeles-born actor starred in more than 50 films, but is undoubtedly best known for playing Paladin, a slick-dressing, San Francisco-based gunfighter and troubleshooter, in the TV series Have Gun--Will Travel (1957-1963). Boone died of throat cancer on this date in 1981, at 63 years of age.

A descendent of frontiersman Daniel Boone, and a cousin to singer-actor Pat Boone, Richard Boone got into acting after World War II, first debuting on Broadway and then appearing in the 1950 film Halls of Montezuma. In the mid-1950s, he starred in an NBC-TV medical drama called Medic, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination. However, it was his next series, Have Gun--Will Travel, that made him a national celebrity. After the cancellation of that show, Boone and his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. According to Wikipedia,

While living Oahu, Boone helped persuade Leonard Freeman to film Hawaii Five-O exclusively in Hawaii. Prior to that, Freeman had planned to do “establishing” location shots in Hawaii, but to do most production in Southern California. Boone and others convinced Freeman that the islands could offer all necessary support for a major TV series and would provide an authenticity otherwise unobtainable. Freeman, impressed by Boone’s love of Hawaii, offered him the role of Steve McGarrett; however, Boone turned it down, and the role went to Jack Lord, who shared Boone’s enthusiasm, which Freeman considered vital. Coincidentally, Jack Lord had appeared with Boone in the first episode of Have Gun--Will Travel, entitled “The Three Bells to Perdido.”

Boone went on to star in an anthology series, The Richard Boone Show (1963-1964), but it wasn’t until he took center stage in Hec Ramsey, part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie rotation, that he found himself a small-screen star again. In Hec Ramsey (1972-1974), produced by Dragnet’s Jack

Webb, Boone played an aging, once-infamous quick-to-draw lawman who, in 1901, had finally settled down as the deputy sheriff in an ambitious Oklahoma railroad town. His evolving interest in forensic science distinguished him from his colleagues, and made the show distinctive among western dramas. I was a big Hec Ramsey fan myself, and was sorry when a contract dispute between Boone and Universal Studios led to its demise. (The introduction to a Season 1 episode, “Mystery of the Green Feather,” is embedded on the left.)

In 1970, Boone had moved to Florida, where for a time he wrote a newspaper column called “It Seems to Me” for the St. Augustine Record. His final role was playing Commodore Matthew Perry in The Bushido Blade (1981). Boone died in St. Augustine, but his cremated ashes were later scattered in the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii.

READ MORE: “When Lillian Met Dashiell,” by Bill Peschel.

Get Wheel

I’ve been waiting for months to post this YouTube video, and with the 2007 fall television season beginning in earnest this week, now seems like the right moment.

Yeah, yeah, I know: There’s been a good deal of boob-tube nostalgia suffusing this page of late, what with our tributes to Columbo and its star, Peter Falk; our midlife mooning over The Fall Guy’s gal, Heather Thomas; and our remarks on how much better the 1972 television season was than the one before us. But allow me one more indulgence, for it was on this date, 35 years ago, that I officially became a crime-fiction enthusiast. That night, which was a Sunday, marked the season premiere of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, a “wheel-format” series that featured four quite different 90-minute TV mysteries in monthly rotation. Two had debuted together on Wednesday evenings during the 1971-1972 season. One had actually been introduced in 1970. And the last was brand new. All of them stirred my imagination and conspired to make me the crime-fiction fan I am today.

As originally configured, the Mystery Movie comprised a trio of series. The first of these had been introduced by a February 1970 TV flick called McCloud: Who Killed Miss USA? As Richard Meyers recalls in his 1981 history, TV Detectives, that feature found Dennis Weaver playing a matchstick-chewing marshal out of Taos, New Mexico, “who comes to New York to extradite a subpoenaed witness, only to see the witness shanghaied and find himself handcuffed to a fence along a highway. From there he gets involved with the murder of a pageant contestant and runs afoul of the NYPD ...” Inspired by Clint Eastwood’s 1969 film Coogan’s Bluff, and penned by the legendary team of Richard Levinson and William Link (who had previously created the private-eye drama Mannix), this teleflick spawned a series the following fall, part of NBC’s “umbrella rotation,” Four-in-One. It was a peculiar collection, as Four’s three other hour-long, Wednesday night components--Night Gallery, a horror anthology hosted by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling; San Francisco International Airport, which found ex-Sea Hunt stud Lloyd Bridges managing (and just as often policing) the Bay Area’s busy travel hub; and The Psychiatrist, with Roy Thinnes as an unorthodox “shrink”--had nothing to do with crime fiction. Only McCloud and Night Gallery survived their first year; the latter took over Four-in-One’s 10 p.m. slot by itself in 1971, while McCloud--which NBC apparently liked, but did not think could survive on its own--was tucked in with a pair of newcomers in a rotating, 90-minute slot on Wednesdays, just before Night Gallery.

The first of those two raw recruits was the aforementioned Columbo, which was also created by Levinson and Link, and starred Emmy Award winner Falk, who’d received critical acclaim but lesser ratings in a previous TV series venture, The Trials of O’Brien (1965-1966). Columbo was the first show to debut in mid-September 1971 in the NBC Mystery Movie’s new 8:30-10 p.m. slot.

The other series was McMillan & Wife, which came along just in time to save longtime film star Rock Hudson from early retirement. As TV Detectives puts it, “Hudson had proved his acting ability in The Spiral Road (1962) and Seconds (1966), but people still thought of him as Doris Day’s screen husband. When he reached middle age, his roles began to dry up, but he remedied the problem by going into TV ...” McMillan cast Hudson, then in his mid-40s, as lawyer-turned-San Francisco police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan, whose lovely but trouble-magnet spouse was played by former The Name of the Game regular Susan Saint James, then in her mid-20s. (Much was made on the show, at least in early episodes, of this May-December coupling). Created by writer-producer Leonard B. Stern, McMillan & Wife has been described before as part The Thin Man, part Burns and Allen, with “Sally ... as wacky as Gracie and as prone to finding corpses as Nora (or Mrs. North, for that matter),” to quote Richard Meyers. With John Schuck as a well-intentioned but often bumbling police sergeant, and comedienne Nancy Walker as the McMillans’ housekeeper, the show was “so frothy and watchable that disbelief was suspended ...”

For reasons I no longer recall, but that undoubtedly had to do with the fact that Wednesday was a school night and I was still a young teen, I didn’t catch these three series in their first year. It wasn’t until the 1972 fall TV season--when Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife were relocated on the programming schedule under the modified umbrella title The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, to make room for a second rotating sequence of mystery dramas, The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie (which initially comprised Banacek, Cool Million, and Madigan)--that I finally caught up with them.

That was the same year a fourth series joined Columbo, et al.: Hec Ramsey. Produced by Dragnet’s Jack Webb, it starred Richard Boone (Have Gun--Will Travel) as a previously quick-to-draw lawman, Hector “Hec” Ramsey, who had developed a great interest in the aborning science of forensics. After taking the job of deputy police chief in an ambitious Oklahoma railroad town called New Prospect, in 1901, Ramsey set about employing his newfound knowledge to solve murders that seemed, on their face, anyway, to present no clues. In his efforts, he was hampered by an inexperienced but earnest young boss, Oliver B. Stamp (Rick Lenz), but helped by an imperturbable town doctor (played by Webb’s old Dragnet partner, Harry Morgan).

The video at the top of this post is of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie’s main title sequence, either from 1972 or 1973, after Hec Ramsey was integrated into the mix. Even after all these years, I still get a thrill whenever I hear that dramatic theme music, composed by American arranger-conductor Henry Mancini (probably best remembered for writing the themes for The Pink Panther and Peter Gunn, and the song “Moon River” for Breakfast at Tiffany’s).

Unfortunately, times change. And TV shows--even memorable ones--disappear. By the 1974-1975 season, the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie was no more, and its Sunday sister would revert to being called, simply, the NBC Mystery Movie again. Meanwhile, Hec Ramsey had been canceled, supposedly because of “unresolvable disagreements between Boone and Universal Studios,” which produced the western detective drama. It was replaced in the fall of 1974 by Amy Prentiss, an Ironside spin-off series in which Jessica Walter played the San Francisco Police Department’s first female chief of detectives--a position that forced her to do battle with institutional sexism (sometimes pitched her way by an overconfident detective portrayed by William Shatner), at the same time as she worked to solve crimes and rear her pre-teen daughter, Jill (played by Helen Hunt). But only a year later, Amy Prentiss was gone and McCoy, headlined by Tony Curtis, had taken its place. You don’t remember McCoy? Well, you’re probably not alone. The Web site American Classic TV Series offers this brief synopsis:

The McCoy character was a curious concept--a con man with a gambling addiction decides to turn over a new leaf and become a latter-day Robin Hood--to help those who have been financially victimized to regain their money and put the perpetrators in jail.

The concept may have had more than a passing co-incidence with that of the hit 1973 movie “The Sting” in which a con man cons a notorious mob figure and card cheat.

Only four episodes of McCoy were broadcast, before it too went to that great cutting room in the sky. The hole left behind was filled during the fall 1976 season by Quincy, M.E., starring The Odd Couple’s Jack Klugman as a Los Angeles County medical examiner who lived on a houseboat and seemed unable to resist investigating crimes that he, if nobody else, thought were damnably suspicious. Quincy lasted half a year on the Mystery Movie before being cast off as a separate hour-long, weekly series. (It continued showing on NBC till 1983.) After that, the new fourth member of the Sunday rotation was Lanigan’s Rabbi, based on Harry Kemelman’s then-popular Rabbi Small novels (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, etc.). It starred Art Carney as a small-town California police chief who solved crimes with a modicum of divine assistance from his friend, amateur sleuth Rabbi David Small (Bruce Solomon).

Carney always proved to be a watchable performer, but Lanigan’s Rabbi (which was also created by Leonard B. Stern) may have been doomed from the outset, because the Mystery Movie formula was then in its last throes. That same season, Susan Saint James finally divorced herself from McMillan & Wife, leaving Hudson to limp along (and I do mean limp--the show was never the same) in the retitled McMillan. (Wife Sally’s obvious absence was explained by a deadly plane crash.) In 1974, all of the rotating shows had been boosted from their original 90-minute format to two hours long, and many of the stories thereafter seemed rather flabby. Other wheel series had come and gone, and collectively they seemed to have worn out their welcome. Even I, by 1976, was tuning in the NBC Mystery Movie less regularly. The prime-time U.S. TV schedule was blessedly rife with P.I. and police shows by then, and the Mystery Movie series no longer seemed as remarkable as they once had.

Yet now, 35 years later and at a time when most crime/mystery series are either too cute or overly repetitive for my taste, Columbo, McMillan & Wife, McCloud, and their companions are looking awfully good again. All it takes for me is to hear the bouncy theme from McCloud or watch the introduction to McMillan & Wife once more, and I am overcome with nostalgia for those character-driven, often quirky Mystery Movie installments that helped turn my curiosity about crime fiction into a lifelong interest.

READ MORE: “The NBC Mystery Movie” and “A Short History of
Umbrella Series,” by Mercurie (A Shroud of Thoughts); “NBC Mystery Movie Series Guide.”

“M*A*S*H,” Murder, and Morgan

I failed to make note of what would’ve been actor-producer Jack Webb’s 87th birthday, on April 2. But I’ll not miss commemorating his Dragnet co-star, Harry Morgan’s 92nd birthday today.

Morgan (born Henry Bratsburg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915) is probably associated by anyone under 30 years of age with the long-running medical comedy M*A*S*H, on which he played stern but warm-hearted Colonel Sherman T. Potter. However, Morgan’s creds in the crime fiction department are long-standing. In 1947, he hosted the NBC radio series Mystery in the Air. Fourteen years later, he began appearing in Dragnet episodes, playing Officer Bill Gannon--a gig that became regular when he signed on as Webb’s partner in a revival of the series, Dragnet 1967 (1967-1970). A piece on the Norwegian American Hall of Fame Web site (Morgan’s father was Norwegian) highlights his contribution to that show:

Few reprisals succeed. This one did, and the casting of Morgan as Officer Bill Gannon might be a significant reason for that. The light-hearted interplay between Morgan, as Gannon, and Jack Webb, as Sgt. Joe Friday, was priceless. Gannon was constantly advising and lecturing Friday. “I’m telling you, Joe ...” he would begin, and a nonplused Friday would listen, then utter a noncommittal response such as “Is that so?” In the final season, Gannon made frequent references to boning up for the sergeant’s exam and, in the end, got his promotion; Friday, who spoken [sic] nary a word about studying for the lieutenant’s exam, was promoted at the same time.

In 1971, Morgan co-starred with British actor (and Kennedy relative) Peter Lawford in Ellery Queen: Don’t Look Behind You, an NBC-TV movie adaptation of the 1949 Ellery Queen novel, Cat of Many Tails. Lawford, of course played Ellery, though his interpretation was a bit odd, at best. The Harvard-educated crime novelist became, in Lawford’s hands, some sort of British hipster, while Morgan served as his uncle, New York Police Inspector Richard Queen. (In the books, Inspector Queen had been Ellery’s father, but that wouldn’t have made much sense here, since Morgan had no British accent, and probably didn’t wish to affect one.) This teleflick’s original script came from William Link and Richard Levinson, the pair who created Mannix, Columbo, Tenafly, and other well-regarded mystery series of that time. But the finished product was mediocre, with Lawford an unconvincing Ellery. Link and Levinson disagreed so greatly with the changes made to their script, that they were jointly billed simply, and pseudonymously, as “Ted Leighton”--an amalgamation of their two middle names. In the end, NBC passed on the Lawford/Morgan series. (However, Link and Levinson, both lifelong Queen fans, got another shot at bringing their bookish hero to the small screen in 1975, with the NBC series Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton and David Wayne. It lasted one year.)

Morgan went on to co-star with Robert Conrad in The D.A., a half-hour legal drama described in Wikipedia rather succinctly:

The D.A. starred Robert Conrad as Deputy District Attorney Paul Ryan, a tough-minded, hard-hitting prosecutor who conducted his own investigations, assisted by Bob Ramirez (Ned Romero). He then prosecuted the case, under the watchful eye of his supervisor, Chief Deputy District Attorney “Staff” Stafford (Harry Morgan). His opponent was usually Public Defender Katherine Benson (Julie Cobb). During the courtroom segments, Ryan also provided a voice-over narration, which brought the audience in on legal jargon and court procedures and allowed there to be less exposition in the dialogue, which was necessary due to the program's length. This program, however, is probably less known for its own storylines than for the fact that it was canceled at midseason in order to make way for one of the 1970s biggest comedy hits, Sanford and Son.

Just a year later, in 1972, Morgan returned to television in another Mystery Movie segment, Hec Ramsey. It starred Richard Boone (formerly of Have Gun--Will Travel) as an aging former Wild West gunfighter who, as the 19th century becomes the 20th, assumes the job of deputy sheriff in an ambitious Oklahoma town and tries to employ newfangled forensic techniques to solve crimes. Morgan co-starred as the dusty burg’s unflappable doctor, Amos Coogan, who befriends Ramsey and provides him with medical expertise. The series, which was executive-produced by Morgan’s old Dragnet cohort, Jack Webb, showcased Boone well as a crusty, cussing, and altogether short-tempered lawman trying to turn over a new leaf, and it was an excellent complement to Columbo, McMillan & Wife, and Dennis Weaver’s McCloud. Unfortunately, Hec Ramsey was canceled after just a couple of years.

Over the next decade and a half, Harry Morgan split his acting commitments between small- and large-screen roles. He appeared in several episodes of Gunsmoke, played a Nevada marshal in John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist (1976), and appeared in a pair of teleflicks based on the popular 1965-1969 TV series The Wild Wild West (which put him back together with Robert Conrad). He then spent eight years on M*A*S*H (winning an Emmy Award in 1980 for his brilliantly controlled but heartfelt performances), before signing on with yet another NBC mystery series, this one titled Blacke’s Magic. I remember liking that 1986 series (another Link and Levinson creation), though not so much as I had enjoyed an earlier show concocted of crime-solving and legerdemain, Bill Bixby’s The Magician. Undoubtedly, the best thing about Blacke’s Magic was its two leads: Hal Linden (previously of Barney Miller), who played a renowned American magician, Alexander Blacke; and Morgan as Blacke’s dad, Leonard, an unreconstructed con man whose, er, unique skills and mastery of disguises, combined with his son’s sleight of hand--and more than a soupçon of logic--made them a formidable and frequently funny duo when it came to solving impossible robberies, explaining incredible phenomena, and helping people in deep trouble.

Morgan went on to guest star on Murder, She Wrote and 3rd Rock from the Sun, and to revive his role as Los Angeles cop Bill Gannon (now promoted to captain) in the horrendous, 1987 big-screen adaptation of Dragnet. (He also voiced his Gannon character on an episode of The Simpsons.) But he made a final, worthy contribution to the field of televised mysteries during the early 1990s, when he was pushing 80 years old, working beside Walter Matthau in a trio of made-for-TV courtroom dramas (The Incident, Against Her Will: An Incident in Baltimore, and Incident in a Small Town), portraying a World War II-era judge to Matthau’s small-town lawyer. These productions weren’t great fare, but they were certainly worth watching, especially for Matthau’s performances.

So, on this, his 92nd birthday, let us all raise our glasses to Harry Morgan for a career that has brought both mirth and mystery into our lives. And what more appropriate musical accompaniment could there be for the occasion, than this clip?

READ MORE: “Webb of Suspicion,” by Ivan G. Shreve Jr. (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear).