Bullet Points: Eclipse Day Edition

• The Columbophile Blog reports that David Koenig, author of the 2021 book Shooting Columbo, will be back in print next month with Unshot Columbo: Cracking the Cases That Never Got Filmed (Bonaventure Press), which “focuses on 19 murder mysteries that never made it to our screens—and outline why we never got to see them. ... [T]he many Columbo stories crafted but never filmed include 1970s tales by ‘murder consultant’ Larry Cohen and a young Brian De Palma, an aborted pilot for Mrs. Columbo that was reimagined for the good Lieutenant, and the legendary last case that Peter Falk desperately hoped would drop the curtain on Columbo’s televisual career.” Yeah, you should know by now that this is on my “preorder” list.

• North Carolina resident Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier, whose short stories have appeared in various magazines, and Audrea Sallis, a South Dakota technical writer hoping to expand her fiction portfolio, have been named as the 2024 Barbara Neely Grant recipients. This scholarship program, named for the late Barbara Neely (creator of the Blanche White mystery series), is designed to promote Black crime-fiction writers. A pair of winners is selected each year—one an already published author, the other a writer just getting started in publishing. More information about Bernier and Sallis can be found here.

• Mike Ripley expands his oft-amusing “Ripster Revivals” series for Shots with this piece looking back fondly at the oeuvre of Walter Satterthwait (1946-2020). Ripley calls him “an American with a passport, who knew how to use it. Not only did his nomadic existence find him living in numerous locations in the U.S., particularly New York, Santa Fe, California and Florida, but in Greece, Kenya and the Caribbean, with frequent visits to Germany, France, Holland and England. Along the way he wrote numerous short stories, a series of classic private eye investigations, a historical series set in the Europe of the 1920s featuring cameos from Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Ernest Hemingway and Adolf Hitler (!), plus stand-alone thrillers and novels featuring Lizzie Borden and Oscar Wilde.”

• The annual CrimeFest convention, held in Bristol, England, has revealed its program lineup for this coming May. In attendance should be crime-fiction stars running from Laura Lippman and Ajay Chowdhury to Denise Mina and Abir Mukherjee. More details are here.

• Perhaps in anticipation of what would have been actor Rock Hudson’s 100th birthday coming up next year (he succumbed to AIDS-related illness in 1985), the celebrity magazine Closer recently profiled Susan Saint James, now 77, who starred with Hudson in the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife. The article begins with Saint James’ statement that “kissing Rock Hudson on the set … never felt like a hardship. ‘We were kissing all the time, and it was fun,” she tells Closer exclusively, calling her late costar “engaging, wonderful, friendly and sexy.’” It goes on to mention Hudson’s “gregarious, upbeat personality” and how he personally welcomed famous guest stars to the McMillan & Wife set. “‘He would send flowers to their trailer, and he’d go over first thing in the morning to say hello,’ recalls Susan, who notes that stars of hit TV series are rarely so gracious. ‘He had this kind of Old Hollywood courtesy and kindness.’”

• Speaking of Susan Saint James, I was contacted not long ago by northern Virginia resident Frank Gregorsky, a non-fiction editor specializing in economics and political history who, in his spare time, pens a free, PDF-formatted Web quarterly called Detective Drama Gems. He’s apparently been doing that—ever so quietly, and with no professional background in his subject matter—since 2020, long enough to have analyzed “roughly four dozen episodes” of vintage American crime and detective TV shows. “I look for plausibility of events; spectacular character clarity; and the power and precision of dialogue,” Gregorsky tells me. The reason he reached out to me was that he’d come across my 2011 Rap Sheet tribute to McMillan & Wife, and had referred to it while producing this enjoyable Gems recollection of “Point of Law,” a 1976 episode of the series—and the last to feature Saint James in the role of Sally McMillan (left), spouse to Hudson’s San Francisco police commissioner, Stewart “Mac” McMillan.

• By the way, I’d love to direct you to previous issues of Detective Drama Gems, but Gregorsky has (sadly) provided no easy way to access them. The first issue, focusing on episodes of Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator, Hawaii Five-O, and The Streets of San Francisco, can be enjoyed here. But after that, the Web addresses begin with http://www.exactingeditor.com/Detective-Gems-1.pdf, and you must change the number in that address each time to find the next one. There are 13 issues thus far, looking back at installments of everything from The Mod Squad and 77 Sunset Strip to The Name of the Game and M Squad.

• Here’s an episode that seems to have passed from my recollection: “In the final season of Perry Mason (1957-66), the intrepid attorney went behind the Iron Curtain for an adventure.”

• This is good news, indeed. New episodes of Beyond Paradise, the Death in Paradise spin-off series starring Kris Marshall, have just begun to drop on the streaming service BritBox. A Christmas special was shown in December, but only last week did a second ep suddenly appear. Here’s a synopsis: “As a steam train races through the Devonshire countryside, [Detective Inspector] Humphrey [Goodman, played by Marshall] and [Deteetive Sergeant] Esther [Williams, played by Zahra Ahmadi] join the Shipton Abbott Players for a murder mystery rehearsal. Though Humphrey is only playing a detective, things turn from amateur to professional when the actor playing the victim is found dead with a real knife in his back.” Wikipedia says six Season 2 episodes are in the hopper (and began showing in the UK in March). Marshall was my favorite among the fish-out-of-water British detective stars of Death in Paradise, and it’s nice to see him return in this rather different series, which will apparently find Goodman and his fiancée, Sally Bretton (Martha Lloyd) becoming foster parents.

• Meanwhile, American streamer Hulu has decided to end the cruise of Death and Other Details after 10 installments. “Now we’ll never know which poor soul these severed limbs belonged to,” observes Deadline. “Hulu has opted not to renew murder mystery series Death and Other Details for a second season. The news is not really surprising; the visually stylish series starring Mandy Patinkin and Violett Beane had a pretty quiet run, not able to break into Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 streaming ratings.”

• And if you missed seeing today’s total solar eclipse, visible in North America, here’s NASA’s broadcast of that “celestial spectacle.”

Bullet Points: Torpid Tuesday Edition

• Deadline reports that actor Max Martini (The Purge, The Order, NCIS: Los Angeles) “is set for a heavily recurring role opposite Titus Welliver on the upcoming second season of Bosch: Legacy, the spin-off of the long-running Amazon series, on Freevee. … Martini [pictured at left] will play Detective Don Ellis, a hardened vice cop in the LAPD. He’s intelligent and fierce, and not above getting down and dirty with the criminals he polices to get the job done.” Based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling Harry Bosch novels, this Freevee TV sequel finds Bosch (Welliver) having retired from the Los Angeles Police Department and set himself up as a private eye. Mimi Rogers plays Honey “Money” Chandler, a prominent L.A. defense attorney who sometimes turns to Bosch for investigative work, and Madison Lintz appears as Harry’s daughter, Maddie, who’s become a rookie police officer. Connelly has already said that Season 2 of Bosch: Legacy will draw on his 2015 novel, The Crossing, for its principal storyline. “In The Crossing,” explains Showbiz CheatSheet, “a defense attorney hires Harry to help find evidence that will prove his client is innocent of murder. While there’s DNA evidence that seems to point to his guilt, the man says he didn’t commit the crime. At first, Harry is reluctant to work with the defense, but after he takes the job and begins to dig into the case, his investigation leads him to look inside the LAPD.” The counsel for the defense in Connelly’s book was of course Bosch’s half-brother, Mickey Haller, but since Haller is now the star of his own Netflix series, I’m guessing—and I doubt this is going too far out on a limb—that Honey Chandler will be the one hiring Bosch on television. Season 2 should debut in early 2023.

• Meanwhile, the Oxford Mail brings word that filming is underway in Oxford, England, on Season 9 of Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam. “Location trucks have been spotted at the Kings Centre on the Osney Mead industrial estate and it is understood scenes will be filmed … in and around Radcliffe Square,” says the tabloid. It adds: “Filming for the popular ITV detective drama, based on Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories, also took place in May in Christ Church Meadow.” The three-episodes of Season 9—Endeavour’s concluding season—may premiere “as late as February 2023.”

• Because I remain a big fan of TV “wheel series,” I can’t help but point you toward this piece, by pop-culture critic Herbie J. Pilato, about McMillan & Wife and the rest of the vintage NBC Mystery Movie lineup. It includes a charming story about how Susan Saint James wound up playing Rock Hudson’s spouse on McMillan:

Saint James was a prime candidate. Also contracted with Universal, the actress with the unique voice she describes today as “scratchy,” had just completed a three-year run on NBC’s The Name of the Game. One of the producers of that series had written a script for her [Magic Carpet] and, as she remembered, “I was off to Europe to shoot a pilot.”

But in the middle of filming, Saint James was instructed by her agent to return to the States to meet with [McMillan & Wife creator Leonard B.] Stern and Hudson about a leading role in a new TV show.

“Rock was having lunch with every actress in Hollywood who was in my kind of category,” Saint James said.

The following day, she received a phone call from her agent, who said, “That’s it. Go to wardrobe. You got the job.”

Years later, Hudson joked with Saint James about why she won the role. As she recalled, “He told me, ‘I was gaining so much weight just having lunch with people, so I figured, Let’s just go with this woman because I don’t want to have any more lunches.’”

• Kris Calvin, author of the July-released thriller Under a Broken Sky (Crooked Lane), has posted—in CrimeReads—a list of four underrated TV crime series that she says have “the potential to be your next bingeing obsession.” I’m pleased to see the quirky British mystery McDonald & Dodds make the cut, but cannot imagine sitting through all 57 episodes of Mr. and Mrs. North, the 1952-1954 show based on Frances and Richard Lockridge’s books, which I think can be interesting but is likely too old-fashioned for most modern viewers.

• For what it’s worth, the UK-based retail site Book Depository has joined Amazon and CrimeReads in posting lists of what it says are “the best books of 2022 (so far).” Among its 20 crime- and thriller-fiction picks are Janice Hallett’s The Twyford Code, Adrian McKinty’s The Island, Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut, and Tom Bradby’s Yesterday’s Spy. Check out those choices and more in other categories here.

• Australian critic Jeff Popple posts his own selections along this same line. His “best so far” choices include John Connolly’s The Furies, Emma Viskic’s Those Who Perish, Michael Robotham’s Lying Beside You, Shelley Burr’s WAKE, and Deon Meyer’s The Dark Flood.

• Drought-provoked water-level depletion at Lake Mead, an enormous reservoir on the Nevada/Arizona border that was created in the 1930s by construction of the Hoover Dam, has revealed still more human remains. The first set (those of a gun-shot homicide victim concealed in a barrel) were discovered on May 1, with two more skeletons found later that same month and then in late July. More remains turned up in early August. As CBS News explains, “The discoveries have prompted speculation that the lake was used as a burial ground by organized crime and gangs from the early days of Las Vegas, which is just a 30-minute drive from the lake.”

• I read about this proposed novel in a recent newsletter from New York City’s renowned Mysterious Bookshop:

Murray Sinclair, best known for his Ben Crandel series, a trio of Los Angeles-based mystery novels set in the criminal underbelly of early 1980's Hollywood, has created a Kickstarter to help fund his next project: F. Scott Fitzgerald: American Spy.

What if F. Scott Fitzgerald was recruited by the French Resistance to embark upon a secret mission on the eve of World War II? Through the lost correspondence of Henri Duval, a member of the French Resistance, the historical espionage novel F. Scott Fitzgerald: American Spy tells the story of Fitzgerald’s recruitment by the French Resistance to assassinate the premier of Vichy France on the eve of America's entry into World War II.

You can find out more about Sinclair’s latest endeavor and, if you wish, help fund it by clickety-clacking right here.

• Leave it to Kevin Burton Smith, founding editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, to remember that 2022 marks the 100th birthday of the hard-boiled American gumshoe of fiction. He traces that character’s propitious delivery back to the December 1922 edition of Black Mask magazine, which led with stories by Carroll John Daly (“The False Burton Combs”) and “Peter Collinson,” aka Dashiell Hammett (“The Road Home”), both featuring models for the classic shamus we know today. As Smith recalls in the brand-new, fall edition of Mystery Scene magazine, those yarns preceded by only three months the introduction—also in Black Mask—of “the first official hard-boiled private eye,” Terry Mack, appearing in Daly’s “Three Gun Terry.” Smith’s essay, however, is only one of the reasons to grab a copy of the latest Mystery Scene. Among its other attractions are Michael Mallory’s piece about movies based on Vera Caspary’s Laura; Craig Sisterson’s assessment of modern indigenous crime writers; and Oline H. Cogdill’s picks of six authors tipped for greater success in this genre (among them Kellye Garrett, May Cobb, and Gary Phillips). Click here for information about obtaining a copy of Mystery Scene #173.

• Worth checking out, too, is the Summer 2022 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, with its excellent cover profile of Javier Cercas, Spanish author of Even the Darkest Night (Knopf).

• Author Max Allan Collins recently sat for an enjoyable video interview with Titan Books editor Andrew Sumner, during which they discussed the soon-forthcoming Mike Hammer novel, Kill Me If You Can. The footage includes, too, Collins’ announcement that he’s “signed with Titan to complete the Mike Hammer Legacy series with two final Mike Hammer novels, to be published in 2023 and 2024. These final two books will, as have all of the books in this series of Collins-completed novels, contain genuine Spillane content.”

• I long ago turned on the comments moderation function for this blog, and it was partly to head off junk messages such as a recent one suggesting readers “buy crystal meth online in Alaska.” The bizarre ad went on to make that dangerous recreational drug sound benign: “It is chemically similar to amphetamine, a drug used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy, a sleep disorder.” Why anyone would think these sorts of harmful messages are acceptable, or that a blogger like me would simply let them pass into circulation without hesitation? Amazing!

• I’m sometimes sorry that I wasn’t born early enough to sample the wares of coin-operated book vending machines.

• After years of talk about adapting Erik Larson’s outstanding 2003 non-fiction book, The Devil in the White City, as a movie or small-screen drama (actor Leonard DiCaprio bought the film rights way back in 2010!), the TV streaming service Hulu has finally commissioned an eight-episode series starring Keanu Reeves. Deadline notes that Larson’s book “tells the story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer and the man behind the notorious ‘Murder Castle’ built in the Fair’s shadow. This marks Reeves’ first major U.S. TV role. He will also serve as an executive producer.” DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese will also serve as executive producers. The limited series is expected to launch in 2024. Reporting isn’t clear on which of the two leading characters Reeves will play, but I’m assuming a portrayal of Burnham would be more beneficial to his reputation.

• Finally, I continue to be impressed with Curtis Evans’ in-depth features for CrimeReads, the most recent of which recalls author Edmund Crispin (the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery), creator of amateur detective and locked-room mystery expert Gervase Fen. “Love interest is not what distinguishes Edmund Crispin mystery tales,” Evans remarks, “but rather intelligence, humor, wit, narrative zest and … clever fair-play plotting. Edmund Crispin—let us use this name to discuss Montgomery in his authorial guise—has something of the formidable literary intellect of Michael Innes, yet his humor is earthier, less precious, less an acquired taste, with Innes forever remaining the indulgent don and Crispin the precocious, puckish schoolboy. Despite his small output, Crispin is, in my view, one of the great comedic writers in British detective fiction.”

Clear the Way for Mac and Sally

This last Wednesday brought us one significant small-screen anniversary, a full half-century having passed since Columbo made its debut as part of the equally new NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series.” Today offers another. It has now been an amazing 50 years since Once Upon a Dead Man—the two-hour pilot film for McMillan & Wife, another popular Mystery Movie component—was first broadcast on Friday, September 17, 1971. The teleflick’s competition that evening included the second-season opener of the ABC sitcom The Partridge Family; the debut of David Janssen’s third boob-tube drama, CBS’ ill-fated O’Hara, United States Treasury; the ABC comedy Love, American Style; and the CBS “world premiere” of Terror in the Sky, based on blockbuster best-seller Arthur Hailey’s 1956 television play, Flight into Danger.

Once Upon a Dead Man starred Rock Hudson as Stewart “Mac” McMillan, a defense attorney turned police commissioner of San Francisco, who took an extraordinarily active role in criminal investigations; and Susan Saint James (formerly of The Name of the Game) playing Sally McMillan, the commissioner’s two-decades-younger spouse, whose tendency to attract trouble was fortunately paired with her own skills at crime solving—she was, after all, born to a legendary Bay Area criminologist. Regarding the plot of that teleflick (written by Leonard B. Stern and Chester Krumholz), it found Sally drawing Mac into a charity-auction theft … which inevitably led to murder. John Schuck (who’d previously been seen in episodes of M*A*S*H, Gunsmoke, and Mission: Impossible) took the role of Sergeant Charles Enright, Mac’s phlegmatic and sometimes laughably obtuse assistant. Further filling out the cast were Jack Albertson, René Auberjonois, Kurt Kasznar, James Wainwright, the then-ubiquitous Herb Edelman, and Lost in Space’s Jonathan Harris. (Nancy Walker, who would receive three Emmy Award nominations for her supporting role as the McMillans’ grouchy housekeeper, Mildred, didn’t appear in this pilot; she only joined the series with its first regular episode, “Murder by the Barrel,” shown on September 29, 1971.)

As the TV Guide ad above asserts, Once Upon a Dead Man was intended to “generate laughs and suspense.” That should’ve been amended to read “smiles and suspense”—it wasn’t a comedy, after all. However, it did feature splendid, playful repartee between Hudson and Saint James, as well as an unusual but delightful bicycle pursuit through the streets of San Francisco, surely meant as a spoof on Steve McQueen’s squealing car chase in the 1968 film Bullitt.

Curiously, while McMillan & Wife is one of the vintage TV series (together with Banacek, McCloud, and others) added just this month to the lineup at IMDb TV, Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service, Once Upon a Dead Man is omitted from the episodes available. To watch it nowadays, you may have to spring for the complete series on DVD. Below you’ll find the movie’s opening title sequence.



Oh, and if you’re confused by the second new show being promoted in the ad atop this post, you’re probably not alone. The D.A., which also debuted on this date 50 years ago, was Robert Conrad’s third series, following Hawaiian Eye and The Wild Wild West. According to Wikipedia, the half-hour drama had Conrad playing Paul Ryan, “a tough-minded, hard-hitting prosecutor” for Los Angeles County. Aided by criminal investigator Bob Ramirez (ex-Dan August co-star Ned Romero), Ryan “prosecuted all types of cases under the watchful eye of his supervisor, Chief Deputy District Attorney H.M. ‘Staff’ Stafford (Harry Morgan, who directed at least one episode himself). His opponent was usually Public Defender Katherine Benson (Julie Cobb).”

Employing a half-investigation, half-prosecution format that had been used in the earlier ABC-TV series Arrest and Trial (1963-1964), and would work to superior effect on NBC’s Law & Order (1990-2010), The D.A. was a production from actor, director, and screenwriter Jack Webb, spun off from a couple of TV films made by Webb’s company, Mark VII Ltd.: 1969’s Murder One and Conspiracy to Kill from 1971, “both of which fictionalized cases prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi, world-famous as the prosecutor of Charles Manson.” Despite helpful hype in TV Guide and other sources, the series lasted only 15 episodes, the final regular installment appearing on January 7, 1972. However, again quoting Wikipedia, "some episodes were later compiled in 1978 as a two-hour TV movie titled Confessions of the D.A. Man which aired on CBS on January 20, 1978, as part of The CBS Late Movie.”

To read more about The D.A., click here.

Bullet Points: One Heck of Giant Edition

• Chris Sullivan, who writes the fine blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, confirms that the popular ITV-TV series Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, “will end as predicted, at 33 episodes.” Endeavour is, of course, a prequel to the long-running small-screen drama Inspector Morse, both of them based on characters created by Colin Dexter. “It is no surprise to those who believed that Russell Lewis, the creator and writer of all the Endeavour episodes, would not go beyond the number of episodes that the original Morse series and the Lewis series stopped at,” Sullivan remarks. This means there will be eight seasons of Endeavour altogether, with the final one comprising only three episodes. That’s the same number of installments found in Series 7, which was already broadcast in Great Britain this last February, but will debut in the States on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! come Sunday, August 9. Here’s a trailer for the new season.

• If you want a jump on that August debut, and aren’t  squeamish about plot spoilers, check out The Killing Times’ reviews of those Series 7 installments: Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3.

• Since I last took note, The Columbophile has rolled out three more posts in its series identifying “The 100 Greatest Columbo Scenes of the 1970s.” Part 6 is here and includes a great clip from the Season 3 episode “Double Exposure,” in which Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo rattles his prime suspect (played by Robert Culp) during his golf game. Part 7 features a scene from the Season 2 installment “Requiem for a Falling Star” in which renowned American costume designer Edith Head has a cameo role. And in Part 8, look for guest murderer Patrick McGoohan to offer Columbo some cigar etiquette in the Season 4 episode “By Dawn's Early Light.” (By the way, McGoohan scored an Emmy Award for that performance.”) The Columbophile’s unnamed author has so far covered 80 of his or her 100 choices. The penultimate post in this project is slated to appear tomorrow.

• When I read that 82-year-old New Mexico author Rudolfo Anaya died on June 28 at his home in Albuquerque, I didn’t immediately recognize any link with crime fiction. After all, I associated him with mainstream fiction, especially his best-selling 1972 novel, Bless Me, Ultima, and also with his children’s stories. It was The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura who reminded me that, in addition to Anaya being “regarded as one of the founders of contemporary Chicano literature,” he had penned a quartet of mysteries starring a Mexican-American high school teacher turned private eye, Sonny Baca. Three of those novels were published in the 1990s, beginning with Zia Summer (1995). The fourth, Jemez Spring, didn’t appear until 2005.

• It’s been almost half a dozen years since novelist P.D. James passed away at age 94. If you need an introduction to her oeuvre or a reminder of her significant contributions to the genre, click onto this terrific piece from Neil Nyren, in CrimeReads.

• Really, “emoticons” date back to 1881?

• This is good news: Vienna Blood, the BBC-TV drama based on Frank Tallis’ Max Lieberman historical mysteries, and set in early 20th-century Vienna, has been renewed. “Three feature-length episodes have been ordered for the show’s second run,” says The Killing Times, “and BBC Two will once again serve as the UK broadcaster.” The show’s return is expected in Britain in 2021. There’s no word yet on when Americans might enjoy these fresh Vienna Blood stories.

• A six-episode ITV-TV adaptation A Spy Among Friends, Ben McIntyre’s 2014 non-fiction book about the Cambridge spy ring, will bring together an assortment of stars and writers with “some serious spy experience on their résumé,” according to Double O Section. That blog’s Matthew Bradford writes that “Damian Lewis (Our Kind of Traitor) will reunite with his Homeland producer Alexander Cary (the Taken TV show) to star as [Nicholas] Elliott. Dominic West (The Hour, Johnny English Reborn) will play [Kim] Philby, who has been portrayed in the past by Toby Stephens, Tom Hollander, Anthony Bate, and Billy Cruddup.” The show is scheduled for broadcast in fall of 2021.

• Our favorite genre is offering succor to many Brits forced inside by COVID-19. “Britain’s readers have been emerging from lockdown to restock their bookshelves, with book sales—and particularly crime novels—booming in the three weeks since booksellers were allowed to open their doors,” reports Alison Flood of The Guardian.

The print market continued its healthy run since England’s bookshops reopened on 15 June, with 3.8m books sold in the last week, for £32.6m, up from 3.1m (making £26.9m) at the same time last year. This is a 15% increase in value on last week and 21% year-on-year.

Sales in the last three weeks are up 19% on the same period in 2019, according to book sales monitor Nielsen, with almost 11m titles worth £94m sold over the period. Readers have been pouncing on stories of murder and revenge, with nearly 120,000 more crime and thriller books bought in the last two weeks of June, when compared to the same point last year.

• Just as the COVID-19 crisis was beginning, back in March, blogger Evan Lewis brought us a four-part BBC Radio adaptation of Hammett’s early Secret Agent X-9 yarns. (If you missed those, click here, here, here, and here to listen.) Last weekend he followed up by posting the four-hour, 13-episode, action-packed entirety of a 1945 film serial starring future Sea Hunt hunk Lloyd Bridges as Phil Corrigan/X-9. When you have enough free time, tune it in here.

• Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel really didn’t like the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, the first in the series to star ex-Remington Steele lead Pierce Brosnan. “I think he isn’t an interesting Bond,” said Siskel. “I like [Sean] Connery and everybody else has been nothing compared to Connery. Frankly, Roger Moore has a more commanding physical performance than this guy. I thought this was an average picture. … I can’t recommend this picture at all.”



• Incidentally, GoldenEye premiered 25 years ago this coming November. Do you think it might be time for a rewatch?

• Why crime fiction might be the perfect genre for our coronavirus times: “Through crime fiction,” explains author Sulari Gentill (A Dangerous Language), “we have faced all manner of peril, defended the unjustly accused, protected intended victims. We have been selfless and fearless, we have been seekers of truth and justice, someone’s last hope. We have trained for crisis.”

• It was a couple of weeks ago that I announced my tally of favorite U.S. crime novels published during the first half of 2020. Last weekend, librarian-turned-blogger Lesa Holstine issued a comparable list of her own. Holstine’s picks extend beyond mystery fiction, but she does include Tracy Clark's What You Don't See, Paul D. Marks’ The Blues Don’t Care, and Katharine Schellman’s The Body in the Garden.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Killer Nashville is the latest event to announce it’s canceling for 2020 due to the pandemic, … the new travel bans and the recent upsurge of cases in Tennessee. They’re going to postpone Killer Nashville 2020 and roll everyone’s registrations forward to KN 2021 (August 19-22, 2021). Founder Clay Stafford added that “It was a hard choice, but the safety and well-being of our friends is our most important consideration. These are tough and uncharted times.” This year’s special guests were to be Lisa Black, J.T. Ellison, and Walter Mosley.

• Other conventions are seeking ways to carry on. Mystery in the Midlands, for instance, has scheduled a live Webinar for Saturday, July 25, that will include appearances by Charlaine Harris, Jeffery Deaver, Tara Laskowski, Art Taylor, and Dana Cameron. Register here.

• If you didn’t catch it already, here’s my Killer Covers gallery of artist James Bama’s splendid paperback fronts showcasing “teenagers either causing trouble or trying to find their own way in a confusing new world of sex, drugs, and yes, rock ’n’ roll.”

• As you’re probably already aware, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz have co-authored a new criminal history, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (Morrow), due out in August. (It’s a follow-up to their 2018 collaboration, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago.) What you may not know, is that Collins has also signed with Las Vegas-based Wolfpack Publishing to reissue his four Eliot Ness historical thrillers, beginning with a new omnibus edition released earlier this month. In his blog, Collins explains that this relationship with Wolfpack—a “hybrid” house that “place[s] primary importance on e-books and secondary importance on real books, which are Print-on-Demand”—will give him the chance to resurrect backlist titles, publish new short-story collections, and add to existing or discontinued series. “I can do a Jack and Maggie Starr or a Mallory or a ‘disaster’ or a Perdition prequel or a Black Hats sequel or even—should the current publishers stop doing them—new Spillane titles. Wolfpack is interested in whatever I might want to do. This feels incredibly liberating.”

• I have enjoyed the blog Paperback Warrior almost since the day it debuted seven years ago this week. And one of its most engaging ingredients is the much-newer Paperback Warrior Podcast, focusing on vintage adventure and crime novels as well as the authors behind those works. A couple of recent entries have been particular standouts: Episode 50, which looks back in part at Thomas B. Dewey’s life and writing career; and Episode 51, addressing the work of “CIA operative, Watergate burglar, and vintage genre fiction author [E.] Howard Hunt.” You can catch up with all of the podcasts here.

• Speaking of Hunt, I see that a couple of the novels he wrote pseudonymously (as “Robert Dietrich”) about “two-fisted, hard-drinking CPA detective, Steve Bentley,” are available again in print, thanks to Lee Goldberg’s new imprint, Cutting Edge Books. The House on Q Street, originally released in 1959, can be purchased here, while The Calypso Caper (1961) is newly obtainable right here. Cutting Edge is offering additional Dietrich works in e-book format only. For more info, click here.

• I somehow missed the welcome news that Steeger Books is reissuing—in both softcover and e-book formats—the 1952-1973 Milo March series, starring “a high-flying, globetrotting investigator for Intercontinental Insurance.” “Written by Green Lama creator Kendell Foster Crossen under the [M.E.] Chaber pen name, the Milo March thrillers are fondly recalled by paperback collectors for the spectacular Robert McGinnis paintings on the covers of the 1970s series,” explains the publisher. “These remastered, uniform editions include the original texts, restored by Kendra Crossen Burroughs, her father’s literary executor and the series editor. New bonus articles, interviews, and rare images are featured in most of the volumes.” Steeger is already selling six March titles, with 17 more to come by the end of this year—“including the final, unpublished March novel,” Death to the Brides.

• Mick Finlay, Glasgow-born author of the new mystery Arrowood and the Thames Corpses, reconsiders the 2007 book Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters and pronounces it “a real treat for Sherlock Holmes fans. The letters were written to Doyle’s family, publishers and others, but most of them are to his ‘Mam,’ who he was very close to all his life. He describes her as a wonderful storyteller, and attributes his own gifts to her influence, while his gift for dramatic effect came from his father, an artist whose alcoholism led to lengthy stays in sanitoria and asylums in the latter part of his life. As well as some fascinating insights into Conan Doyle’s personal life and politics, they also provide some background to the development of the Sherlock Holmes stories.” Finlay’s full essay can be enjoyed at this link.

• An unusually nice photo cover for a crime-fiction mag.

• British actor Peter Cushing, said to have been “a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes,” starred in the 1959 big-screen production The Hound of the Baskervilles. He later returned to sleuthing in a 1968 run of the BBC-TV series Sherlock Holmes. (See the show’s opening titles here.) Cushing apparently played Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous consulting detective in 15 installments of that hour-long series, taking over from Douglas Wilmer. However, only six were known to have survived, the remainder said to have been wiped “to allow tape stock to be re-used.” Now, though, The Killing Times brings word that at least some clips from those missing episodes have been found, thanks to “an intense search” by Yorkshire Post reporter Tony Earnshaw.

• Because I’ve long been a fan of the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, I must draw your attention to Steve Lewis’ generally complimentary review, in Mystery*File, of that show’s first regular installment, “Murder by the Barrel.” The full-episode video is included.

• This is curious: Midnight Atlanta, the third book in U.S. author Thomas Mullen’s outstanding series about mid-20th-century Georgia police officers Lucius Boggs, Tommy Smith, and Denny Rakestraw, is already available in the UK, from Little, Brown. However, there’s no American edition of the novel. Both of Mullen’s previous series entries appeared in the States (from 37 Ink, an Atria Books imprint) months before the were released in Britain. Why is Midnight Atlanta the exception? So far, I see no word on the Web about when Mullen’s new novel might reach U.S. bookshops.

• Bloomberg Businessweek has studied the murderers in Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and charted the age, sex, profession, relationship to the victim, and homicidal methods used by each of them. The bottom line: “In Agatha Christie’s novels, murder and financial fraud are often intertwined. The murderers are more likely to be men, are partial to poison, and frequently commit the crime as part of a scam such as winning an inheritance.” See all of the results here.

• I’ve never read Joel Townsley Rogers’ The Red Right Hand. But with Penzler Publishers having recently brought that acclaimed 1945 novel back into print as part of its American Mystery Classics line, I have another chance to do so. Joe R. Lansdale’s introduction to this edition leaves me further intrigued. As he observes: “At times, while reading Rogers’s peculiar book, I felt as if I were seeing the world through a dark and grease-smeared window pane that would frequently turn clear and light up in spewing colors like a firework display on the Fourth of July. At the same time there was the sensation of something damp and dark creeping up behind me, a cold chill on the back of my neck. Clues and odd impressions pile up like plague victims, and from time to time the answer to the riddle seems close at hand, as if you could reach out and grasp it. Then the answer that seemed so clear wriggles from your grasp like an electric eel and slithers into darkness.”

• Has it been a while since you last consulted The Rap Sheet’s inventory of Summer 2020 crime-fiction releases? Then you might want to revisit it, as I have made many additions over the last month.


• There’s nothing secret about my fondness for Olivia Rutigliano’s contributions to CrimeReads. I favor her work partly because so much of it glances back at the history of this genre, in all media. Case in point: her recent piece about the jailing of Dashiell Hammett, after the quondam Pinkerton agent and private-eye novelist ran afoul of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1951. Another Rutigliano piece that won my immediate attention remarked on “the endless symbolism of Jaws, which owes its dark soul to Moby Dick.” (The 45th anniversary of that movie’s release was June 20.) Her spoiler-filled essay begins:

I watch Jaws every year on the Fourth of July, in view of its timelessness as well as its seasonality. Jaws is specifically set during Independence Day. It also generally invented the ‘summer blockbuster,’ a detail which makes its 1975 premiere on midsummer’s eve seem quite significant, in hindsight. Like the shark that arrives off the coast of Amity Island in the film’s famous opening scene, Jaws arrived unassumingly at the start of the season and caused a frenzy that would ripple out far past Labor Day. It became one of our greatest filmmaking touchstones: a marvelously intellectual monster movie, an arbiter of cinematic summer, a technical origin story for the boy-genius director who would become Steven Spielberg. It is also a touch prescient. It is one of those eerie films that, to me, feels a little sibylline, a little otherworldly. It seems to sit at the nexus of everything—the past, the future, high art, popular entertainment, mythology, history—as a film whose deliverance certainly revolutionized filmmaking and scared everyone from going in the ocean, but also stands as a vessel for the summoning of mankind for reflection and atonement.

• New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis offers her own take on the initial impact and enduring legacy of Jaws here.

• Could a motion picture based on Luther, the popular BBC psychological crime drama starring Idris Elba, finally be in the offing? While speaking with Deadline about his new Sky-TV comedy, In the Long Run, Elba said: “I’ve made it very clear that I’d like to see Luther come back as a film. And I can tell you this, that we are this close to making a film of Luther.” Of course, as Deadline notes, this is “not the first time Elba has talked about the BBC Studios show heading to the big screen. He told [the British newspaper] Metro in 2018 that Luther writer Neil Cross has been ‘beavering away’ on a feature script.” Will such talk ever amount to something?

• Vulture talks with writers, directors, and others about the challenges of presenting TV cop dramas in the post-George Floyd era.

• How might school history textbooks of the future summarize and try to make sense of this crazy year, 2020? Historian James West Davidson speculates on that subject in The Atlantic.

• Real people have spent the months-long COVID-19 lockdown in different ways, not all of them worth reporting or free of embarrassment. But what about some of our favorite crime-fiction protagonists? What have they been up to amid this health crisis? Scott Montgomery, of Bookpeople, in Austin, Texas, asked Joe R. Lansdale, Laura Lippman, Mark Pryor, Craig Johnson, and Megan Abbott to imagine their creations’ self-quarantine escapades.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist: “The In GAD We Trust podcast chats with short-story sleuth Tony Medawar, who has uncovered unknown or neglected works by authors such as Christianna Brand, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Medawar talks about his favorite mystery finds and other discoveries he has made. A new volume in Medawar’s Bodies from the Library series will be out in October in the United States.”

• A few other writer exchanges worth finding: For his Author Interviews blog, Marshal Zeringue talks with J. Todd Scott (Lost River) and Chris Nickson (The Molten City); Speaking of Mysteries podcast host Nancie Clare quizzes Cathi Stoler (Bar None) and Michael Elias (You Can Go Home Now); Jeff Rutherford pitches questions at T.R. Ragan (Don’t Make a Sound) for his Reading and Writing Podcast; and Do Some Damage’s Steve Weddle chats with Jay Stringer about the latter’s new book, Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth.

• In another episode of Open Book on Location, authors Lee Goldberg, Nicholas Meyer, and Leslie S. Klinger got together virtually to talk about their writing processes, movie/TV tie-in novels, their respective reading histories, Hollywood, and more.

• I forgot to mention this before, but The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog spent the month of May saluting—with book covers—the prolific work of Alan Geoffrey Yates, who wrote under the Carter Brown pseudonym. Those fronts can all be seen here.

• At the Villa Rose’s Xavier Lechard muses on Golden Age investigators who occasionally took justice into their own hands.

• Finally, Flashbak offers a sometimes-shocking selection of vintage crime-scene images, taken by the Los Angeles Police Department and barely saved from destruction. “In 2014,” the site explains, “Los Angeles-based photographer Merrick Morton (a onetime LAPD reserve officer) spotted a derelict stash of LAPD crime photos dating from the 1920s to 1970s. The cellulose nitrate-based film and negatives were decomposed and deemed as fire hazard. … Now spruced up, the macabre collection includes photographs of crimes, many of them violent. … There’s an unusual photo of Maila Nurmi dressed as Vampira, pictures of comedian Lenny Bruce’s overdose in March of 1966 and images of the Manson Family arriving at their arraignment in 1970.” That post is definitely not safe for work.

Bullet Points: Encore Edition

Now you know what happens when I spend too much time away from my office: I return with more to say than will fit into one post.

• This seemed rather inevitable, didn’t it? Following the success of TNT-TV’s 10-part adaptation of The Alienist, Caleb Carr’s 1995 Victorian thriller, the same U.S. network has decided to bring Carr’s sequel, The Angel of Darkness (1997), to the small screen. There’s no word yet on when the finished product might be broadcast, but The Killing Times offers this plot synopsis:

It is June 1897. A year has passed since Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a pioneer in forensic psychiatry, tracked down the brutal serial killer John Beecham with the help of a team of trusted companions and a revolutionary application of the principles of his discipline. Kreizler and his friends—high-living crime reporter Schuyler Moore; indomitable, derringer-toting Sara Howard; the brilliant (and bickering) detective brothers Marcus and Lucius Isaacson; powerful and compassionate Cyrus Montrose; and Stevie Taggert, the boy Kreizler saved from a life of street crime—have returned to their former pursuits and tried to forget the horror of the Beecham case. But when the distraught wife of a Spanish diplomat begs Sara’s aid, the team reunites to help her find her kidnapped infant daughter. It is a case fraught with danger, since Spain and the United States are on the verge of war. Their investigation leads the team to a shocking suspect: a woman who appears to the world to be a heroic nurse and a loving mother, but who may in reality be a ruthless murderer of children.

• By the way, I see that Carr’s long-promised third novel in the Laszlo Kreizler series is now being offered for “pre-order” by Amazon. Titled The Alienist at Armageddon, it appears set for a U.S. release in September of next year (from Mulholland Books).

• In a fine article for CrimeReads, Christopher Huang, Montreal-based author of the new novel A Gentleman’s Murder, reflects on how World War I gave rise to the traditional mystery story.

• This past August 4 marked the 126th anniversary of the infamous Fall River, Massachusetts, ax murders supposedly committed by Lizzie Borden and resulting in the demise of her father and stepmother. But it won’t be until September 14 that Lizzie, the latest film from director Craig William Macneill, premieres in U.S. theaters. Judging from a trailer posted in Slate, the movie suggests a sexual relationship between Lizzie (portrayed by Chloë Sevigny) and the Bordens’ live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), precipitated the violence—a theory previously explored in Evan Hunter’s 1984 novel, Lizzie.

• Would you like to attend next year’s Left Coast Crime convention—to take place in Vancouver, British Columbia, from March 28 to 31—but can’t afford the $300 (Canadian) registration fee? Well, it seems the convention’s organizing committee is offering three financial-assistance scholarships, which include the registration payment as well as $200 (U.S.) in expense money. All you have to do is apply by November 30. Click here for more information.

• The New York-born jazz singer and actress Morgana King, who played Vito Corleone’s wife in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, has died at age 87. She actually passed away in Palm Springs, California, on March 22 of this year, but as Star magazine explains, “Her death had gone unreported until a friend, [entertainment writer] John Hoglund, wrote about her this week … on Facebook.”

• In case you were wondering what became of Morven Christie, the Scottish actress who played Anglican vicar Sidney Chambers’ on-and-off love interest, Amanda Kendall, in the UK mystery drama Grantchester, she’s now set to star in a modern ITV-TV crime series called The Bay. As Radio Times notes, that six-part program is likely to be compared with the surprisingly popular Broadchurch. “Like the Dorset-set Broadchurch,” Radio Times writes, “The Bay takes place in a coastal town—in this case Morecambe—and is described by ITV’s drama boss Polly Hill as ‘a very real crime story about family and community … compelling and beautifully crafted,’ all of which will also strike a chord with Broadchurch fans.” Christie has been cast as Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong, “a fierce and hard-working Family Liaison Officer,” to quote from Killing Times, which goes on to provide these clues as to the show’s storyline:

When Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong is assigned to a missing persons investigation, at first it seems like any other—tragic, but all too familiar. As a Family Liaison Officer, she’s trained never to get emotionally involved. Her job is to support families during the worst time of their lives whilst also to be the eyes and ears of the police investigation; a cuckoo in the nest. But there’s something very different about this particular case. With horror Lisa realizes she’s got a personal connection with this frightened family; one that could compromise her and the investigation. As she grapples to get justice for the grieving family, Lisa discovers it could come at a cost.

• While writing recently about the 36th birthday of Yvonne Strahovski, who co-starred in the 2007-2012 NBC-TV spy series Chuck, I happened across this dream sequence spoofing the start of Hart to Hart, ABC’s older mystery starring Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. I thought others might enjoy watching that video, too.

• Needless to say, I already own a copy of John le Carré’s 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. However, I may need to add to my collection The Folio Society’s beautiful new edition of that “breakthrough work that redefined the spy story.” It features interior illustrations by British artist Matt Taylor, whose cover for Penguin’s most recent paperback version of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy won The Rap Sheet’s 2011 Best Crime Novel Cover contest.

• “So how was the wife of the professional police detective portrayed in most Golden Age police procedurals?” short-story writer Carol Westron asks in Lizzie Hayes’ blog. “On the whole, she was hardly portrayed at all. She was mentioned as part of his background but played no part in the intellectual or emotional process that leads to the resolution of the case.”

• For the MysteryPeople blog, Scott Montgomery interviews author Max Allan Collins on the subject of his new non-fiction book, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago (Morrow), which he penned with A. Brad Schwartz.

• And I long ago added to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page the original opening from the NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James. But only yesterday did I realize that I never followed up by posting the main title sequence from Once Upon a Dead Man, the pilot film that gave birth to that beloved, 1971-1977 mystery drama. So here it is. Once Upon a Dead Man was directed by Leonard B. Stern and was first broadcast on September 17, 1971. Jerry Fielding composed the theme music.

Right Pair, Wrong Program?

Question: What does the 1973 ABC-TV sitcom Adam’s Rib have to do with the NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife? Answer: According to an item published in the Portland Oregonian during the summer of ’73, the stars of Adam’s Rib--Blythe Danner (the mother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow) and Ken Howard--were offered the lead roles in McMillan, “and turned them down within 15 minutes of each other.” Those parts went instead to Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James.

(Left) TV Guide’s September 8, 1973, preview of the sitcom Adam’s Rib

“Adam’s Rib ... may be one of the more palatable situation comedies of the fall season, judging by the pilot,” remarked Oregonian TV critic Francis Murphy. “The plot is taken from the [1949] Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn movie of the same name, featuring a man-and-wife attorney team.”

Palatable to Murphy or not, the fact is the Friday series Adam’s Rib lasted 13 episodes, just four months. McMillan & Wife ran for six years, 39 episodes (plus pilot). Do you think Danner and Howard might later have spent more than 15 minutes regretting their choice of one show over the other?

NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: “McMillan & Wife”

(The third entry in our long-running succession of posts highlighting shows featured in the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series.”)

Title: McMillan & Wife

Starring: Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James

Original Run: 1971-1977 (39 episodes, plus pilot), NBC-TV

Premise: San Francisco’s particularly activist police commissioner turns detective to solve murders and other major crimes with the help of his comely, trouble-attracting, and occasionally brilliant younger spouse. Because of this show’s emphasis on the couple’s May-September romance, as well as its lighthearted storytelling nature, it wasn’t uncommon to hear critics say that McMillan & Wife “brought the screwball sleuthing of The Thin Man into the 1970s with a series of posh, whodunit mysteries.”

Background: McMillan & Wife was the last of the three original NBC Mystery Movie series to debut in the fall of 1971. Its initial regular episode--titled “Murder by the Barrel”--aired on Wednesday, September 29, a week after McCloud’s season premiere. However, the two-hour McMillan pilot movie, Once Upon a Dead Man, was broadcast on September 17, only a couple of days after Columbo’s launch.

This comedy-tinged mystery was created by Leonard B. Stern, who had already racked up an impressive list of writing and producing credits, including work on The Honeymooners, The Phil Silvers Show, I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, and Get Smart. Once Upon a Dead Man was a different sort of venture for Stern, and he wasn’t at all sure how it would be received by executives at the then three U.S. TV networks. In fact, the likelihood that his teleflick would not evolve into a regular program might have been one of its attractions for the guy Stern hired to play Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan: Rock Hudson, a handsome, 6-foot-5-inch leading man of 1950s and ’60s films who, having moved into his mid-40s, was no longer so much in demand by Hollywood as he’d been. Hudson didn’t want to take on long-term small-screen efforts. But as Stern explained in an interview for the Archive of American Television, the cast of Once Upon a Dead Man had so enjoyed doing the project, that when NBC asked Hudson to reconsider his resistance to portraying the commissioner in a series, he did exactly that. “Once Rock was involved,” recalls Paul Mason, an early producer and writer of the show, McMillan & Wife “got the highest priority” and was quickly tagged to become the third spoke of the primary Mystery Movie “wheel.”

Before casting the & Wife portion of this new show, Stern “talked to many gifted actresses” about the part, including Diane Keaton and Jill Clayburgh. But a lunchtime get-together in Los Angeles between Stern, the famously shy Hudson, and the gregarious Susan Saint James--a mid-20s brunette who had played sexy purloiner Charlene “Charlie” Brown in four episodes of It Takes a Thief and scored an Emmy Award for her role as the short-skirted, over-educated editorial assistant, Peggy Maxwell, on The Name of the Game--ultimately won Saint James second billing on the series. “Rock felt comfortable with Susan,” Stern recalled, “so we said, OK, we’ll go with her. And she turned out to be an ideal choice, ’cause she had an innate sense of mischief. And that’s what the role calls for.”

(Left) Season 1 publicity shot of stars Hudson and Saint James

On paper, the two lead roles showed great potential. Stewart “Mac” McMillan was a middle-aged, Scottish-descended U.S. Navy veteran with a background in CIA intelligence and a string of former girlfriends. (It was a running gag on the show that attractive young lovelies would sidle up to Mac, say “hi” and wish him well--much to Sally’s annoyance--but he rarely remembered their names.) McMillan had been a prominent defense attorney in San Francisco before being asked to serve as the city’s police commissioner. (Actually, San Francisco has a more complicated police commission hierarchy than that, but for the purposes of this show, it worked.) Sally McMillan, née Hull, was the free-spirited daughter of the late Fred Hull--described in the pilot as “a great criminologist”--and had benefited from her father’s influence. “She grew up in the business,” Mac says early on. “She knows a clue when she meets one.”

However, it was the on-screen romance between Hudson and Saint James that made magic for McMillan & Wife. Although Hudson was gay (something that certainly wasn’t publicized at the time), he came across on this program as an understanding and supportive older husband, while Saint James was clever, kindhearted, and altogether captivating. (The series’ regular bedroom scenes, in which the actress donned a long, red, No. 18 football jersey, fueled the fantasies of many adolescent boys.) The pair seemed, at least during half a dozen episodes every year, to be very much in love. Their chemistry is conspicuous in the scene embedded below--clipped from the pilot--which finds a then mustachioed McMillan and the almost-foot-shorter Sally discussing what might be evidence in the theft of an Egyptian sarcophagus from a charity auction.*



Film authority Richard Meyers wrote in TV Detectives (1981) that “McMillan and Wife were as much George Burns and Gracie Allen as they were Nick and Nora Charles, because Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan’s wife, Sally, was as wacky as Gracie and as prone to finding corpses as Nora (or Mrs. North, for that matter).” He was especially complimentary of Saint James’ talents: “It is not that easy to be kooky without being cloying or completely unbelievable, but Saint James pulled it off. In every episode, it seemed, Sally would uncover a body or something and spend the rest of the show getting kidnapped, attacked, threatened, or else all three ...”

The McMillan & Wife plots often revolved around friends, family, or social acquaintances of the commissioner and his wife, be it someone from Mac’s espionage days, a bedeviled concert pianist associate of Sally’s, the commissioner’s long-feuding relatives back in Scotland, or Mac’s soon-to-be-wed sister, Megan (played by The Rockford Files’ Gretchen Corbett, with Mildred Natwick of The Snoop Sisters appearing as his mother, Beatrice). In one episode, a minor Bay Area earthquake toppled part of the McMillans’ chimney, revealing a corpse bricked up inside. Another focused on Sergeant Charles Enright (John Schuck)--the loyal but rather slow-witted cop assigned as Mac’s official assistant--who had apparently murdered his jealous ex-wife, while a third installment found Mildred (Nancy Walker), the McMillans’ imperfect and oft-grumpy housekeeper, attacked in her hotel while serving on a sequestered trial jury.†

Additional Notes: Although some of its episodes were penned by Edward D. Hoch, Steven Bochco, Steve Fisher, and Columbo’s Levinson and Link (using their pseudonym Ted Leighton), this show’s story lines could be pretty outrageous at times. Take, for example, the second season’s “Terror Times Two,” in which the commissioner was abducted by mobsters and replaced by a surgically altered look-alike--a thoroughgoing criminal who, while he had no qualms about assassinating a hospitalized informant, stopped short of hopping into the sack with an unsuspecting Sally. (The idea of a McMillan double was employed yet again the next season in “Cross and Double Cross,” which found Mac switching places with a mirror-image malefactor to intercept a shipment of stolen gold.)

(Right) An early newspaper advertisement for McMillan & Wife

But then complete credibility never seemed of paramount importance in McMillan & Wife. Robert Daley, a former New York City deputy police commissioner turned novelist, acknowledged as much in his November 19, 1972, assessment for The New York Times of that season’s TV crime-fighters. Examining an episode of McMillan & Wife in which Mac chased after a suspect fleeing aboard one of San Francisco’s celebrated cable cars, Daley wrote:

Police commissioners do not catch suspects with their bare hands, any more than presidents of General Motors build cars with their bare hands, and for exactly the same reasons. There is too much other work to do--administrative work--which is perhaps not as much fun as catching crooks, but which is absolutely essential if the machine is to work at all.

I suspect that hardly anybody in this country knows what a Police Commissioner does. One thing he does not do is move through the police world accompanied by his wife, as McMillan does. ... The sight of a luscious dish such as Mrs. McMillan hanging about all the time would distract the cops. No work would get done while she was around, and eventually her presence would become downright annoying.

McMillan himself conceded that his job description didn’t include any heroics. The topic came up during a discussion with his city’s police chief, Andrew Yeakel (Jack Albertson), in Once Upon a Dead Man:

McMillan: “Andy, is it necessary for you to keep me under constant surveillance?”

Yeakel: “You’re the commissioner. We don’t want anything to happen to you.”

McMillan (laughing): “Nothing ever happens to commissioners.”

Despite its conceptual flight of fancy, or perhaps because of it (after all, would TV watchers have sat still for Rock Hudson engaging in a real commissioner’s paper shuffling once a month?), McMillan & Wife became a hit for NBC. It also brought still more attention to San Francisco, which at the time was also the backdrop for Raymond Burr’s Ironside and The Streets of San Francisco, starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas. Although much of this Mystery Movie series was filmed on the Universal Studios back lot, the real city featured in the pilot and select later scenes. Re-viewing McMillan & Wife today (all six seasons are available in DVD format), it’s interesting to see how the Bay Area’s biggest metropolis has changed since the 1970s, especially as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which helped bring the demolition of the waterfront’s ugly, sight-blocking Embarcadero Freeway, a road that made repeat appearances over the show’s run.

Following its fifth (1975-1976) season, though, McMillan & Wife underwent some dramatic changes. Reportedly due to a contract dispute, Susan Saint James left the series. But NBC sought to keep this moneymaker going, even though it now lacked not only wife Sally (who was said to have perished in a plane accident), but also Sergeant Enright (as John Schuck had moved over to the short-lived series Holmes & Yo-Yo) and Mildred (because Nancy Walker was recruited into an eponymous situation comedy). For Season 6, the commissioner took up new residence in an apartment, with a different but equally eccentric housekeeper--Mildred’s sister, Agatha (played by comedienne-singer Martha Raye)--and another police aide, Sergeant Philip DiMaggio (Richard Gilliland). The show was retitled simply McMillan, and managed to limp along for half a dozen more episodes, but Saint James’ absence was too acutely felt, and the introduction into widower Mac’s life of a succession of less-interesting girlfriends only seemed to insult Sally’s memory. In 1977, McMillan was finally cancelled, along with the NBC Mystery Movie wheel (though the network continued showing Columbo films for another year after that).

After leaving McMillan & Wife, Saint James appeared in large- and small-screen movies before landing another TV series gig, Kate & Allie (1984-1989), a family sitcom in which she co-starred with Saturday Night Live alumna Jane Curtin. She was later seen playing the mother of Kate O’Brien (Christa Miller, who is her real-life niece) on The Drew Carey Show, and took the role of a defense attorney in a 2006 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But ever since 2004, when a plane crash in Colorado (shades of Sally McMillan’s fate!) took the life of her youngest son, Teddy, Saint James--who turned 65 years old this last summer--has been spotted less and less in the limelight. However, she did receive a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame back in 2008.

(Left) The forthcoming DVD set, McMillan & Wife: The Complete Series

Rock Hudson went on from his disappointing solo year on McMillan to star in the 1979 TV mini-series The Martian Chronicles (based on Ray Bradbury’s 1950 science-fiction short story of the same name), and he featured in the 1980 picture The Mirror Crack'd, adapted from Agatha Christie’s 1962 novel, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. He later landed a recurring role on the prime-time soap opera Dynasty, but his physical condition started to cause him trouble. As Wikipedia recalls,

In the early 1980s, following years of heavy drinking and smoking, Hudson began having health problems which resulted in a heart attack in November 1981. Emergency quintuple heart bypass surgery sidelined Hudson and his new TV show The Devlin Connection for a year; the show was canceled in December 1982 not long after it first aired. Hudson recovered from the heart surgery but continued to smoke. He was in ill health while filming The Ambassador in Israel during the winter of 1983-84 with Robert Mitchum. ... During 1984, Hudson's health grew worse, prompting different rumors that he was suffering from liver cancer, among other ailments, due to his increasingly gaunt face and build.

In June 1984, Hudson was diagnosed with HIV, but he struggled to keep his illness secret as he continued his showbiz career. It wasn’t until a year later that he announced he was dying of AIDS. This news prompted fervent debates in the media and elsewhere, not only surrounding Hudson’s sexual history but also the dire fate facing him and other AIDS patients. Rock Hudson, who’d been born Roy Harold Scherer Jr., died on October 2, 1985, at age 59.

Despite this show’s occasional incredible turns and the fact that some later, two-hour episodes lacked the vitality of their predecessors, McMillan & Wife still occupies a prominent spot in my memory. Susan Saint James was the first woman I fell in love with, though we had of course never met. The show made me long to visit San Francisco, which I have done many times since. And I still find myself, in contemplative moments, humming the theme from this Mystery Movie series. In fact, I’m doing that right now--you’re correct to imagine that I am smiling at the same time.

Next up: Banacek

The video below features the main title sequence and closing credits from “Death Is a Seven-Point Favorite,” the fourth regular episode of McMillan & Wife (originally broadcast on December 8, 1971). This show’s theme music was composed by Jerry Fielding, who later also created themes for two other NBC Mystery Movie series, The Snoop Sisters and Faraday and Company.



* By the way, the interiors of the McMillans’ house shown in the pilot movie were actually shot in star Rock Hudson’s own Los Angeles residence. “We were low on the budget and the set we’d picked was awful,” Paul Mason explains. “So Rock said, why didn’t we just use his home. He was later surprised when he saw the size of the crew ... but overall a good sport about the mess.” In the series’ first episode, the McMillans moved into another house, the address of which was given as 250 Carson Street, though the exterior filming was done at 1132/1134 Greenwich Street, between Hyde and Leavenworth, in San Francisco.

† As Leonard Stern mentioned in his Archive of American Television interview, the McMillan & Wife pilot never showed Mildred, though it did refer to the housekeeper, her tendency to store things in unlikely spots, and her almost illegible messages left for Mac and Sally. “But she had such a palpable presence through her notes,” Stern explained, “that we said, why not write her [into the scripts]? And we did.” Nancy Walker joined the cast as Mildred in “Murder by the Barrel.”