Bullet Points: Wonders Never Cease Edition

• This coming Monday, March 1, will bring—from The Bagley Brief Web site—the release of Writer: An Enquiry into a Novelist, Philip Eastwood’s “painstaking reconstruction” of a previously unpublished memoir by English adventure-thriller writer Desmond Bagley (1923-1983). In advance of that, Shotsmag Confidential has posted the foreword to Eastwood’s work, written by Mike Ripley (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and establishing Bagley’s stature as one of the Big Three among contributors to the”Golden Age of the British thriller,” the other two being Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean.

• Can it really be true, at last? According to Deadline,

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a character created by author Walter Mosley, is getting another shot on television after Amblin Television signed up to develop a series.

The production company has closed a deal to adapt Mosley’s stories—Rawlins has appeared in 15 novels and short stories—with The Americans and Amazing Stories director Sylvain White on board to direct the pilot episode and exec produce.

The series, based on the gritty detective novels, will center around Easy, a Black WWII Army veteran turned hard-boiled private eye. The show will be set in 1950’s Los Angeles and will honor the great traditions of storytelling in the detective genre, while also exploring the racial inequalities and social injustice experienced by Black people and other people of color.

Deadline observes that this “is the latest attempt to get Rawlins on to the small screen—[screenwriter-producer] John Wells attempted an Easy Rawlins series at NBC back in 2011 and USA Network also attempted a version seven years before that. The character of Easy Rawlins also previously appeared on screen in the 1995 film Devil in a Blue Dress, which starred Denzel Washington.”

• Back in December I mentioned that the often humorous British crime drama McDonald & Dodds, featuring Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins as mismatched cops in modern-day Bath, England, would soon return with a second season. Radio Times now brings word that the first of three new two-hour-long McDonald & Dodds episodes will show in the UK on Sunday, February 28, beginning at 8 p.m. Guest stars this season include Rupert Graves, Doctor Who’s Natalie Gumede, and Saira Choudhry. Radio Times provides cursory synopses of each installment’s storyline. It also frets that “these three episodes could be McDonald & Dodds’ last, since DCI McDonald [Gouveia] firmly stated in the previous series that she would only stay in Bath for two years tops.” But hey, we’re dealing here with a work of pure fiction, and if this ITV program continues to pull in audiences, can we not expect someone in charge to contrive a semi-logical excuse for extending its storyline?

• Shortly in advance of the coronavirus pandemic shutting down movie and television production a year ago, British TV channel BBC One announced that it had greenlighted two additional seasons—Series 6 and 7—of the Scottish crime drama Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall. But only now, says The Killing Times, is work on those fresh episodes finally resuming. Beginning in April, it explains, back-to-back series of the show (six episodes apiece) will commence shooting on the subarctic archipelago that gives this prize-winning drama its name. “Both series will be written and created by David Kane (Stonemouth, The Field of Blood), who originated the first series of Shetland and has written on every series since. The islands’ local newspaper, The Shetland Times, reported that producer Louise Say promised ‘absolutely riveting’ and ‘hard-hitting’ storylines.”

• This will likely be worth watching. B.V. Lawson tells us that “Benedict Cumberbatch will star in a limited series update of the classic thriller, The 39 Steps, inspired by John Buchan’s novel, which was turned into the 1935 film classic by Alfred Hitchcock. The TV project of The 39 Steps is being described as ‘a provocative, action-packed conspiracy thriller series that updates the classic novel for our times. An ordinary man, Richard Hannay, becomes an unwitting pawn in a vast, global conspiracy to reset the world order.’”

• Even before TV writer and producer William Link’s death in December, I had been trying to catch up with the proliferation of small-screen movies he developed with his writing partner of 43 years, Richard Levinson. I’ve found a variety of them on YouTube, and bought DVDs of some others online. However, I was in the dark about their 1986 mystery Vanishing Act, until Mystery*File reminded me of its existence. As Steve Lewis relates, it finds “Harry Kenyon (Mike Farrell) … on his honeymoon in the Rocky Mountains after a whirlwind romance in Las Vegas with a woman named Christine Prescott. But their wedded bliss is soon interrupted and Harry reports her disappearance to Lieutenant Rudameyer (Elliott Gould), a New Yorker more interested in eating a corned beef sandwich specially imported from a delicatessen on West 87th Street. It seems to be a fuss over nothing as Christine (Margot Kidder) is quickly found--only Harry doesn’t recognize her and refuses to believe she’s his wife!” At least for the present moment, you can watch that full picture here.

• Shoot! We almost got to watch a Wild Wild West reboot.

• Thirty-nine-year-old Morven Christie (formerly of Grantchester) has quit her role as a detective sergeant family liaison officer on The Bay, making way for actress Marsha Thomason to lead the cast in Series 3 of that British crime drama. Understandably, Christie’s sudden departure has fomented speculation about why she gave up that plum part. The Killing Times thinks it may have a clue.

• Holmes and Watson—villains? That’s just one of the twists in a new, eight-episode horror series debuting on March 26. Writes Olivia Rutigliano: “The Baker Street Irregulars, Sherlock Holmes’s organization of motley street urchins, are going to get their own Netflix series. It’s a dark show, full of supernatural mysteries, but the paranormal activity is not the only modification to the Sherlockian world you know and love. The program, titled The Irregulars, posits that the group is manipulated into solving dangerous supernatural crimes by Dr. Watson (who is evil)—feats for which his sketchy business partner Sherlock Holmes gets all the renown.”

• In Reference to Murder reports that among the among the 25 categories of finalists for this year’s Audie Awards, announced this week by the Audio Publishers Association, are two of potentially special interest to Rap Sheet readers: Mystery and Thriller/Suspense. Below are the five Mystery contenders:

— A Bad Day for Sunshine, by Darynda Jones, narrated by Lorelei King (Macmillan Audio)
— Confessions on the 7:45, by Lisa Unger, narrated by Vivienne Leheny (HarperAudio)
— Fair Warning, by Michael Connelly, narrated by Peter Giles and Zach Villa (Hachette Audio)
— The Guest List, by Lucy Foley, narrated by Chloe Massey, Olivia Dowd, Sarah Ovens, Rich Keeble, Aoife McMahon, and Jot Davies (HarperAudio)
— Trouble Is What I Do, by Walter Mosley, narrated by Dion Graham (Hachette Audio)

The full list of 2021 Audie nominees is here. Winners are to be announced during a virtual “gala” on March 22. The festivities are set to start at 9 p.m. EST, and can be streamed live at this link.

• Blogger Evan Lewis has generously taken the time to dig up, from the deep recesses of the Web, as many publicity materials as he could find related to the 1946 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall film, The Big Sleep. Look for them in two separate posts, here and here.

• Left Coast Crime already rescheduled its 2021 convention for 2022, due to the worldwide spread of COVID-19. And now Malice Domestic is doing the same. “After careful consideration,” its board of directors declared in a news release, “we have decided to postpone Malice 32/33 to 2022. … Instead of a live event in 2021, we are excited to announce More Than Malice, a virtual (online) festival. More Than Malice will be held on July 14-17, 2021, and will feature special guests, unique panels, and the Agatha Awards. We will have much more exciting information for you in the coming days and weeks.” Everyone who’s currently registered for Malice 2021 should receive an Agatha Award nomination form soon. Keep up with developments by following the Malice Twitter page.

• In CrimeReads, editor Dwyer Murphy ponders that immortal question, Why was Raymond Chandler so venomous in attacking Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train?

• How did Victorian homes “go from celebrated to creepy?”

• Excellent news! UK author Martin Edwards spent his weeks in pandemic lockdown researching and penning a third Rachel Savernake/Jacob Flint historical mystery (following Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall). He writes in his blog that it should be published “early next year,” with a fourth installment to follow in 2023.

• Only days ago I recommended that readers check out—with warranted dispatch—the complete, one-season run of NBC-TV’s City of Angels on YouTube. Now comes Steve Aldous with a short review of that show’s three-part first episode, “The November Plan.” He remarks: “The promise on show here would occasionally surface over the series’ next ten episodes before it was cancelled due to low ratings just as it was building a head of steam.”

• Why the Titanic’s 1912 sinking still makes for a good story.

• And it’s true: Director Tim Burton is set to shoot a live-action, young-adult series for Netflix about Wednesday Addams, the wonderfully creepy little girl familiar from small- and big-screen versions of The Addams Family. Variety describes Wednesday as “a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore Academy. She attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago—all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore.” Tor.com says there is “no official word on the casting yet, but given how sadly awful the last Addams film was (the animated one from 2019, not the gems we got in the ’90s), this might be a slight improvement?”

See Them While You Can

• I’m always leery of directing readers to videos on YouTube, as offerings there tend to be yanked capriciously. But this is too good to miss. Someone employing the handle “Maljardin” has posted the full, 13-episode run of NBC-TV’s City of Angels, a Depression-era private eye drama starring Wayne Rogers. Although some episodes weren’t as well-plotted or as tightly edited as others, this 1976 midseason replacement series—created by Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell of Rockford Files fame—remains eminently watchable, a Chinatown-inspired program that delivers plenty of suspense, eccentric characters, and 1930s atmosphere. No less than Max Allan Collins has called City of Angels “the best private eye series ever.” If I didn’t already own bootlegged copies of these eps, I would be viewing them all today. Click here to find Maljardin’s full selection of videos.

• OK, since I am already going out on one shaky limb by recommending those YouTube features, why not another? Michael Hayes was a 1997-1998 CBS-TV series starring ex-NYPD Blue hotshot David Caruso as “an Irish Catholic ex-New York City police officer appointed acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.” It was developed by Paul Haggis, before he went off and scripted a couple of films starring some character named James Bond (Casino Royale and Quantum of Silence). YouTube user “Kevin МАРУСЕК” has posted the “prequel” installment of Michael Hayes, which was originally broadcast on September 15, 1997.

• Finally, if you have never seen the 1994 HBO-TV adaptation of Robert Harris’ what-if novel, Fatherland, starring Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson, then tune in here. Just don’t blame me if, between my writing this and your trying to find the video, it disappears without so much as a hint of explanation.

James Made Loathsomeness Watchable

Clifton James was an actor I hadn’t thought about in some while, but when he passed away this last Saturday, April 15, at age 96, the memories suddenly came flooding back.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that, although he hailed originally from Spokane, Washington, and lived during most of his career in New York, James “often played a convincing Southerner … One of his first significant roles playing a Southerner was as a cigar-chomping, prison floor-walker in the 1967 classic Cool Hand Luke.” Still more memorably, perhaps, the portly James appeared as “a redneck sheriff in two 007 films …,” recalls The Spy Command. “James embodied a 1970s shift in James Bond films to a lighter, more comedic tone. He played Sheriff J.W. Pepper, a Louisiana lawman who was comic relief in 1973’s Live and Let Die and 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun.” Wikipedia adds that James was seen as “a very similar character in both Silver Streak (1976) and Superman II (1980), and had a more serious role in The Reivers (1969). In that last movie, opposite Steve McQueen, James played a mean,corrupt, bungling country sheriff.”

All of this reminds of the first time I really noticed James on screen, in the short-lived 1976 NBC-TV drama City of Angels. That show featured ex-M*A*S*H co-star Wayne Rogers as not-too-tough and poorly recompensed 1930s Los Angeles private eye Jake Axminster. James held a recurring role as Murray Quint, a thoroughly repellent, again cigar-chomping, police lieutenant who thrived on graft and greed, and found particular delight in making Axminster’s life hell, whenever their paths crossed. Clifton James’ résumé is long and quite impressive, with parts played in TV shows from Naked City and Mannix to Gunsmoke, Hart to Hart, Quincy, M.E., The Fall Guy, and The A-Team. But it’s as Quint that he’s likely to stick in my memory. Below is a scene from “The November Plan,” the three-part introductory episode of City of Angels, in which Quint sends some of his cops out to roust Axminster from bed for a late-night grilling.

That’s a Lot of Candles to Blow Out

We have a couple of birthdays to celebrate today, both from the TV crime-drama category.

The first and most significant, of course, is the 80th birthday of Rockford Files star James Garner, an actor who may never have given a bad performance. I’ve not only been watching the DVDs of Rockford lately, but have managed to acquire an almost complete collection of Bret Maverick, the NBC series (and revival of the 1950s TV western Maverick) that he went on to do after leaving Rockford. What a treat.

Since I wrote about Garner at length last year, on the occasion of his 79th birthday, I shan’t try to outdo myself this time. I’ll simply wish him the best on this most momentous of occasions.

Today also happens to be the 75th birthday of Birmingham, Alabama-born actor Wayne Rogers, who left the hit show M*A*S*H after only three seasons to star as 1930s Los Angeles private eye Jake Axminter in NBC’s City of Angels. A Roy Huggins-Stephen J. Cannell series, Angels debuted with a bang-up three-part opener in February 1976, but by May it was off the air, with just 13 episodes in the can. Although it was clearly designed to take advantage of the popularity of Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown, which had hit movie screens in 1974, City of Angels had much to commend it, including Rogers’ performances as a down-at-heel gumshoe always on the edge of either exploding or committing homicide; Elaine Joyce’s role as his cute but near-ditzy secretary, Marsha Finch, who runs a switchboard for hookers; and stories that really brought forth the social and political conditions of that bygone era, whether it be Depression-caused tramping or the rise of Nazism. Rogers later lamented having left M*A*S*H to do this series, but in an interview I conducted several years ago with prolific novelist Max Allan Collins (creator of another early 20th-century P.I., Nate Heller), he stated that “City of Angels is the best private eye series ever, and is probably the biggest single influence on Nate Heller. The show did several historically based stories, that prefigure what I did, and Wayne Rogers was a great wiseguy private eye, very much a nontraditional, selfish, sometimes cowardly, sometimes reckless hero in the Roy Huggins Maverick/Rockford Files vein.”

Since City of Angels, Rogers has appeared in a number of films and TV series, including five guest shots on Murder, She Wrote, playing (as Wikipedia notes) Charlie Garrett, “a disreputable private investigator who usually gets into trouble and needs Jessica [Fletcher]’s help.” (What would the resourceful Jake Axminster have said about that?) He also reprised Larry Hagman’s original role as Major Tony Nelson in the 1985 teleflick I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later--but we’ll just forget about that dud, OK?

More recently, Rogers has become a successful entrepreneur as well as a very visible stock trader and financial commentator, appearing with some regularity on Fox News’ Cashin’ In. In 2005, he was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. He also promotes himself as a public speaker. But if it’s jake with you, I’ll remember him best as Axminster.

Their Finest Hours

With the exception of westerns (which, unfortunately, disappeared into the storied sunset some while ago), there’s no more venerable genre in TV history than crime dramas.

In the late 1940s, several American shows dramatized real-life offenses or combined whodunits with game shows (Public Prosecutor, for instance). But the first program that justly belongs under the “crime drama” rubric is probably Barney Blake: Police Reporter, a live series that premiered in the spring of 1948, with Gene O’Donnell as a brave newsie who, assisted by his secretary (Judy Parrish), interviewed suspects and witnesses involved in a breadth of criminal acts. (If that sounds a bit dry, it might explain why Barney Blake remained on the beat for only a few months.) NBC-TV had considerably more luck in 1949 with Martin Kane, Private Eye. Adapted from a popular radio show, and sponsored by U.S. Tobacco Company (which insisted that the protagonist and others regularly go for their smokes on the air), Kane featured “a New York detective who solved his cases through determination, cooperation with the police, and just a little bit of roughhousing,” wrote Richard Meyers in his 1981 book, TV Detectives. Lloyd Nolan (who’d previously portrayed Miami P.I. Mike Shayne in a series of 1940s films), was one of four actors to play Kane during the series’ run.

Martin Kane was quickly joined by another private eye series, Man Against Crime, starring Ralph Bellamy. But it took somewhat longer for a cop hero to make his name in series television. In 1950, the DuMont Television Network (an early rival of ABC, NBC, and CBS) debuted Rocky King, Inside Detective, starring Hollywood character actor Roscoe Karns as a middle-aged Manhattan police inspector with a never-seen wife who often served as his sounding board. Although most Rap Sheet readers have likely never heard of Rocky King, Meyers calls it “the best-loved mystery of its time.”

In the more than five decades since, television--particularly American TV--has introduced myriad other crime dramas, packed with clever, sexy, physically impaired, or in some other way distinctive characters. The high-water marks for this genre were in the late 1950s, early ’60s, when series such as 77 Sunset Strip, Peter Gunn, and Richard Diamond, Private Eye ruled the airwaves; and again in the 1970s and early ’80s, when there were so many sleuths on the set, that wags mused on the lengths to which screenwriters would soon have to reach, if they hoped to distinguish any new characters from the existing pack (since blind, wheelchair-bound, fat, old, religiously devout, historical, and even dead detectives had already been done). Those days are gone, at least for the time being. But with the recent introduction of Jeff Goldblum’s Raines and a bumper crop of cop and P.I. shows in the works for the fall 2007 season, it’s possible that detective dramas could make a comeback, displacing some of the redundant forensic series and lawyer serials that fill up the networks today.

Meanwhile, The Rap Sheet recently asked its readers to choose the best TV police detectives and private eyes of all time. Our survey proved very popular, with hundreds of votes being registered over three weeks. Some of the results could have been predicted, but others showed that Rap Sheet visitors have both longer memories and, well, better taste than the average TV watcher.

Here are the top five vote-getters in each category.

Best TV police detective in history:
1. Lieutenant Columbo, Columbo (Peter Falk)--71 votes
2. Andy Sipowicz, NYPD Blue (Dennis Franz)--43 votes
3. Tie: Joe Friday, Dragnet (Jack Webb); and Robert Goren, Law & Order: Criminal Intent (Vincent D’Onofrio)--21 votes apiece
4. Christine Cagney, Cagney & Lacey (Sharon Gless)--20 votes
5. Sledge Hammer, Sledge Hammer! (David Rasche)--16 votes

Best TV private eye in history:
1. Jim Rockford, The Rockford Files (James Garner)--79 votes
2. Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett and others)--25 votes
3. Harry Orwell, Harry O (David Janssen)--24 votes
4. Joe Mannix, Mannix (Mike Connors)--21 votes
5. Jake Axminster, City of Angels (Wayne Rogers)--18 votes

(You can look through the complete tallies of police detective votes here, and of P.I. votes here.)

Now do you understand what I mean when I say that this survey offered at least some predictable results? Although there have certainly been other excellent TV cops, Columbo may be most fondly remembered by the greatest number of watchers. He boasted all of the intelligence of Holmes, but in a disarming package highlighted by his rumpled raincoat, his on-its-last-legs Peugeot, and a patient persistence familiar from Crime and Punishment’s Porfiry Petrovich. It’s nice also to see Joe Friday and Chris Cagney putting in good showings here, since neither of them has been around for a while. Polls of this sort usually demonstrate the short memories of respondents; this one didn’t. On the other hand, I am flabbergasted to find the goofy Sledge Hammer among our foremost five. I’d have bet that Miami Vice’s Sonny Crockett would have jet-boated right past Hammer in voting. Instead, Hammer proves that TV Squad’s Bob Sassone was (partly) right, when he put that rules-breaking, .44 Magnum-toting San Francisco police inspector in his own recent ranking of TV’s five greatest police detectives.

I wonder, though, whether the results would have been changed by the inclusion of a few more names to this mix. For instance, former San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside (Raymond Burr), or frontier lawman Hec Ramsey (Richard Boone), or Lieutenant Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) from Crime Story, or Endeavor Morse (John Thaw) from Britain’s Inspector Morse series. And how might the results have been skewed by the addition of hip crime-fighters Pete Cochran, Julie Barnes, and Linc Hayes from The Mod Squad? Several people responded to my original post announcing these TV polls by saying that I ought to have included Baltimore Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) from Homicide: Life on the Street. Indeed, I should have; however, it didn’t occur to me until the surveys were already up. There’s no telling whether, facing off against the cool power of Pembleton, Sledge Hammer might have slipped into this survey’s also-ran category beside Theo Kojak (Telly Savalas) and Hawaii Five-O’s Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord).

There were almost twice as many characters to choose from in our “best private eyes” list. Yet the results could hardly have been more unambiguous: Jim Rockford trounced all other contenders. (This might surprise the aforementioned Mr. Sassone, whose choices of the greatest private eyes on television didn’t even include Garner’s con man detective.) What makes Rockford stand out so? I think Ed Robertson hit it on the head when he wrote, in his book Thirty Years of The Rockford Files (2005):

He looked like Steve McGarrett. He dressed like Joe Mannix. But he acted like no other private detective prime time television had ever seen.

When he threw a punch, Jim Rockford ... was more likely to hurt his own hand than his opponent. He rarely carried a gun (he didn’t have a permit), and on those occasions when he did, he was more likely to point the weapon than fire it. Rockford hated trouble, wouldn’t hesitate to quit in the middle of a case if things got too rough, and had no qualms about telling you why (“You’re damned right I’m afraid!”). But he did like money: he charged $200 a day, plus expenses, so he’d hang in there no matter what if he could smell a fat check down the road. “I won’t kill for money, and I won’t marry for it,” he once said. “Other than that, I’m open to just about anything.”

Most private eyes--at least, the ones we see portrayed in movies and on television--have a lieutenant friend on the police force with whom they trade information in the course of a given case. But because Rockford was an ex-con (he was unjustly convicted of armed robbery and served five years in prison before receiving a full pardon), he didn’t always trust the police. For that matter, nearly everyone in the Los Angeles Police Department despised Rockford because he had a propensity for solving cases that the cops had either closed or considered unsolvable. In fact, whenever Rockford showed up at headquarters with a broken nose or a bloody lip, morale at the department automatically went up ten percent!

In many respects, Rockford was the logical descendent of Bret Maverick, the 19th-century West-roaming gambler Garner had played for three years (1957-1960) on the ABC series Maverick. They both steered a wide path around obvious heroism, yet were honorable in ways that viewers recognized. If television ever produces a private investigator with more charm, compassion, and honesty than Jim Rockford, it’ll be a frickin’ miracle.

Yet, TV has served up other magnetic gumshoes. Our poll found Sherlock Holmes in second place behind Rockford, even though he’s primarily a fixture of novels and short stories (not all of them written by Arthur Conan Doyle), rather than the small screen. The real interest in this P.I. survey could be found in the battle for third place, which found Harry Orwell, Joe Mannix, and Jake Axminster sharp-elbowing each other all the way to the finish line. Janssen (who’d previously played the role of Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive) gave us what I agree is American television’s second-best private dick, next to Rockford--an often grumpy and antisocial, yet endearingly vulnerable San Diego (later L.A.) investigator who deserves far more acclaim that he has received of recent date. Again, he didn’t figure into Sassone’s top eight. Neither did Mannix or Axminster, the latter of whom is certainly the more surprising top-five pick, since the Stephen J. Cannell/Roy Huggins-created series in which he appeared survived only one season, in 1976. Regardless, 1930s P.I. Axminster is recalled fondly by some heavy-hitting critics, including novelist Max Allan Collins (Black Hats), who’s called City of Angels “the greatest of all P.I. series.”

Sassone picked the single-monikered Spenser (Robert Urich) of Spenser: For Hire, adapted for television from Robert B. Parker’s bestselling novels, as his favorite TV P.I. In the Rap Sheet poll, however, Spenser comes in at No. 6, with 16 votes, just three votes ahead of Thomas Banacek (George Peppard) from the old NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie rotating series Banacek. Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) from Magnum, P.I.--who previously triumphed in a Sleuth Channel survey to pick the “top sleuth” from television and film--finds his place here at No. 7, just ahead of Harry Tenafly (James McEachin), from the Richard Levinson-William Link production Tenafly, another alumnus of the Wednesday Mystery Movie. Obviously, Rap Sheet readers have a pretty deep familiarity with TV detectives. Otherwise, they’d never have cast their votes for African-American family man and L.A. corporate investigator Tenafly, who appeared in only a handful of 90-minute movies. Rounding out the top 10 we find Peter Gunn (Craig Stevens) and Mike Longstreet (James Franciscus).

Again--though this time because the Pollhost service I was using limited me to 20 nominees--I left a few names off the P.I. ballot that might’ve been interesting to include. Had there been room, I’d have added Miles C. Banyon (Robert Forster) from the too-short-lived period drama Banyon, Claire McCarron (Margaret Colin) from Leg Work, Maddie Hayes and David Addison (Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis) from Moonlighting, and Lionel Whitney and E.L. Turner (Jeff Goldblum and Ben Vereen) from Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, but they will just have to wait for a later survey. The same goes for Mike Hammer, who lost a spot among the nominees because he--like Holmes, Spenser, Lew Archer, Nero Wolfe, and Philip Marlowe--came to television with the distinct advantage of having amassed a following through books. I decided that this study should concentrate primarily on characters born on the small screen.

While these surveys were in progress, I heard from Steve Lewis of the Mystery*File blog. He wrote to say that “Back in the early ’70s, when I first started [the magazine] Mystery*File, I did a similar poll for TV detectives. The winner was David Ross, played by Darren McGavin during two seasons of a series called The Outsider” (1968-1969). I’d guess that most TV watchers--even those knowledgeable ones who read The Rap Sheet--don’t remember The Outsider, or at least don’t recall it clearly. (Count me among that latter camp.) Yet the show was the brainchild of Rockford Files creator Roy Huggins, and as Kevin Burton Smith explains at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, Ross was distinctive for being “one of the first of the sensitive, compassionate eyes to be featured on television (he didn’t even carry a gun!), echoing literary eyes such as Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, and anticipating television’s Harry O.”

It makes you wonder whether some of the biggest vote-getters in this, The Rap Sheet’s second readership poll, will find themselves completely out of the running 10, 20, or 30 years down the road, when another editor gets it into his or her head to ask about favorite police detectives and P.I.s. on television. If so, what characters will have taken their places?

Huggins’ Writing Workshop

Now, here’s something that’s just downright cool.

Apparently, author-blogger Lee Goldberg had a chance to talk with screenwriter-producer Roy Huggins--the prolific creator of such TV series as Maverick, The Fugitive, 77 Sunset Strip, The Outsider, The Rockford Files, and City of Angels--in 1998, less than four years before his death. That six-hour interview, conducted and taped on behalf of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Archive of American Television, is now available online.

Their 10-part exchange covers everything from Huggins’ growing-up years and his idolization of his older brother, to the birth of 77 Sunset Strip and his blacklisting as a “former communist,” to his creation of Maverick and the “Movies of the Week” concept, his habit of driving out into the California desert and dictating seasons’ worth of TV episodes into a tape recorder, and his respect for fellow TV writer Juanita Bartlett. I haven’t yet finished watching all six hours (hey, I do have other things to do, even on a weekend), but already I’m utterly charmed. Huggins was a TV-writing master, and Goldberg does an exceptional job of ... well, not drawing him out exactly, since Huggins pretty much runs away with the interview, but inviting his subject to relive some of the seminal and little-understood experiences from his 87-year-life.

Go here to read Goldberg’s recollections of how this interview came about; and the first installment of the Huggins interview can be viewed here. Any fan of Roy Huggins’ work over the years would be a fool to miss this. Fantastic stuff!

READ MORE: “R.I.P., Adele Mara,” by Ivan G. Shreve Jr. (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear); “What’s a Turn-On?” by David Thomson (Salon); “Black List, White Wash,” by Stephen Bowie (The Classic TV History Blog).