Bullet Points: Heavy on Nostalgia Edition

• A much-deserved accolade, mentioned yesterday in Literary Hub: “John le Carré, perhaps history’s greatest spy novelist, was this morning announced as the latest recipient of the $100,000 Olof Palme Prize, an award given for ‘an outstanding achievement in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, peace and common security.’ In their citation, the prize organizers praised le Carré ‘for his engaging and humanistic opinion-making in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and the fundamental issues of mankind,’ and called his career ‘an extraordinary contribution to the necessary fight for freedom, democracy and social justice.’”

• There are plenty of interesting pieces in the latest edition of Mystery Scene magazine, among them profiles of authors William Kent Krueger and Elly Griffiths, and Kevin Burton Smith’s “2019 Gift Guide for Mystery Lovers” (still worth perusing, even with the holidays now past). However, I was most drawn to Michael Mallory’s retrospective on the 1973-1976 late-night ABC-TV anthology series Wide World of Mystery. As Mallory recalls, that succession of original “mysteries, horror stories, and science-fiction tales”—all of which began at 11:30 p.m.—was ABC’s several-nights-a-week alternative to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. “While the show’s stories and settings ran the gamut,” Mallory writes, “other things remained constant. One was the 90-minute length—actually 70 or so minutes plus commercials. Another was the fact that they were all recorded on videotape rather than being filmed, as were then-popular prime-time movies of the week. Because of this, viewers were occasionally treated to the occupational hazard of live-on-tape shows: bloopers.” Ed Asner, Lynda Day George, Christopher Reeve, Susan Sarandon, and Tom Selleck were all cast in WWoM installments, only a handful of which are available on DVD (with one—1975’s “Alien Lover,” introducing Kate Mulgrew, to be found on YouTube). I wasn’t a big late-night TV viewer as a boy, but I do remember seeing a few of those teleflicks, notably the March 14, 1975, presentation “Nick and Nora.” An unsuccessful “backdoor pilot” for a separate ABC series, it starred Peter Gunn’s Craig Stevens and small-screen fixture Jo Ann Pflug as Dashiell Hammett’s tippling snoops, Nick and Nora Charles, who in this movie “investigated the death of a man found floating in the pool of a posh L.A. hotel,” according to Mallory.

• By the way, The Stiletto Gumshoe notes that in this new issue of Mystery Scene, “publishers Kate Stine and Brian Skupin officially announced the magazine’s switch to a quarterly starting this year. It’ll be tough to wait longer between issues, but the promise of an increased page count while keeping the subscription price untouched was welcome news.”

• Found recently among my mail, too, was the fifth edition of Down & Out: The Magazine. This was long overdue: the previous issue came out in August 2018. In his editor’s note, Rick Ollerman chalks this delay up to multiple personal mishaps—which wouldn’t have been as big a problem at a larger publication, where other employees could have filled in for the recuperating editor, but at shorthanded Down & Out, it spelled trouble. The sad part is that this tardiness probably cost the periodical subscribers, who thought they could no longer trust in its regularity and future. I can only hope that enough readers will give Down & Out: The Magazine a second chance, because it’s new issue is guaranteed to please, with fiction from the likes of Walter Satterthwait, April Kelly, and Brendan DuBois, plus a column I wrote about Erle Stanley Gardner’s Doug Selby mysteries.

• The original 1968 Ford Mustang GT driven by Steve McQueen in the Warner Bros. film Bullitt, was sold at auction recently for a whopping $3,400,000. That car is renowned for having participated in this thrilling on-screen chase scene.

• In 1985, author Ross Thomas won the Edgar Award for Best Novel with Briarpatch. Now that standalone thriller has been adapted as a USA Network series, set to premiere on February 6. Taking the lead in Thomas’ novel was Ben “Pick” Dill, a white former reporter. However, the gender and race of the protagonist in USA’s series have both been flipped, with Rosario Dawson starring. The Hollywood Reporter explains: “Briarpatch follows Allegra Dill (Dawson), an investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered. What begins as a search for a killer turns into an all-consuming fight to bring her corrupt city to its knees. The series is described as a blend of crime and pulp fiction.” If you’re interested, you can watch a short trailer is here. (Hat tip to Craig Pittman.)

• Also headed for television: Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, 1994’s Gun, with Occasional Music. “The novel,” says Deadline, “is a blend of sci-fi, noir and satire, set in the near future in a trippy world. Evolved animals are part of society, the government placates its citizens with free mind-numbing drugs, and the police monitor people by their karma levels. The protagonist is Conrad Metcalf, a down-and-out P.I. on a loser of a case. His last client—a prominent doctor—just turned up dead, and in order to clear his name and stay out of the deep freeze, the P.I. works for free to get to the bottom of it all. Turns out there is no bottom to this one, though, and Metcalf soon finds there’s nothing simple about this murder.” Deadline adds that “The series will be produced by Aggregate Films’ Jason Bateman, Michael Costigan and Daniel Pipski, along with Francey Grace.”

• Better late than never, let me direct your attention to the second annual Charlie Chan Family Home newsletter. Ohio Chan fan Lou Armagno notes that the newsletter (available here as a PDF document), addresses “two new book releases; a fall ‘Chan’ class taught at the University of Las Vegas, NV; ‘The Other Guys,’ an article on Mr. Wong and Mr. Moto; a recap of my first year blogging at The Postman on Holiday; and a ‘very special’ narrative by Charlie Chan Family Home webmaster, Rush Glick, on his adventure (20 years ago) to pursue the four lost Chan film-scripts. Finally, [there’s] a look at the upcoming Chinese New Year (The Year of the Rat, January 25) and three Charlie Chan events happening at various locations in 2020.”

• Among the “artists, innovators, and thinkers” we lost in 2019, The New York Times honors Peggy Lipton, co-star of The Mod Squad.

• The blog Up and Down These Mean Streets points out that Angel Eyes, Ace Atkins’ recent novel starring Boston private eye Spenser, features a few nods to the work of Dashiell Hammett.

• Speaking of Hammett, Nick Kolakowski records the multiple efforts over the decades to adapt 1929’s Red Harvest for the silver screen. “Red Harvest,” he opines, “seems doomed to remain the Schrödinger’s cat of noir adaptations: often made—and yet never made.”

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

The Audio Publishers Association announced that they will be presenting bestselling author Stephen King with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Audie Awards in March in New York City. King is known for his horror novels such as The Shining and Carrie but also for his crime novels, the Mr. Mercedes Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch), The Outsider, The Colorado Kid, and Joyland.

• I’m not usually a Marie Claire reader, but this recent piece in the magazine had me at the headline: “Megan Abbott Wants You to Feel Everything,” with a subhead reading, “With the premiere of her TV series ‘Dare Me’ on December 29, the novelist-turned-showrunner is taking her knack for humanizing the dynamics of gender, rage, and power beyond the page.” Good job, Megan!

• In the blog Mystery*File (which last month celebrated its 13th anniversary), critic Michael Shonk identified his favorite TV series of the last decade, mostly crime dramas, a couple of which I’d never heard of before. So what was his top 2010-2019 pick? “The underrated Person of Interest” (2011-2016).

• Have you seen these Bonnie and Clyde photos?

• Almost a year ago, I mentioned on this page that the 1978 CBS-TV pilot for an unsold series titled The Jordan Chance, starring Raymond Burr, had been posted on YouTube, but that a previous Burr pilot, 1976’s Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence, remained unavailable. Suddenly, though, that latter movie has popped up on the video sales site Modcinema. Here’s its plot synopsis: “Raymond Burr stars again as a lawyer, this time named Arthur Mallory. No Perry Mason here, Mallory has been on the outs since being falsely accused of encouraging a witness to lie on the stand. Eventually cleared, Mallory lives hand to mouth as a public defender, with a heightened sense of fair play when it comes to the downtrodden. In this pilot film for the never-sold TV series Mallory, the attorney defends a jailed car thief (Mark Hamill) who has been framed for the killing of another prisoner.” You can buy the video here.

• It’s hard to believe that California-born actress Karen Valentine will turn 73 years old this coming May. As an early birthday present (to the rest of us), Comfort TV blogger David Hofstede has compiled briefs on some of her most prominent small-screen roles, including in Room 222, her short-lived eponymous TV series from 1975, and an ABC Movie of the Week titled The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped (1974)—that last being a flick I recall liking, but hadn’t thought about in years. Here’s Hofstede’s description of the story: “A magazine publisher (Richard Long) receives a bikini-clad girl (Karen Valentine) as a birthday present. Sounds like a set-up for a skit on Love, American Style. But there’s a lot more going on in this surprisingly touching (and funny) TV movie with a wonderful cast—Farrah Fawcett, Tom Bosley, Dave Madden, and Reta Shaw. This may be the best remembered of Valentine’s TV movies—and that’s not a bad choice if it is.” Sadly, you can’t watch The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped online; but I see that Modcinema (again, a site after my own heart) has copies for sale here.

• Incidentally, I glanced through Karen Valentine’s IMDb page and discovered that she was cast not only in comedies, but also in a number of crime, mystery, and legal dramas as well—everything from Eischied and The New Mike Hammer to Murder, She Wrote and Family Law. The site says her last TV performance was in the 2004 teleflick Wedding Daze, in which she co-starred with John Larroquette.

• Before we venture too deep into 2020, let’s look back for a moment at 2019’s “best” book covers, as judged by the sites Literary Hub, Spine, and The Casual Optimist. What do you think?

• Hah! Just as we thought all along: “Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images.”

• “Craig Stevens discusses his life and career, including his classic role on Peter Gunn, as well as his long marriage to Alexis Smith, in this 1993 interview with cable TV host Skip E Lowe.”

• If you missed Killer Cover’s end-of-the-year tribute to Anglo-Scots painter and book-cover artist Tom Adams—who created iconic fronts for novels by Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, among others—you can catch up with that whole series here.

• David Zucchino recalls the notorious, long-ago white-supremacist takeover of Wilmington, North Carolina. He writes:

Throughout that summer and autumn, white men had been buying shotguns, six-shot pistols, and repeating rifles at hardware stores in Wilmington ..., a port city set in the low Cape Fear country along the state’s jagged coast. It was 1898, a tumultuous mid-term election year. The city’s white leadership had vowed to remove the city’s multi-racial government by the ballot or the bullet, or both. Few white
men in Wilmington intended to back their candidates that November without a firearm within easy reach. There was concern among whites in Wilmington, where they were outnumbered by blacks, that stores would run dry on guns, and that suppliers in the rest of the state and in South Carolina would be unable to meet demand.

• Chicago-born author Mike Resnick died this last Thursday of lymphoma at age 77. Although he’s most often thought of as a prolific and multiple award-winning producer of science-fiction stories, The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura observes that Resnick also penned “several mystery novels and fantasy novels with mystery elements. John Justice Mallory is a hard-boiled private detective in a fantastical New York, where humans co-habit with vampires and fairy tale beasts such as dragons. Mallory was introduced in Stalking the Unicorn (Tor, 1987) and featured in two more novels and a collection of short stories, Stalking the Zombie (American Fantasy, 2012). The Eli Paxton series features a Cincinnati private eye who appeared in Dog in the Manger (Alexander, 1995) and two more novels.”

• And while I had my attention turned elsewhere, The Rap Sheet somehow registered its 7,600th post.

Bullet Points Mini-Edition

• Former Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany has joined the cast of HBO-TV’s forthcoming Perry Mason mini-series, which I understand will be set in 1930s Los Angeles and star Matthew Rhys (The Americans). Deadline says Maslany will play the Aimee Semple McPherson-like Sister Alice, “the leader of the Radiant Assembly of God, preaching three sermons a day (21 a week!) to a hungry congregation and a radio audience that spans the country. Entertainer, politician, God’s conduit to the City of Angels, Sister Alice wields great power when she speaks, and plans to use it in ways only she can know.”

• In other television news, two popular crime novels—Will Dean’s Dark Pines and Liv Constantine’s The Last Mrs. Parrish—are both headed toward small-screen development.

• The Gumshoe Site brings news that New York author-playwright Warren Adler passed away on April 15 at age 91. Cause of death is given as “complications from liver cancer.” Jiro Kimura writes:

The former owner of [an] advertising and public-relations agency wrote his first novel, Options (Whitmore Publishing, 1974; later reprinted as Undertow; Stonehouse Press, 2001), a thriller, and kept writing novels—mostly crime novels—quite prolifically till his death. He may be most famous as the author of The War of the Roses (Grand Central, 1981) and Random Hearts (Scribner, 1984). The former was adapted into the 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, while the latter [was made] into the 1999 film starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas. He created the series character Fiona Fitzgerald, a homicide detective in Washington, D.C., who was introduced in American Quartet (Arbor House, 1982), and featured in eight other novels. The last one was Red Herring (Rosetta Books), and the 2002 TV movie, “Fiona,” was broadcast with Kellie Martin as Fiona Fitzgerald. His last novel was probably Last Call (CreateSpace, 2018).

The New York Times and Variety have further details.

• Back in February, AARP: The Magazine carried a quite moving essay by Adler, which is worth revisiting now. In it, he relates the difficulty of caring for his wife of 67 years, Sonia, who has long suffered from dementia. “I do not believe she suffers emotional distress, but I do,” Adler wrote. “Witnessing her decline is debilitating. I kept her at home with round-the-clock care until two years ago, when it became unsafe for her to stay there because she had become aggressive and would wander. Now I live alone in the home we shared, and I am trying to cope with the bruising experience of loneliness.”

• CrimeReads has posted a variety of interesting pieces lately, including Dwyer Murphy’s look at “20 Crime Novels that Probably, in Retrospect, Overestimated the Dangers of Marijuana”; Nathan Ward’s tribute to the fictional Crimeways magazine; Paul French’s survey of crime fiction set in Kingston, Jamaica (which should also have mentioned David Goodis’ The Wounded and the Slain); and Paul Abbott’s spoiler-filled encomium to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series.

• By the way, that McBain piece led me to a Web resource with which I was not previously acquainted: Hark! The 87th Precinct Podcast, dedicated to McBain’s “ground-breaking police procedural series,” and hosted by the aforementioned Paul Abbott. Hard to believe I’d never heard of this before, as it debuted in November 2016.

• Television Obscurities offers up “an unusual 60-second promotional spot” for NBC-TV’s fall 1974 prime-time lineup. It features neither the names of new and returning shows, nor any footage from those programs. Instead, it showcases still photos of its series stars—familiar ones, such as Rock Hudson and Susan St. James (McMillan & Wife), Raymond Burr (Ironside), and Martin Milner (Adam-12); and that season’s newcomers, among them James Garner (The Rockford Files), Jessica Walter (Amy Prentiss), and Barry Newman (Petrocelli). In those days, NBC was the place to find interesting crime dramas.

• Wow! Here’s a CBS-TV pilot I thought I would never see again: The Jordan Chance, starring Raymond Burr, whose third small-screen series—the short-lived Kingston: Confidential—had gone off the air more than a year before this two-hour flick first aired, on December 12, 1978. As Lee Goldberg observes in Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, The Jordan Chance (produced by Roy Huggins and written by Stephen J. Cannell) starred Burr as Frank Jordan, “an attorney who was once wrongly imprisoned and is now dedicated to helping others who are unjustly accused or punished for crimes they did not commit.” In addition to Burr, the film’s cast includes Ted Shackelford, Jeannie Fitzsimmons, James Canning, and Stella Stevens. At least for the nonce, that full movie is available on YouTube.

• Incidentally, don’t confuse The Jordan Chance with an earlier but equally unsuccessful pilot, 1976’s Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence. Goldberg recalls in his book that it featured a curiously curly haired Burr as Arthur Mallory, “a once-famous lawyer whose career floundered after [he was] unjustly accused of coercing a client to commit perjury. Though cleared by the Bar, his reputation is still tarnished.” Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate that particular telefilm (which also starred Robert Loggia and a pre-Star Wars Mark Hamill) anywhere online, but a clip from the picture was shown as part of this 1976 Tonight Show interview with Burr.

• The Web site Crime Fiction Lover proposes “12 South African Crime Writers to Add to Your Reading List,” among them Ekow Duker. Lauren Beukes. Imraan Coovadia, and Margie Orford. Sadly, I have not yet read works by any of those four.

• Talk about monetary inflation! The latest of B.V. Lawson’s “Media Murder for Monday” posts says that “Bumblebee director Travis Knight is set to tackle the Mark Wahlberg-starring Six Billion Dollar Man (after helmer and co-writer, Damian Szifron, stepped down in 2017). The long-awaited project stars Wahlberg as Col. Steve Austin, a downed pilot who is saved by an operation that makes him part machine. The project is a big-screen adaptation of the classic 1970s TV show that starred Lee Majors.” Remember, that earlier science-fiction program was titled The Six Million Dollar Man.

• With this being Earth Day, Janet Rudolph has updated her quite lengthy list of “Environmental/Ecological Mysteries.”

• Let’s welcome back Unlawful Acts. David Nemeth’s blog went ominously dark in mid-February, leading to speculation that he had given up the venture. However, he’s been back on the job as of last week, posting daily links to stories about crime and mystery fiction, and less frequent lists of upcoming small-press releases.

• Although it provides no real insight into Hulu-TV’s eight-episode revival of Veronica Mars—due to launch in late July—this short teaser suggests the series hasn’t lost its sassy, sarcastic edge.

• And B.D. McClay of The Hedgehog Review supplies a fine defense of thesauruses as valuable reference works for writers. “To be clear: I am not somebody who is particularly patient about English errors,” McClay explains. “I still insist that ‘begs the question’ should not ever be used in place of ‘raising the question.’ I have very little time for ill-conceived metaphors. But I don’t blame the thesaurus. I blame not thinking about what you’re saying, which you can’t reasonably expect any reference guide to prevent. At least somebody who looks up a word in a thesaurus is putting a little work in.”

Burr’s Dramatic Century

As Robert Lopresti’s Today in Mystery History blog reminds us, actor Raymond Burr—who shifted from villainous movie roles in the 1940s and ’50s to star in the TV series Perry Mason, Ironside, and Kingston: Confidential—was born 100 years ago today in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada. In his post, Lopresti recalls the familiar story about how, “in 1956 … Burr applied for the part of prosecutor Hamilton Burger in the TV version of Perry Mason. Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of the character, supposedly took one look at Burr and shouted ‘That’s Perry Mason!’ The show ran until 1966.”

It seems the town of New Westminster, just southeast of Vancouver, B.C., still trades on its association with Burr, though the actor only lived there for a few years before moving with his family to California. According to the Vancouver Sun, the local Raymond Burr Performing Arts Society, along with the Douglas College Foundation and something called the Burr 100 committee “have established a legacy endowment to provide funding to theatre arts students at [New Westminster’s] Douglas College for generations to come honouring the talent and inspiration of the past with our own local celebrity, Raymond Burr.”

Raymond Burr died from cancer in the fall of 1993 during an extensive NBC-TV movie revival of Perry Mason.

LISTEN UP: “Episode 224—Burr in the Saddle: Pat Novak, Johnny Dollar, and Fort Laramie (Down These Mean Streets).

Bullet Points: World Cup Final Edition

• As the blog Down These Mean Streets explains, “On July 12, 1946, Sam Spade opened his radio office for business. Dashiell Hammett’s famous private detective was a household name from The Maltese Falcon, and he came to radio in the person of Howard Duff in a series produced and directed by William Spier. The Adventures of Sam Spade became one of radio’s most popular mystery programs, thanks in no small part to Duff’s sardonic tough guy delivery as Spade.” To celebrate this 68th anniversary, for the last several days Down These Mean Streets has been posting a succession of photographs and sound clips from the show. You can check them all out here. And listen to more Adventures of Sam Spade episodes here.

• A couple of months ago we brought you the nominees for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards, honoring “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” Megan Abbott, Joyce Carol Oates, Marisha Pessl, and Michael Marshall Smith all featured on that list. Today, Tor.com brings us the winners.

• National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday looks back at how ideas about crime--especially of the violent variety--have changed over the centuries, through an analysis of records kept at London’s Old Bailey criminal court. Listen to that segment here.

• Today marks the 150th anniversary of the New York Draft Riots, three days of violent disturbances in the wake of new laws drafting men to fight in the American Civil War. “The riots remain the largest civil insurrection in American history, aside from the Civil War itself,” explains Wikipedia. Cracked History has more about this confrontation--which resulted in thousands of casualties--here.

• Will Irish actor Colin Farrell become the next star of HBO-TV’s True Detective? According to Entertainment Weekly, he is “is definitely in the mix and considered the most likely lead name to join the acclaimed drama,” though “there is no deal at this time.”

• Happy fifth anniversary to Rob Kitchin’s View from the Blue House. Congratulations, too, to the blog Battered, Tattered, Yellowed & Creased, which celebrated its third birthday this month.

• Fans of James Garner and The Rockford Files will likely be interested in this forthcoming book about the actor’s association with cars and championship automobile racing.

• In Criminal Element, Jake Hinkson pays tribute to actor Raymond Burr, writing: “Burr might be famous today for playing Perry Mason on television, but I have a feeling that as time goes on, his noir work will catch up and exceed his television fame. I don’t know how many new converts the Perry Mason series will find in the future, but I know that for as long as people watch noir, they’ll be struck by Burr’s cold stare and understated delivery.”

• On the subject of Perry Mason, I just came across part of a video interview with American composer Fred Steiner, in which he talks about his work on the theme music for that 1957-1966 CBS-TV drama. I’m embedding it below. Hear more from Steiner here.



• I’m pleased to see that talented writer Leslie Gilbert Elman, who recapped last year’s opening-season episodes of the Masterpiece Mystery! series Endeavour for Criminal Element, is back on the beat, now critiquing the current, second season as well. Her thoughts on last Sunday’s installment, “Nocturne,” can be found here, while links to her previous write-ups are available here.

• The opening from Cribb, the 1979-1981 Granada Television series starring Alan Dobie as Peter Lovesey’s Victorian police detective, Sergeant Cribb, is among the latest new offerings on The Rap Sheet’s fast-growing YouTube channel.

• Uh-oh, there are problems with AMC-TV’s Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s prequel to Breaking Bad.

• Back in 2009, Hard Case Crime launched a series of high-adventure thrillers built around the swashbuckling character Gabriel Hunt, beginning with Hunt at the Well of Eternity, by James Reasoner. Only half a dozen entries in that line had come off the presses, however, before publisher Dorchester Publishing ended its association with Hard Case, sending HCC to make a distribution deal instead with UK-based Titan Publishing. Only now, says its editor, Charles Ardai, is HCC “bringing the Gabriel Hunt adventure novels back--including the never-available-in-stores final volume, which will receive its first proper publication ever this August. (The first four Hunt titles are back in stores now, having been reissued one per month starting in April, and the very rare fifth volume hits stores on July 29.)” The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt Web site has also been revived.

• R.I.P., Lou Allin. The Canadian mystery writer (Twilight Is Not Good for Maidens) died last week at age 69, following a lengthy bout with pancreatic cancer. More on her life and career here.

• “Mark your calendars!” instructs Omnimystery News. “Agatha Christie’s Poirot comes to an end this summer, with the final five episodes starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot airing on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery! (two episodes) and Acorn TV (all five episodes).” The British TV drama began its long run in 1989!

• The Classic Film and TV Café offers “Seven Things to Know About Raymond Chandler (in His Own Words).” My favorite is No. 3:

On his Philip Marlowe novel The Lady in the Lake and the 1947 film adaptation: “This is the only published fiction of mine which I have tried to adapt for films. And it would take a lot of money to make me try again, and I don’t think this kind of money would be paid me now from Hollywood. When a man has written a book and rewritten it and rewritten it, he has had enough of it.”

• Don’t count me as a fan of DC Comics’ younger, hipper reinvention of Batgirl, aka Barbara Gordon. Co-writer Brenden Fletcher says, “Our take on Batgirl mixes the best elements of Veronica Mars and Girls, with a dash of Sherlock thrown in for good measure.” I prefer a slightly more mature, more womanly Batgirl.

• Lovers of the 1944 film Laura should note that Los Angeles historian Larry Harnisch is in the midst of writing an extended series of posts about that film classic. The installments so far can be found here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X. If you missed reading Jim Napier’s tribute to Vera Caspary’s novel, Laura, from which the film was adapted, read it here. Another, more recent review of the book can be enjoyed here.

• And Screen Rant has posted a trailer for the coming release Before I Go to Sleep, a motion-picture based on S.J. Watson’s 2011 novel of the same name. As SR explains, “[Nicole] Kidman plays Christina Lucas, a woman suffering from anterograde amnesia after being brutally attacked and receiving several blows to the head. Her condition means that every time she goes to sleep she will wake up stripped of all her memories, and must reassemble her past every day. She is reliant upon the help of her husband Ben (Colin Firth) and a specialist called Dr. Nash (Mark Strong)--but as Christine tries to gather the facts, she begins to suspect that what she has been told is not necessarily the truth.”

Burr in the Saddle

Ivan G. Shreve Jr. has posted a nice remembrance, in the blog Radio Spirits, of Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr--the star of Perry Mason and Ironside--who would have celebrated his 96th birthday today. Unfortunately, Burr died in 1993 at age 76.

Interrogating the Man Who Was Mason

I have recently been doing some research into the life and literary career of lawyer-turned-novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, and especially the work he did on his most famous creation, investigating attorney Perry Mason. So I was delighted to find this two-part interview with actor Raymond Burr today on YouTube. It was conducted in 1963 by Scottish-born Canadian journalist Jack Webster on the set of CBS-TV’s Perry Mason, during a break in that series’ filming.

In the course of their almost 20-minute conversation, they talked about Burr’s experiences on Perry Mason (which was then in its seventh production year; it would stay on the air until 1966), his acting background and previous tendency to play “heavies” in the movies, his childhood in the British Columbia, Canada, town of New Westminster, his interest in the Canadian film industry, and the public outcry over Mason actually “losing” a case on television.

Bullet Points: Cinco de Mayo Edition

• It was 50 years ago tomorrow, May 6, that Raymond Burr won the first of two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, given to him for his role in CBS-TV’s Perry Mason.

• I’m a bit late in mentioning this, but the latest short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp is Jay Stringer’s “The Hard Sell.”

• A couple of months back I noticed that publisher Crippen & Landru had added to its roster of coming attractions The Columbo Stories, a collection by William Link, who with Richard Levinson created the NBC Mystery Movie’s most popular series, Columbo. Checking this week, I find that the C&L Web site says Link’s book is “now being typeset.” As a longtime Columbo fan, I’m hoping to have a copy in my hands ASAP.

• Patti Abbott has mounted a new flash-fiction contest, this one built around the concept of “a wedding cake in the middle of the road.” Go here for details. Contest results to be posted on June 4.

• Barry Eisler is guest-blogging today at Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, talking about his new high-tech thriller, Fault Line. You will find his contribution here.

• The perpetually elusive “James Church” (the pseudonym of a 60-something intelligence agent turned author) talks with the Los Angeles Times about how he started writing contemporary mystery novels set in North Korea.

• In the Busted Flush Press blog, Reed Farrel Coleman recalls how he came to collaborate with Ken Bruen on the forthcoming (in September) novel Tower. Read all about it here.

• Spinetingler Magazine launches a tie-in blog, but there’s still no word on the winners of this year’s Spinetingler Awards.

• Here’s a book jacket I wish I’d discovered first for Killer Covers.

• Is Ruth Rendell really done with Inspector Wexford, the protagonist about whom she’s written 22 books, the newest being October’s The Monster in the Box, which recounts Reginald Wexford’s roots as an investigator?

• Mark Coggins points me to a quite thorough profile of author Joe Gores (Spade & Archer), which appears in the current issue of Stanford Magazine. Click here to read the whole article.

• Dick Adler endorses Brian D’Amato’s “amazing new thriller about the end of the world,” In the Courts of the Sun.

• I should learn never to become too fond of network TV shows. Every time I do, it seems, those shows are canceled (e.g., Life on Mars, Crossing Jordan, Raines, etc.). The latest casualty is NBC’s satisfyingly quirky Life, which isn’t going to be renewed for a third season. There will come a time, I suspect, when the U.S. networks no longer have anything I consider worth tuning in to every week. Already, more than half of the decreasing time I spend in front of the boob tube is devoted to watching either DVDs or cable series such as Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Burn Notice, and In Plain Sight. All that’s left on the nets, it seems, are insipid game shows and tedious “reality” programs. Too bad ...

• Disgraced former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has now gone searching through spy novels for ways to scare the American public. Is this part of the Republican’t’s nascent bid for a presidential nomination in 2010, or just another example of how Gingrich and his shrinking party live in an alternative reality?

• Anyone for the “new traditionalist” crime fiction?

• Mike Ripley’s May “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots focuses on new fiction from Lee Child and Deryn Lake, the reissuing of old works by Antony Trew, and an unusual Brittany mystery, Tom Macauley’s The Warning Bell. Oh, and check out that photograph of Dutch writer Saskia Noort. Whoa! Read the whole lot here.

• Bill Crider caught sight of this copycat cover.

• And of course, this being Cinco de Mayo, Janet Rudolph celebrates with a list of associated mystery tales.

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #9

Series Title: Perry Mason | Years: 1957-1966, CBS | Starring: Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper, William Talman, Ray Collins | Theme Music: Fred Steiner

I can already imagine the disappointed and disgusted e-mail notes I’ll receive after choosing this classic TV main title sequence as one of the best ever produced. Those communications are sure to be filled with adjectives synonymous with “boring” and sent by otherwise upstanding folk who prefer the more action-oriented introductions to, say, Magnum, P.I., The Equalizer, Simon & Simon, Starsky & Hutch, and Riptide. How could I choose the opening of Perry Mason, the writers will ask, from among so many other options?

Well, we’ve already written on this page about some of those other openers, and there are still eight more specimens to be analyzed. However, none of them rivals this black-and-white Perry Mason introduction when it comes to subtlety, clarity, and elegant simplicity. All you have here is lawyer Mason (played by Burr), seated at the defense counsel’s table in what’s supposed to be a Los Angeles courtroom (but is undoubtedly just a stage set), apparently going through a brief on his latest murder case. Suddenly, he stops reading and looks up as if considering whatever he’s just discovered, his eyes shifting back and forth as he ponders the implications. He doesn’t make a big deal of his find, but a knowing smile lifts his lips just a little bit. You can tell he’s realized something that no one else has--not his client, not the local constabulary, not his usual antagonist, District Attorney Hamilton Burger (Talman), and not even his essential sideman, hard-boiled yet boyish private eye Paul Drake (Hopper). Mason has unearthed the key to his client’s release. It’s why they pay him the big bucks.

Accompanying this restrained mini-drama is one of the most recognizable TV themes ever created. It actually has a name--“Park Avenue Beat”--and was the work of Fred Steiner, a New York-born composer and arranger, who, believe it or not, also created the theme for The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. (Steiner, who celebrated his 86th birthday last month, has contributed his talents as well to Hawaii Five-O, Star Trek, Lost in Space, Gunsmoke, Have Gun--Will Travel, and the Hec Ramsey pilot film.) Together, this opener’s music and message set the stage for what Richard Meyers, in TV Detectives (1981), called the “most influential, most entertaining, and most popular judicial series ever made, Perry Mason.”

As most everybody must know by now, Mason was the creation of Erle Stanley Gardner. Born in Massachusetts in 1889, at age 10 Gardner relocated with his family to California. He went on to leave college before graduating, and later apprenticed in a law firm in order to pass the California bar exam. He married in 1912, became a successful attorney in Ventura, California, but wasn’t satisfied, so he began writing short stories at night.

In The Perry Mason TV Show Book: The Complete Story of America’s Favorite Television Lawyer (1987)--available online--authors Brian Kelleher and Diana Merrill explained how Gardner broke into print:

The first worthwhile piece of fiction that Erle Stanley Gardner ever sold was published, indirectly, as a result of a cruel inside joke. It happened in 1923. Writing under the pen name Charles M. Green, the California-based lawyer-writer submitted a novelette titled “The Shrieking Skeleton” to a pulp magazine called Black Mask. The story was so bad the magazine’s staff sent it to their circulation director as a joke, pretending that the piece was going to be the lead featured in their next issue and asking him to work up some publicity ideas to promote it. The circulation director read the story and, thinking the editorial staff had taken leave of its collective senses, fired it back to them with comments such as “this plot has whiskers like Spanish moss,” and “the characters talk like dictionaries.”

With the gag played out, the staff returned the story to Gardner accompanied by the usual form-letter rejection slip. However, perhaps fatefully, the circulation director’s note blasting the story was mistakenly sent to Gardner as well. Gardner found the note and read the brutal, uncensored criticism. It may have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

Gardner took the story apart and, in three days, put it back together again. He worked so hard on it that his fingertips bled onto his typewriter keys. He resubmitted it to Black Mask with a letter explaining that he had seen the circulation director’s comments and had taken the criticism to heart. The magazine bought the revised version of “The Shrieking Skeleton” for $160.

After that, there seemed to be no stopping him. “In his first year of writing, he earned less than he made in a month as a lawyer,” fellow novelist Dorothy B. Hughes explained in her 1978 biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. “In his fifth year, his earnings had risen to $6,627. By the early thirties, his sales from writing had mounted to more than $20,000 yearly, a sizable income any day and particularly so in those depression times. At the pulp payment of a few cents a word, this meant a tremendous number of words pounded out on his typewriter night after night. He was prodigiously productive. The quota he set for himself was 1,200,000 words a year, or a 10,000-word novelette every three days, 365 days a year.”

Gardner developed “at least three dozen characters for the pulps,” according to The Thrilling Detective Web Site, among them con artist Ed Jenkins, gentleman thief Lester Leith, and his early model of a crusading attorney, Ken Corning. Perry Mason never made an entrance in the pulp magazines; his first outing was in the author’s debut novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), which Hughes said he “wrote” by dictation, just as he might have composed a letter or a legal brief. “It took three and a half days. He admitted freely and frequently that it would be more accurate to say four days, as he spent an initial half day ‘thinking up the plot.’”

Over the next 37 years, until his death on March 11, 1970, Gardner turned out 81 more full-length novels starring his rugged-jawed, gimlet-eyed, and seemingly infallible advocate--a character that Hughes said was based on the author himself, only “dramatized and glamorized a bit.” (That this wasn’t even Gardner’s total creative output; that he also wrote, or at least dictated, many other books--most notably his Bertha Cool and Donald Lam series--simply boggles the mind.) Sales of his work skyrocketed, no doubt goaded upward by Mason’s appearances in more than half a dozen motion pictures (beginning with 1934’s The Case of the Howling Dog) as well as the 12-year run of a Perry Mason radio series.

But it was Mason’s transference to television that sealed his fame for generations. As National Public Radio reporter Nina Totenberg recalled in a 2002 retrospective, Gardner was disappointed in his protagonist’s adventures in films and on the “wireless.” So, she explained, “when TV came calling, Gardner decided to form his own production company--almost unheard of at the time. He picked the cast, reviewed all the scripts, hired lawyers as writers, and split the profits with the [CBS] network.”

Perry Mason debuted on September 21, 1957, with British Columbia-born actor Raymond Burr leading the cast. “In retrospect,” critic Richard Meyers wrote, Burr “was the perfect choice [to portray Mason], but at the time the various network and studio executives must have been aghast that the Mason role was not to be played by a handsome leading man. In fact, in many of the films Burr appeared in before taking on Perry Mason, he embodied villains beautifully. ... His hulking form and prominent brow made him a fine bad guy, but his famous portrayal of reporter Steve Martin under trying circumstances (both on screen and behind the scenes) in Godzilla (1955) and his performance as [a] fiery district attorney in A Place in the Sun (1951) may have helped him win the Mason role.”

Of course, Burr wasn’t the only one who made Perry Mason a crowd-pleaser. The cast also included Barbara Hale as Della Street, the lawyer’s bright, trusty secretary and never-quite-realized love interest (a funny circumstance, when you consider that Gardner himself married his longtime secretary, Agnes Jean Bethell, after his estranged wife’s demise). William Hopper, the only son of notorious Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, played Mason’s thoroughly capable but drolly humorous private eye associate, Paul Drake, who had an office down the hall from his most frequent employer. William Talman, who’d played a ruthless killer in the noir film The Hitch-Hiker (1953) signed on to the thankless task of portraying D.A. Burger, destined to lose his cases to Mason on every Saturday night’s broadcast, while radio and stage actor Ray Collins took the role of dogged police lieutenant and Burger ally Arthur Tragg.

When I was a boy, watching Perry Mason with my beloved grandfather--a loyal fan of the show--I didn’t recognize how formulaic its episodes were. But the Museum of Broadcast Communications’ Web site spells things out succinctly:

Most episodes follow this simple formula: the guest characters are introduced and their situation shows that at least one of them is capable of murder. When the murder happens, an innocent person (most often a woman) is accused, and Mason takes the case. As evidence mounts against his client, Mason pulls out a legal maneuver involving some courtroom “pyrotechnics.” This not only proves his client innocent, but identifies the real culprit. These scenes are easily the best and most memorable. It is not because they are realistic. On the contrary, they are hardly that. What is so engaging about them is the combination of Mason’s efforts to free his client, perhaps a surprise witness brought in by Drake in the closing courtroom scene, and a dramatic courtroom confession. The murderer being in the courtroom during the trial and not hiding out in the Bahamas provides the single most important image of each episode. The murderer forgoes the Fifth Amendment and admits his/her guilt in an often tearful outburst of “I did it! And I’m glad I did!” This happens under the shocked, amazed eyes of district attorney Burger and the stoic, sure face of defense attorney Mason.

“It made no difference if the solution did not make sense or was impossible to follow,” remarked Meyers. “As long as Mason sounded convincing and the perpetrator admitted his or her culpability, the viewers swallowed anything. As a change of pace, Perry actually lost a case during the 1963 season [‘The Case of the Deadly Verdict’], but it was because the client was covering for someone else and allowed herself to be found guilty. Perry discovered the true villain anyway and got the stubborn victim out of jail.”

Raymond Burr won two Best Actor Emmy Awards for his work on Perry Mason, while Barbara Hale picked up her own Emmy for Best Supporting Actress. Over the course of this series’ nine seasons and amazing 271 episodes, it hosted an abundance of screen legends (Bette Davis and Walter Pidgeon among them), in addition to numerous rising talents (Burt Reynolds, Barbara Eden, Dick Clark, Robert Redford, Adam West, Angie Dickinson, Daniel Travanti, and others). What’s more, Perry Mason provided work for such recognizable writers as Jonathan Latimer (Solomon’s Vineyard) and Stirling Silliphant (who later created the James Franciscus private detective series Longstreet and put together the screenplay for In the Heat of the Night).

Although fans like my grandfather never tired of seeing Perry Mason wipe the courtroom floor with Hamilton Burger, CBS’s decision to move this show around on its prime-time schedule undermined its popularity. With Burr growing tired of the program’s pace, and with its ratings finally declining, the network announced that it would drop Perry Mason after the 1965-66 season. Meyers notes that the final episode, shown on May 22, 1966, “was a family affair in that the line producer had a bit part, the stage hands made up a crowd scene, and the presiding judge of the last courtroom battle was played by none other than Erle Stanley Gardner himself.”

However, Los Angeles’ best-recognized attorney would not go quietly into the night. In the fall of 1973, CBS sought to reawaken the magic with a show called The New Perry Mason. The cast was led by Monte Markham, whose face was familiar from many guest-starring roles, with the blond Sharon Acker appearing as Della Street and the much-better-than-serviceable Harry Guardino stepping into Burger’s shoes. The Museum of Broadcast Communications contends that “Markham’s Mason was closer to the one featured in the original novels. Both were brash, elegant and coolly businesslike in their dealings with clients, something Burr never was.” Yet this new TV version ran just 15 episodes before being yanked off the air, never to be seen again, I fear. (It would be awfully nice if Paramount Home Video, which is in the midst of issuing DVD compilations of the original Perry Mason series, would include those “lost” Markham Masons as extras in one of its sets; however, I won’t hold my breath in anticipation of such a thing happening.)

Not until TV producer Dean Hargrove took on the task was Perry Mason successfully resurrected. By that time, Collins had died of emphysema, William Talman had succumbed to lung cancer (after filming landmark anti-smoking commercials), and William Hopper had perished of pneumonia at age 55. However, Burr (who’d gone on to star in the also-memorable Ironside) was still around, and so was Barbara Hale. After dusting off Fred Steiner’s iconic “Park Avenue Beat” theme (which had been replaced with a much less distinctive tune on The New Perry Mason) and giving it a slightly bouncier beat, the two-hour made-for-TV movie Perry Mason Returns was broadcast on NBC in December 1985. It was the first of 26 Mason teleflicks shown over the next eight years, all with Burr and Hale. After Burr died in 1993, four more “Perry Mason Mysteries” were made, most of them featuring Hal Holbrook as a cunning country lawyer. But without Burr’s presence, those films seemed flaccid.

Fortunately, the original black-and-white Perry Mason episodes continue to be shown many places in reruns. If you can’t catch them that way, a number are available via Uncle Earl’s Classic TV Channel--complete, of course, with one of the best main title sequences ever.

If I do say so myself.

READ MORE: “Perry Mason: The Case of the Tried and True Formula,” by Dixon Hayes (TV When I Was Born); “Noir’s Goon Squad: Raymond Burr” and “Noir’s Goon Squad: William Tallman,” by Jake Hinkson (Criminal Element).

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #17

Series Title: Ironside | Years: 1967-1975, NBC | Starring: Raymond Burr, Don Galloway, Don Mitchell, Barbara Anderson, Elizabeth Baur | Theme Music: Quincy Jones

You might not remember this, but there was a time in the late 1960s and ’70s when so many detectives (police and private) jockeyed for space on the American TV schedule, that they were distinguished to a great degree by their quirks. Lieutenant Columbo had his rumpled coat, his cigars, and his annoying habit of always asking “just one more question.” Lieutenant Kojak was bald and sucked on lollypops. Marshal Sam McCloud had his cowboy chapeaux, well-chewed toothpicks, and folksy drawl. Insurance investigator Thomas Banacek had his expensive cars and “old polish proverbs.” Harry Orwell had a bullet in his spine and a bad temper. Jim Rockford had his con games and allergy to guns. John Shaft was black. Joe Mannix was Greek American. Frank Cannon was fat. Barnaby Jones was old. Remington Steele was ... well, someone else entirely.

And Chief Robert T. Ironside? He was a self-described “cripple.” Not very PC, but there you have it. This was the era of Richard M. Nixon’s “expletives deleted,” after all.

After starring for nine years in the highly rated CBS-TV series Perry Mason (1957-1966), playing author Erle Stanley Gardner’s rabbit-out-of-a-hat-pulling criminal defense attorney, Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr took only a year and a half off before returning to the small screen as an irritable but brilliant cop in Ironside. The show was based on a story by Collier Young, who’d worked on General Electric Theater and The Wild Wild West before cooking up the character of Ironside. And what a character he was--ideal for Raymond Burr, a fine contrast with the more self-contained Mason.

When we met him in the March 1967 pilot film, Robert T. Ironside was a former navy commander and widower with 25 years experience in the San Francisco Police Department. His latest posting was as the SFPD’s chief of detectives--at 46 years old, the youngest person to ever hold that position. But Ironside lived up to his moniker, having a tendency to overwork and drive himself to exhaustion. So his superior, Police Commissioner Dennis Randall (Gene Lyons), finally convinced him to take some time off and visit his chicken farm up in Sonoma County, California--the first vacation Ironside had taken in a quarter-century. And, as it turned out, the most deadly.

The Internet Movie Database provides the film--and subsequent series--synopsis from there:

Citizens of San Francisco are stunned by the news that Robert Ironside, the city’s hard-nosed, tough-talking chief of detectives, has been shot and left for dead while vacationing at his friend the Police Commissioner’s rural retreat. Ironside survives the murder attempt, but the bullet has damaged nerves in his spine, leaving him a paraplegic. Unable to gain reinstatement as chief of detectives, Ironside gets permission to continue investigating criminal cases as a citizen volunteer. With the assistance of two former protégées, Det. Sgt. Ed Brown and Officer Eve Whitfield, and a newly-hired aide/driver, Mark Sanger, Ironside sets out to solve his first case as a civilian by finding the people responsible for the attempt on his life.

Naturally, he succeeded--and then proceeded to bring down other criminals and keep the streets of San Francisco relatively safe for another eight years. You might call Robert T. Ironside one tough mother. A critic with Amazon.com calls him “one of the more distinctive characters on the cop show landscape. Gruff, stubborn, impatient, and utterly unwilling to suffer fools, he commands respect with a combination of tough love and unwavering fairness. There’s nothing touchy-feely about this guy.”

Ironside and Co. had their headquarters on a capacious attic floor of the old Hall of Justice beside Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square, which is also where “The Chief” lived. They powered around town in an antique armored police truck (later exchanged for a specially equipped van). And they solved crimes through means of reasoning and solid investigative efforts, rather than confrontations. Confined as he was to a leopard-print wheelchair (sometimes motorized, sometimes not), Ironside wasn’t an action hero; he depended on his brains and knowledge of criminal behavior to get things done. But as Richard Meyers pointed out in his 1981 book TV Detectives,

[T]he wheelchair made Burr’s action scenes all the more suspenseful. Here was a man who was supposedly helpless, but time after time he proved himself to be as physical as necessary. Over the years, Ironside avoided being thrown down an elevator shaft by grabbing the hanging wires, karate-chopped a few villains, and kept from falling off a wooden raft when stuck out in the bay. None of this stuff seemed unbelievable because Burr made the character seem completely capable. And this made his rare moments of doubt and vulnerability all the more effective.

Loyal, by-the-book Ed Brown (Galloway) and Eve Whitfield (Anderson)--younger, warmer hearted, clothes conscious, and reared amidst wealth--took up joint responsibilities as Archie Goodwin to Bob Ironside’s Nero Wolfe. After the fourth season, former Tennessee beauty queen Anderson left the series, upset that producers weren’t giving her more to do. (She later appeared in Mission: Impossible, Harry O, Switch, and Simon & Simon). Her replacement was brunette Elizabeth Baur, a cousin of Sharon Gless of Cagney & Lacey fame, who came on board as policewoman Fran Belding, the daughter of a cop and slightly more outspoken than Whitfield had been.

Then there was Mark Sanger, probably the most interesting character on this show, outside of Ironside himself. A boxer and ex-juvenile delinquent, Sanger started out with a gargantuan chip on his shoulder, angry at the world for treating him like a second-class citizen, just because he was black. But as the series went on, you could see Sanger softening, learning from The Chief, becoming somebody better than even he himself had imagined. He eventually went to law school and earned his degree, then got married. None of this program’s other characters accomplished such change over the course of the series. Sanger evolved to such a degree, that people thought he was being groomed to star in his own spin-off series, but no such show ever appeared. However, Ironside did generate another, extremely short-lived spin-off called Amy Prentiss (part of the NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series” from 1974 to 1975), which starred Jessica Walter as San Francisco’s new chief of detectives, a promotion that earned her scant applause among the SFPD’s old-boy network. And ex-Mr. Lucille Ball, 67-year-old actor Desi Arnaz, starred as a very quirky but competent doctor-investigator, Juan Domingo, in a March 1974 Ironside episode titled “Riddle at 24,000,” which had been conceived as the pilot for a fall 1975 series, but ultimately failed to make the cut.

Ironside featured a wide variety of other noteworthy guest stars during its run, including Susan Saint James, Harrison Ford, William Shatner, Bill Bixby, Jack Lord, sort-of-musician Tiny Tim, and football star Roman Gabriel. Even musician Quincy Jones made a brief appearance on the show, though he is better remembered for having composed Ironside’s trumpets-dominant, tension-producing theme music.

That theme was used to maximum effect in the series’ main title sequence, which I have embedded at the top of this post. It’s a modification of what novelist-screenwriter Lee Goldberg might call a “format sequence,” laying out (through brief storytelling action in this case, rather than narration) what the program is all about. After establishing, through a succession of high-contrast still shots, that the series takes place in San Francisco, we’re offered images of Chief Ironside strolling without warning into a bright red sniper’s bulls-eye, lighting a cigarette (something he didn’t in fact do before being shot in the pilot film), and then being felled by a bullet. Suddenly, what was black and white in this opening becomes a glaring red and black, signaling that everything has changed--as indeed it has for the show’s protagonist. The opener then proceeds with more high-contrast imagery meant to convey that Ironside has been restricted to a wheelchair, yet continues to operate under the SFPD auspices, and remains capable of getting around dexterously and using a gun, when necessary.

There are no fancy features to this main title sequence. No whiz-bang special effects or combinations of film and illustration. No clips from episodes to show The Chief and his assistants bringing down bad guys or displaying camaraderie. All we get is dramatic build-up, a decidedly dark mood, and rapid-fire photos to establish the series’ back-story. It is simplicity itself, made especially powerful by the overlaying of Jones’ theme music. In the early years, co-stars Galloway, Mitchell, and Anderson weren’t even credited up front; their names appeared at the end of each Ironside episode, along with those of guest performers, producers, and lighting technicians, and only Burr got top billing.

Over the last few months, I’ve been screening the first and second seasons of Ironside, both of which are available in DVD sets. I am surprised at how well they hold up 30 years later. Other than some story lines involving drugs, rock music, and abortion (which was still unsanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court when Ironside debuted), there aren’t any aspects of the series that make it seem particularly old-fashioned. You can’t say the same thing many other shows that broadcast concurrently with Ironside. I’m looking forward to seeing the remaining seasons of this show released on DVDs.

By the end of its eighth season, Ironside was sadly no longer the ratings powerhouse it had been, back when author Jim Thompson--yes, that Jim Thompson--could be persuaded to write a paperback novelization of the series for a hungry market. In the fall of 1975, its coveted Thursday night at 9 p.m. spot went to the William Link/Richard Levinson-created series Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton and David Wayne--a show that lasted only 22 episodes.

But following the resurrection of Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason in a succession of teleflicks, beginning in 1985, Burr and the gang decided to try their hands at a reunion movie. The Return of Ironside (1993) moved the action to Denver, Colorado, to which former Bay Area detective Ed Brown had transferred. Following the “untimely death” of Denver’s chief of police, Brown persuaded Ironside (recently retired, remarried, and sporting a goatee) to take on the job--if only on a temporary basis. When, shortly thereafter, a murder is committed and the prime suspect turns out to be Eve Whitfield’s daughter, Ironside calls on all of his former colleagues to help him solve the case. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications Web site, that film was supposed to be the first in “a new series of Made-for-Television Movies, but only the first movie was completed.” Burr succumbed to cancer just five months after The Return of Ironside was broadcast.

As Ironside himself might have phrased it, “What a flamin’ shame.”

READ MORE: “Bullet Points: ‘Come Monday’ Edition,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet); “Ironside: A Cop and His Chair,” by Kathryn Ware (The Beachwood Reporter).