I just learned that this space has passed 500,000 views! Not too bad for a little blog that’s only been chugging along since 1827. Thanks to every one of you who has dropped by to check the place out. I’d like to return the favor with an announcement!

You’ve followed along as the three amigos, Sergio Angelini, Nick Cardillo and myself, have drafted the best of Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie. You’ve seen our rankings for the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes films. Heck, we’ve even come up with our own lists of the very best of the Golden Age of Detection! How are we going to top ourselves?!?

Well, after you’ve drafted “The Best of the Best,” it behooves one to take a step back and go for a topic that is a little more specific. And for our next draft, specific is what we got!!!

A lot of mystery fans are great admirers of the inverted mystery. They eschew the question of whodunnit and embrace the cat and mouse game played between a foxy murderer and the clever detective who seeks to outfox him! For these fans, no TV series has thrilled them more than the adventures of that rumpled sleuth, Lieutenant Columbo.  Between 1968 and 2003, Peter Falk assumed the trenchcoat and outwitted some of the best of late 20^th century Hollywood in 71 glorious episodes that had every mystery fan holding their sides with joy.

Every fan . . . except me.

You see, I don’t like inverted mysteries. I don’t want to know whodunnit until the last possible moment. For me, Columbo, which alternated as part of NBC’s Mystery of the Week with McCloud and McMillan and Wife, was merely a hitch in my desire to watch Rock Hudson and Susan St. James pretend to be Nick and Nora Charles. Of course, Sergio and Nick feel exactly the opposite – they loooooovvveee Columbo! And they put great pressure on me to do a draft of the best episodes in the Columbo oeuvre.

Perhaps it’s because I’m nothing if not a mensch. Perhaps it’s because Sergio came up with a pitch that intrigued me. At any rate, it’s decided: our summer draft will be Columbo! However, we’re going to focus on the deadlier of the species. Twenty-one of the seventy-one episodes of the series feature a woman killer OR confederate. These cases cover the entire series, from the initial pilot to the very end. And they feature some delicious performances from, among others, Ruth Gordon, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, Honor Blackman, Anne Baxter, and Faye Dunaway!

I say this to you – and yet I haven’t watched a single one of them. Nor do I imagine we’ll be doing a super-draft of all 21 episodes. Maybe a top thirteen? Those details have yet to be worked out. Meanwhile, I have to watch all these shows (they’re available for free on Tubi), and the other night I began with the 1968 pilot, Prescription: Murder. However, I did a little research, and I discovered that the character of Lieutenant Columbo actually debuted a few years earlier – in 1960, precisely – as an episode of The Chevy Mystery Show entitled “Enough Rope.” It’s available to watch in living color on YouTube, and it’s quite delightful.

TV anthology shows of the 50’s and 60’s felt like little stage plays brought to your living room, and this teleplay, one of the earliest TV collaborations by the fabulous team of William Link and Richard Levinson, is no exception. Richard Carlson stars as Dr. Roy Fleming, a cold-blooded psychiatrist who murders his wealthy wife Claire. He is assisted by his mistress Susan, who also happens to be one of his patients. Together, they attempt to provide Fleming with the perfect alibi, and they might have succeeded . . . if it weren’t for the canny mind of Lieutenant Columbo, played here by Bert Freed.

Freed, who played heavies in plenty of crime films, gives a straightforward performance as the sleuth, but Carlson is terrific as Dr. Fleming. It’s a fine cat and mouse game that unfolds over a mere forty-nine minutes, and that includes brief remarks before each act from series host Walter Slezak. I urge you to watch it, both for how the storyline and the character of Columbo would develop and also just to be impressed by all the sets and permutations of early live television. Frankly, that aspect was more impressive to me than what followed eight years later.

Evidently, Link and Levinson knew they had something special on their hands because they expanded their teleplay into a full theatrical script. Prescription: Murder debuted as a stage play in my hometown of San Francisco, with Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead as Dr. Fleming and his wife and Thomas Mitchell, of Stagecoach and Gone with the Wind fame, featured as Columbo. That play became available for performance, and it’s fun to wonder how many community theatre character actors and high school juniors have gone on to play the iconic Lieutenant.

In 1968, Levinson and Link adapted their script yet again into a pilot for what would become the long-running series. Gene Barry was cast as Dr. Fleming, with Nina Foch as his doomed wife and Katherine Justice as his mistress, here renamed Joan Hudson and turned into an actress, a point that figures heavily into a plot that has been expanded to nearly twice the length of the original teleplay. Joan is a somewhat willing participant in Dr. Fleming’s plan to murder his wife and provide an alibi. In “Enough Rope,” she is also a major part of the Doctor’s motive, but here she more interestingly becomes a pawn for the killer’s true desire of money and freedom.  

I’m a big fan of Gene Barry, primarily from his work on two TV show,  Burke’s Law and The Name of the Game, where he epitomized the urbane gentleman, catching murderers or exposing corruption while beautifully attired in a tux. Here, he plays Dr. Fleming with such deliberate coldness that I actually preferred Carlson’s warmer performance; however, Barry provides the template for most of Columbo’s future adversaries – at least for the men. Since we’re focusing on the distaff side for our upcoming draft, I think Katherine Justice did, er, justice to the part of Joan, humanizing the character and providing Columbo with the necessary chink in the couple’s armor to solve the case.

The big surprise here is Peter Falk. At 41, Falk is young and good-looking, far less rumpled and absent-minded than he would become, and even a bit rough in his handling of suspects. He’s clearly performing the character as it was originally intended, and all the comic mannerisms have some evolving to do. I must say I enjoyed Falk’s straightforward performance here, but I can see how this early version of Columbo might not feel like a full-blown series lead character yet. Still, the script sparkles, and detective and killer seem evenly matched, right down to the final moments. The ever-present score, by jazz great Dave Grusin, helps this along – except when it gets intrusive. And I’d like to give a mention to one of my favorite TV actors, William Windom, who does a fine turn in one of two wasted roles he played on the series. Why this guy never got to be the killer I’ll never understand! But at least Levinson and Link didn’t forget the guy when they crafted another classic TV mystery series . . .

Columbo wouldn’t show up again on TV for three years, when Levinson and Link wrote a second pilot, this one featuring a female antagonist – so I’m covering that one next! I don’t like to tip my hand too early to my fellow drafters, but if the other woman listed as “accomplices” act as hapless as Justice does here, I don’t see how I can place any of these episodes at the top of my list.