All the Crime in Half the Time

I returned home this afternoon from a short, out-of-Seattle fishing excursion with my nephew, only to discover 411 new junk-mail messages needing to be removed from my e-maibox … and my latest CrimeReads piece having been posted for public consumption.

My subject on this occasion is half-hour American TV crime dramas. Although such offerings long ago fell out of favor—overwhelmed by the spread of hour-long series—there were myriad 30-minute shows available from the 1950s through the early ’70s. As I write:

Billboard brought word in May 1948 that “the first half-hour mystery series,” NBC-TV’s Barney Blake, Police Reporter—centered on an indomitable newspaperman (played by Gene O’Donnell) and his trusty secretary, who together interview suspects and solve crimes—had recently flashed onto American television sets. The magazine then proceeded to excoriate that live-action drama for employing “just about every cliché in the whodunit book.” Barney Blake hung on for 13 weeks before being axed.

By the fall of 1959, the U.S. television landscape had changed markedly. Westerns continued to ride high on the nighttime schedule, but as Time magazine explained in an October cover story, that season also dished up a whopping “62 shows (network and syndicated) devoted to some variation of Cops & Robbers”—the majority of them lasting 30 minutes and headlined by fictional private eyes. There were so many such programs, Time quipped, that “as the evenings pass, one Eye blurs inevitably into another, a TV trouble that even an honest repairman cannot cure.”

Do you remember Peter Gunn or Staccato? How about Martin Kane, Private Eye or Honey West? And it wasn’t only gumshoe dramas shooting up the mid-20th-century airwaves. Divertissements also came in the form of abbreviated police procedurals, such as The Naked City, M Squad, and Decoy, in addition to amateur or part-time detective mysteries, among them The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Mr. and Mrs. North, Man with a Camera, and T.H.E. Cat.

Chances are, the majority of people reading this post weren’t around to take in those programs when they originally aired on network television or in syndication. (I was not either.) However, episodes of vintage half-hour series can still be found and enjoyed on YouTube, or can be purchased in DVD sets. I say they can be “enjoyed,” because over the months I spent sampling early, mostly black-and-white whodunits and cop shows on behalf of CrimeReads, I found myself far from bored. Yes, a few of the programs now seem hopelessly dated; yet many hold up reasonably well after half a century or more of gathering dust and being forgotten.

So recognize my latest CrimeReads piece as a curated guide to the lost world of classic, condensed TV crime and mystery dramas. And on some evening when you’re stumped for what to watch next, ditch the supposedly must-see shows of today in favor of a streaming installment of Peter Gunn or Decoy or Mr. Lucky, or a YouTube-borne episode of Dante or N.Y.P.D. or Markham. You just might find that half-hour stories can be as entertaining as their 60-minute cousins.

Begin your boob-tube investigations right here.

A Very Waldo’s Christmas

Television has long scheduled special Christmas episodes of popular series, whether it be The Twilight Zone, Friends, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Downton Abbey. Crime dramas aren’t necessarily ideal vehicles for holiday sentimentality, but some have offered up a bit of comfort and joy at this time of year.

Just the other day, for instance, I stumbled upon the December 24, 1959, episode of Johnny Staccato. You remember that half-hour NBC show, right? It ran for only a single season, from September 1959 to March 1960, and starred John Cassavetes as Staccato, a jazz pianist in New York City who earns some cash on the side doing hard-boiled private-eye work. It’s a stylish gem that, sadly, too many modern boob-tubers have never taken the time to watch.



Well, here’s your opportunity. Embedded above is that Yuletide-themed installment, “The Unwise Men.” It finds Staccato helping out a hardworking friend, Tom Raffe (played by Jack Weston), who has a gig portraying Santa Claus at the musician-gumshoe’s favorite Greenwich Village nightclub, Waldo’s, but who’s also being pressed by his ex-con elder brother (Marc Lawrence) to help pull off a heist at Macy’s Department Store. Naturally, Staccato stands up for his buddy, but that only brings Tom more trouble. This 15th episode of Johnny Staccato may be remembered best for its concluding scene, which finds Cassavettes breaking television’s so-called Fourth Wall by turning to the home audience and saying, “Merry Christmas, everybody.”

If you’d like to see more of this series (which Cassavettes apparently “didn’t care for”), there are plenty of episodes available on YouTube. Or spring for the full DVD collection, re-released in 2020.

READ MORE: “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly: Christmas Eyes,” by Kevin Burton Smith (The Thrilling Detective Web Site).

Bullet Points: Pre-Halloween Edition

• This week’s Web-wide selection of “forgotten books” recommendations includes: Six Dead Men, by Andre Steeman; His Name Was Death, by Fredric Brown; Halo in Blood, by John Evans; The Warrielaw Jewel, by Winifred Peck; Death Beyond the Nile, by Jessica Mann; The Ambassador’s Wife, by Jake Needham; Vengeance, by Brian Pinkerton; a couple of short-story anthologies--The Hardboiled Lineup, edited by Harry Widmer, and The Ethnic Detectives, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin Greenberg; and what may have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most unusual book, The Coming of the Fairies. For a full list of this week’s participating bloggers, plus several more suggested crime-fiction reads (one of them being Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Lucky Legs), see organizer Patti Abbott’s personal blog.

• Squeezegut Alley’s Nicolas Pillai looks more closely at Johnny Depp’s plans to star in a big-screen remake of the 1934 William Powell-Myrna Loy picture, The Thin Man. Should you wish to watch the trailer for the original film, click here.

• Add another name to the list of most unnecessary TV remakes: ABC is hoping to bring Charlie’s Angels back for 21st-century audiences. “The angels haven’t been cast yet,” reports Omnimystery News, “but original series producer Leonard Goldberg and film angel Drew Barrymore are executive producing the pilot. Filming is expected to begin in Miami in January.” Groan ... I was afraid that the success of a revamped Hawaii Five-O would unleash this sort of nonsense.

• Oh no, a Wild Wild West remake too?

• Bare•bones’ Peter Enfantino continues his excellent look back at “the greatest crime [fiction] digest of all time,” Manhunt. Part 6 of his retrospective can be found here.

• Reviews are coming in of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the Swedish film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s third novel, recently released in the United States. Salon has its say here, while The Baltimore Sun’s Read Street blog wraps up other opinions here. UPDATE: Mystery Scene’s Oline Cogdill contributes her own two cents about Hornet’s Nest here.

• Here’s the schedule for NoirCon 2010, set to take place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from November 4 to 7.

• Another eye-catching faux-vintage paperback cover from New Jersey freelance illustrator Rob Kelly.

• How damaging could any significant Republican gains in Congress be? Economist Paul Krugman and The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen weigh in here. More here.

• Wow, the Webzine Beat to a Pulp is already clocking in its 99th short-story entry, “Outback Gothic,” by author-editor Chap O’Keefe.

• Omnimystery News has posted the trailer for the 2011 big-screen release, Blitz, based on Ken Bruen’s 2002 novel of the same name and starring Jason Statham as London Detective Sergrant Tom Brant.

• Universal Studios Home Entertainment has finally announced the release date for its three-DVD set, Columbo--The Mystery Movie Collection 1991-1993. It should reach stores by February 8, 2011.

• Marty McKee recalls Broken Badges, one of the less-well-remembered TV series cooked up by the late producer, Stephen J. Cannell.

• Meanwhile, Mystery*File’s David L. Vineyard reflects on the classic ABC-TV series Peter Gunn, and Skipper Bartlett pays tribute to the appearance of beatniks in Johnny Staccato.

• Right-wing voter intimidation at McDonald’s?

• Ten reasons to hire a private eye.

• From Spinetingler Magazine comes this video in which authors Robert Ward, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Daniel Woodrell discuss the overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction.

• A few author interviews worth your time: Craig Sisterson chats up both Roger “R.J.” Ellory (Saints of New York) and Simon Kernick (The Last 10 Seconds); Col Bury puts the screws to Adrian Magson (Red Station); J. Sydney Jones addresses John Harvey (Far Cry); Keith Rawson questions Russel D. McLean (The Good Son); Declan Burke has a conversation with James Ellory (The Hilliker Curse); and in the blog Sea Minor, several people sit down to talk with themselves--Martin Edwards, Brian Wiprud, Jen Forbus, and Benjamin Whitmer.

• Benjamin Whitmer, author of the new novel Pike, also submits to questioning by Jedidiah Ayres in the blog Hard-boiled Wonderland.

• Add this book to my Christmas wish list.

• It won’t be published until May 2011, but Vince Keenan is already recommending Lawrence Block’s next novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff.

• British pulp authority Steve Holland offers two galleries of Margery Allingham book covers, plus a short bio of the author, who died in 1966.

• And here’s a nice collection of illustrated covers from Ed McBain’s much-admired 87th Precinct books.

• Finally, Martin Edwards writes in Bookdagger about Following the Detectives and the importance of location in crime fiction.

Don’t Give Up Hope!

This strikes me as a very promising development: The Web site TV Shows on DVD.com brings news that The Snoop Sisters, a 1973-1974 U.S. series broadcast under the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie umbrella, will be released in DVD format by Canada’s Visual Entertainment Inc. (VEI) during the first quarter of 2011. Of that series, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blogger Ivan G. Shreve Jr. writes:

Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick starred as Ernesta and Gwendolyn Snoop (in Gwen’s case, Snoop-Nicholson, because she had been married), two elderly sisters who channeled their inner Jane Marple and solved crimes in their copious needlepoint-occupied free time. The show also starred Tattletales host Bert Convy as their nephew and contact on the police force, Lt. Steve Ostrowski and future TV director Lou Antonio as Barney, an ex-con who worked as their chauffeur. (Elderly women not behind the wheel of a car? Obviously this show did not take place in Florida.) Because it rotated with the returning Banacek and two new series, Tenafly and Faraday and Company, Sisters only telecast four episodes before being cancelled at the end of the season ... but all four of these installments and the original 1972 pilot will be available on [VEI’s] three-disc collection ...

I find this news interesting, not because I haven’t seen The Snoop Sisters in decades (I actually purchased a bootleg copy of the series and its pilot a few years back), but because the unexpected release of Sisters in DVD suggests other TV mystery dramas that never achieved cult status or generated dozens of episodes might also appear in stores sometime in the foreseeable future. Dare I hope that Harry O, City of Angels, Petrocelli, Hec Ramsey, Hooperman, Cool Million, Banyon, Private Eye, Assignment: Vienna, The Duke, and Search, as well as the aforementioned Tenafly and Faraday and Company, might eventually be added to my collection of vintage TV shows on DVD?

One other series that I can be guaranteed of adding soon to my shelves is the gumshoe drama Johnny Staccato. As TV Shows on DVD explains:

Johnny Staccato--starring legendary actor, writer and director Johnny Cassavetes-first appeared on TV in 1959, and although it lasted only 27 episodes, the unique mixture of big-city mystery-adventure and jazz left an indelible impression on a generation of TV viewers. Johnny is an ex-jazz musician/detective who finds himself drawn into cases where his distaste for crime, criminals and injustice is put to test. Many notable Hollywood guest stars include Michael Landon, Martin Landau, Shirley Knight, famed soundtrack musician John Williams, Dean Stockwell, Elisha Cook, Susan Oliver, Gena Rowlands, Elizabeth Montgomery, Norman Fell, Cloris Leachman, and Mary Tyler Moore!

The three-disc set of Johnny Staccato is due out on October 12.