Three Final, Fond Farewells

As I return to blogging mode, after a week spent on unrelated projects, let me mention three deaths that occurred during my hiatus.

First off, there was San Francisco resident Rabbi Lawrence W. Raphael, who passed away on March 17 at age 74. As Janet Rudolph recalls in Mystery Fanfare, Rabbi Raphael—who, in 2003, “became the ninth senior rabbi of Sherith Israel in San Francisco, where he served until 2016”—“played a vital role in the admission, education, and professional training of over a thousand Reform rabbis, cantors, and educators. He was instrumental in the founding and supervision of the Soup Kitchen, which has fed over 150,000 guests since its inception over 30 years ago, and implemented educational initiatives, using the latest computer technologies and the newly emerging Internet, for students, faculty, and alumni.”

Raphael was also the editor of Mystery Midrash: An Anthology of Jewish Mystery & Detective Fiction (1999), a fine book about which I wrote, in one of the earliest versions of The Rap Sheet:

Remember when Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small tales were about all there was of Jewish crime fiction? No longer, as editor Lawrence W. Raphael makes clear in Mystery Midrash: An Anthology of Jewish Mystery and Detective Fiction (Jewish Lights Publishing).

Some familiar wordsmiths and characters are to be found in these pages, from Stuart M. Kaminsky (whose Chicago detective, Abe Lieberman, here takes a confession from a lapsed and irate Jew) to Ronald Levitsky (contributing a story in which civil-liberties lawyer Nate Rosen faces a truly unique First Amendment case) and Howard Engel (providing P.I. Benny Cooperman with a light-hearted locked-room puzzle). Although Raphael’s selections often deal with Jewish issues, fans of this book will likely stretch across the religious spectrum.

Raphael published a sequel in 2001: Criminal Kabbalah: An Intriguing Anthology of Jewish Mystery & Detective Fiction.

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Gone as well is American film producer and screenwriter Larry Cohen, who died on March 23 in Los Angeles. He was 77 years old.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper notes that Cohen “was a key figure in exploitation movie circles in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as writing scripts and storylines for TV shows such as The Fugitive and Columbo, before staging a feature film comeback with the script for the Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth in 2002. … Cohen then came up with another phone-oriented thriller, Cellular, that became a vehicle for Kim Basinger. Cohen’s second coming eventually tailed off, but he appeared in the 2017 documentary tribute King Cohen, in which he defended his film-making habits: ‘I don’t know what exploitation means. Every movie is exploitation. So what?’”

I have to admit, I didn’t connect significantly with Cohen as a director or producer. My memories of his career relate to his small-screen escapades. In addition to his work on Columbo and The Fugitive, Cohen crafted scripts for Checkmate, The Defenders, and NYPD Blue. He also created the Robert Goulet espionage series Blue Light, the Western drama Branded, Roy Thinnes’ alien-invasion show, The Invaders, and one of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series, Cool Million, starring James Farentino. Several years ago, I tried hard to contact Larry Cohen via e-mail, hoping to ask him some questions about that Farentino program, but I never heard a word back.

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Finally, The Gumshoe Site reports the demise, at age 90, of Majorie Weinman Sharmat. Blogger Jiro Kimura writes:

One of America’s most prolific authors of children’s books, [Sharmat] had two dreams as a child—to be a detective and to be a writer, and the wish of hers came true when she created Nate the Great. Nate is a boy detective with a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker who catches culprits with the help of his dog, Sludge. The Nate the Great series started with Nate the Great (Putnam, 1972) and ended with Nate the Great and the Missing Birthday Snake (Delacorte, 2017; with Andrew Sharmat, her son). Nate has a cousin Olivia Sharp, a girl detective, who appears in four novels, starting with The Pizza Monster (1989) and ending with The Green Toenails Gang (1991, all from Delacorte, with Mitchell Sharmat, her husband). She wrote more than 130 books for children and young adults, and three of them were written as by Wendy Andrews: The Supergirl Storybook (1984), Vacation Fever! (1984), and Are We There Yet? (1985, all from Putnam).

Sharmat, who lived in Munster, Indiana, was taken by respiratory failure on March 12.

READ MORE: “The Late Great Larry Cohen,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts).

Lights Out for Two Stars of My Youth

This was not the best news to hear on an overcast Seattle day:

Actor James Farentino, named Golden Globes’ most promising newcomer in 1967, died Tuesday in a Los Angeles hospital, according to a family spokesman. He was 73.

Brooklyn-born Farentino, who appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows and even earned an Emmy nod for his performance as Saint Peter, died of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Hospital after a long illness, said the spokesman, Bob Palmer.

The CBS News obituary goes on to mention that the once-handsome Farentino starred opposite Patty Duke in Me, Natalie (1969); was part of the cast of notables in Jesus of Nazareth, a 1977 TV miniseries; featured with Kirk Douglas in the 1980 science-fiction film The Final Countdown; was married and divorced four times; and fell into trouble in his later life, including being prosecuted for “stalking his ex-girlfriend Tina Sinatra.

However, it glosses over the two series that really brought Farentino to my attention: The Bold Ones, on which he played lawyer Neil Darrell for three years (1968-1972); and Cool Million (1972), a short-lived component of the original NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie, which cast him as Jefferson Keyes, “an enterprising former CIA agent who set himself up in business as a private eye willing to take any case or solve any problem for a flat fee of one million dollars (refunded if he fails),” recalls The Thrilling Detective Web Site.

Later, Farentino also starred in ABC-TV’s much-hyped high-tech helicopter series, Blue Thunder, a spinoff from Roy Scheider’s 1983 film of the same name. However, it’s as Darrell and Keyes that I shall always remember him best.

Good night, Mr. Farentino. We didn’t know you well enough.

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More unfortunate news, this time from The Boston Globe:

Nicol Williamson, the British actor best known for his role as the wizard Merlin in the 1981 film “Excalibur,” has died of esophageal cancer, his son said Wednesday. He was 75.

His son Luke said the actor died Dec. 16 in Amsterdam, where he had lived for more than two decades.

I don’t believe I ever saw Excalibur. But I remember Williamson well from his starring role as Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a 1976 film adapted from Nicholas Meyer’s wonderful 1974 novel of the same name.

When that movie came out, I was living in Portland, Oregon. And I somehow managed to win two free tickets (it might have been through a contest on the radio) to see the film, but didn’t know anybody to invite along with me. So I sat through the entire picture, engrossed by Williamson’s performance as a cocaine-addled Holmes, as well as Robert Duvall’s turn as the indulgent Doctor John Watson and Adam Arkin playing neurologist Sigmund Freud, with my bin of popcorn keeping the seat warm beside me.

In the end, it turned out to be a good memory.