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Peter S. Fischer, co-creator of “Murder, She Wrote,” died in a care facility in Pacific Grove, Calif. on Oct. 30. He was 88.

Fischer’s grandson Jake McElrath confirmed the news of his death.

Fischer was a writer, producer and novelist, known for penning over 40 scripts for “Murder, She Wrote.” He created the series alongside Richard Levinson and William Link. He also served as executive producer for several seasons. The hit murder-mystery crime show spanned 12 seasons, running from 1984-1992. Angela Lansbury starred as Jessica Fletcher, a widow who is both a mystery writer and amateur detective. She lives in the small coastal Maine town of Cabot Cove, where she frequently solves murders a step ahead of the police.

In a similar vein, Fischer also wrote 12 episodes of “Columbo,” the long-running crime drama about Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk), a homicide detective in Los Angeles. He additionally penned a season of “Ellery Queen,” another...

Peter S. Fischer, the prolific television writer behind “Murder, She Wrote” and “Columbo,” passed away on Monday, his grandson Jake McElrath told TheWrap. He was 88.

“We are very lucky to have so much of his work still accessible, like pieces of him left behind,” McElrath said in a statement to TheWrap. “He was an amazing presence to have in our lives, our Pa. We are all going to miss him.”

Fischer, who was nominated for three Emmy Awards across the duration of his career, is also known for his work on “Ellery Queen” and “The Eddie Capra Mysteries.” No further details about Fischer’s death are known at this time.

Born in 1935, Fischer’s longstanding career in Hollywood stretches back to writing 1971 TV movie “The Last Child,” before writing several TV episodes on “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law,” “Griff,” “Kojak” and “Baretta.”

The TV writer went...

Fictional detective Ellery Queen is set to make a return to television – this time as a woman.

Incendo and BlackBox Multimedia have optioned the TV adaption rights to the collection of novels and short stories in which Queen, originally written as a male character, appears.

The two companies will co-develop and co-produce a modernized, high-end scripted series in which Ellery will be changed to female. The part of the best-selling detective has yet to be cast.

The “Ellery Queen” books, which were written by cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, remain hugely popular in the U.S. and abroad, including China. The character of Queen was both a fictional detective and a pseudonymous name the cousins used when writing or editing other works.

“’Ellery Queen’ is one of the most definitive series of detective fiction to ever be written,” Giuliano Papadia, CEO and creative director at BlackBox Multimedia said in a statement.

William Link, the co-creator of classic TV series including “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote,” has died at the age of 87.

Link’s widow, Margery Nelson, told Deadline that her husband died of congestive heart failure on Sunday.

A prolific TV writer-producer throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Link was best known for his collaborations with writing partner and longtime friend Richard Levinson.

Link and Levinson co-created dozens of shows together, including “Murder She Wrote,” “Columbo,” “Mannix,” “Jericho” and “Ellery Queen.” The duo also co-authored the books “Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at the Making of Prime-Time Television” and “Off Camera: Conversations with the Makers of Prime-time Television.”

Steven Spielberg, who counts the pilot episode of “Columbo” as one of his first directing credits in Hollywood, remembered Link as a generous and patient mentor.

“Bill’s truly good nature always inspired me to do good work for a man who, along with Dick Levinson,...

William Link, a writer and producer known for co-creating “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote,” died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles on Sunday, his niece confirmed to Variety. He was 87.

Over the course of Link’s decades-long television career, he became known for working alongside screenwriter and producer Richard Levinson. The duo collaborated on a number of projects, including both “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote.”

Steven Spielberg, who directed the first episode of “Columbo,” paid tribute to Link on Tuesday.

“Bill’s truly good nature always inspired me to do good work for a man who, along with Dick Levinson, was a huge part of what became my own personal film school on the Universal lot,” Spielberg said in a statement. “Bill was one of my favorite and most patient teachers and, more than anything, I learned so much from him about the true anatomy of a plot. I...

Prolific television writer-producer William Link, co-creator of classic TV series including Columbo and Murder She Wrote among others, died Sunday, December 27 of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles, his wife, Margery Nelson, told Deadline. He was 87.

Link was born in Elkins Park, Pa, a suburb of Philadelphia, on December 15, 1933.

In a career spanning more than 60 years, Link was best known for his collaboration with the late Richard Levinson. The two – who first met at the age of 14 and began collaborating almost immediately on stories, radio scripts, and dramas – saw television’s potential to capture the current scene and contribute to the national discussion about such subjects as race relations, student unrest, and gun violence.

Co-created by Link and Levinson, Columbo, starring Peter Falk as LAPD homicide detective Columbo aired on NBC from 1971 to 1978. The character and show popularized the inverted detective story format, which begins by showing the commission of the crime and its perpetrator.

Editors’ Note: With full acknowledgment of the big-picture implications of a pandemic that has already claimed thousands of lives, cratered global economies and closed international borders, Deadline’s Coping With Covid-19 Crisis series is a forum for those in the entertainment space grappling with myriad consequences of seeing a great industry screech to a halt. The hope is for an exchange of ideas and experiences, and suggestions on how businesses and individuals can best ride out a crisis that doesn’t look like it will abate any time soon.

Otto Penzler has devoted himself to books, mysteries a specialty. His store, The Mysterious Bookshop, has been in business since the 1970s. Beyond being a fixture among independent New York City booksellers, Penzler founded several publishing companies including the Mysterious Press, Penzler Publishers, Scarlet, and Mysteriouspress.com; he’s won two Edgar Awards, an Ellery Queen and a Raven and has edited over 60 books.

Ken Swofford, the familiar character actor who played the stubborn vice principal Quentin Morloch for three seasons on the TV adaptation of Fame, has died. He was 85.

Swofford died Thursday, his grandson Brandon Swofford announced. He was a longtime resident of Pacific Grove, California.

The red-headed Swofford also portrayed the reporter Frank Flannigan on the admired but short-lived 1975-76 NBC series Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton, and he recurred as Lt. Catalano on several episodes of another sleuthing series, Angela Lansbury's Murder, She Wrote.

Swofford frequently played lawmen of various stripes, doing so on other shows like The Odd Couple, Petrocelli, Switch, Police ...

Ken Swofford, the familiar character actor who played the stubborn vice principal Quentin Morloch for three seasons on the TV adaptation of Fame, has died. He was 85.

Swofford died Thursday, his grandson Brandon Swofford announced. He was a longtime resident of Pacific Grove, California.

The red-headed Swofford also portrayed the reporter Frank Flannigan on the admired but short-lived 1975-76 NBC series Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton, and he recurred as Lt. Catalano on several episodes of another sleuthing series, Angela Lansbury's Murder, She Wrote.

Swofford frequently played lawmen of various stripes, doing so on other shows like The Odd Couple, Petrocelli, Switch, Police ...

John Hillerman, the actor who made a career out of playing snooty types, including Tom Selleck's fastidious estate caretaker Jonathan Quayle Higgins III on Magnum, P.I., died Thursday. He was 84.

Hillerman, who received four Emmy nominations in consecutive years for portraying Higgins and won in 1987, died at his home in Houston, family spokeswoman Lori De Waal told the Associated Press. She said the cause of death had not been determined.

His Higgins character was a natural extension of a part he played on the TV detective show Ellery Queen: Simon Brimmer, a radio personality and affected gent who fancied...

Seduction of the Innocent will release on February 19, 2013. New York Times bestselling author Max Allan Collins, known for his book Road to Perdition, once again has outdone himself with Seduction of the Innocent, which blends fact and fiction in a true-thriller fashion!

Amanda Dyar: Seduction of the Innocent is an upcoming novel from yourself that focuses on the real life story of 1950s proposed ban of violent and horror-filled comic books. How did you become involved in this project, and how did you prepare for the beginning of your work?

Max Allan Collins: Seduction of the Innocent takes a fairly lighthearted approach to a serious subject, and I hope it doesn't stint on either one. The format is a Golden Age mystery -- that's the era of Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner -- since the '50s setting of the novel is appropriate to that kind of story.

Amazon has released their early Black Friday Deals Week schedule beginning Monday, November 19 and running through Monday, November 26 and I have added the entire list in its state below and will be updating as more and more titles are added it to it and considering the limited number of Blu-ray titles included I have to assume this thing is going to get beefed up. There are some notable titles beginning with the Gold Box Deal on Saturday, November 24 where the Blu-ray edition of the recently released amazon asin="B006U1J5ZY" text="Bond 50: The Complete 22 Film Collection" will be on sale. The price has not yet been announced, but as of right now it sits at $149.99 and I wouldn't be surprised if it drops under $100 on that day so stay tuned. Additional titles on sale throughout the eight day sale include X-Men Origins: Wolverine, X-Men: The Last Stand,...

Mickey Spillane grabbed his position in the pop culture pantheon much like his iconic creation, private eye Mike Hammer, made his way through a case: through a sort of literary brute force, blasting away with heavy doses of graphic violence, steamy sex, and a style which reviewers often considered the prose version of a blunt object.

As a mystery writer, Spillane wasn’t as clever as Evan Hunter, nor as introspective as late career Ross MacDonald, nor did he have the insider’s street savvy of George V. Higgins, or the prose command of Raymond Chandler. Read today, some of his stuff seems so familiar and stale and excessive it borders on camp. But, whatever one’s qualitative judgment on Spillane and his canon, there’s no doubt his impact on the mystery genre – and the private eye tale in particular – was both massive and indelible, reaching beyond the printed...

Unforgettable

Created by John Bellucci and Ed Redlich

Based on J. Robert Lennon’s short story The Rememberer

imdb, CBS, Tuesdays at 10 Pm

1.01 Pilot

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Written by John Bellucci and Ed Redlich

Based on J. Robert Lennon’s short story “The Rememberer”

1.02 Heroes

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Written by Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin

1.03 Check Out Time

Directed by John David Coles

Written by Joan Binder Weiss

1.04 Up in Flames

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Written by Michael Foley and Erik Oleson

*****

Launching a new police procedural is tricky. On one hand, you have to stand out from all the competition – especially visually. At the same time, you have to be familiar enough not to alienate viewers. You have to be old, but in a new way.

Unforgettable has an interesting twist on the Sherlock Holmes formula that it is able to express in a visual way,...

This last Monday, August 8, maestro and auteur Guillermo Del Toro rolled into The Walter Read Theater at Lincoln Center in NYC with the cast and director of the new fright film Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark, for the premiere of the movie he has been trying get made since 1998!John Wildman, from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, was kind enough to send these pictures of the event, to share with those tragic geeks (me) who are dying to see the film, but can't travel across country just to see one movie...yet.The film, a remake of a truly creepy 1973 television horror film of the same name,  starring Kim Darby (the original True Grit)and Jim Hutton (television's Ellery Queen), finally gets released...

The remains of '50s B-movie actress and former Playboy model Yvette Vickers were found in her L.A. home. She was 82.

A neighbor noticed cobwebs on Vickers' mailbox, and when she entered the dilapidated house, she found the actress' decomposing body. Vickers had long been a recluse -- and could have been dead for as long as a year, reports the Los Angeles Times.

"She kept to herself, had friends and seemed like a very independent spirit,...

Actor who rose to fame in Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers On a Train, but refused to conform to Hollywood pressures

Early on in his career, the actor Farley Granger, who has died aged 85, worked with several of the world's greatest directors, including Alfred Hitchcock on Rope (1948) and Strangers On a Train (1951), Nicholas Ray on They Live By Night (1949) and Luchino Visconti on Senso (1953). Yet Granger failed to sustain the momentum of those years, meandering into television, some stage work and often indifferent European and American movies.

The reasons were complicated, owing much to his sexuality and an unwillingness to conform to Hollywood pressures, notably from his contract studio, MGM, and Samuel Goldwyn. Granger refused to play the publicity or marrying game common among gay and bisexual stars and turned down roles he considered unsuitable, earning a reputation – in his own words – for being "a naughty boy".

He was also the victim of bad luck,...

NBC’s Ellery Queen Mysteries only lasted one season, but it remains a favorite among fans of TV detective shows in general, and fans of writer-producers Richard Levinson and William Link in particular. Following their success with Mannix and Columbo, Levinson and Link had the clout to pursue a series based on Ellery Queen, whose stories they had bonded over in junior high. “Ellery Queen” was the pseudonym of another mystery-loving pair, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, two cousins who stuck the name on novels, short stories, magazine anthologies, movies, radio dramas, and the protagonist of all the above. Their ...

American writer and producer Michael Rhodes has lost his battle with cancer, aged 74.

Rhodes died last week at a Los Angeles hospital, according to his daughter Laura. Further details regarding his illness had not been released as WENN went to press.

Rhodes was perhaps best-known for shaping 1970s U.S. TV crime dramas Ellery Queen and Delvecchio, which starred Judd Hirsch.

His other producing credits include TV shows Operation Petticoat and Mariah, and small screen films The Return of Frank Cannon and Captive.

Rhodes is survived by his mother, a son, two daughters, a stepdaughter and three grandchildren.

Michael Rhodes, a producer and writer who shaped 1970s TV crime dramas "Ellery Queen" and "Delvecchio," died Oct. 7 of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 74.

Rhodes' version of "Ellery Queen" ran on NBC from 1975-76 and starred Jim Hutton as a writer-sleuth who helps his NYPD detective father solve crimes. "Delvecchio," another Universal TV series, was written by Steven Bochco and starred Judd Hirsch as an Los Angeles detective; it ran 1976-77 on CBS.

Other producing credits for Rhodes include the series "Operation Petticoat" and "Mariah" and the telefims "The Return of Frank Cannon" and "Captive."

He is survived by his children Ross, Laura and Camila; his step-daughter Nikki; his grandchildren Ethan, Ella and Zen; and his mother Rose.

A ceremony to celebrate his life will take place at 3 p.m. Sunday at Braemar Country Club in Tarzana. The family asks that donations be made to...

Each episode of Ellery Queen Mysteries opens with a narration: in a few minutes, this man (or woman) will be murdered, or some variation of that, and then proceeds to list off virtually all of the potential suspects. Each listing is accompanied by a quick clip from the episode, in which the suspect says something incriminating. This is a clean and deliberate evocation of old-time radio, in which the narrator was key to holding the story together, as there were no visuals for the scriptwriters to rely upon. It sets the tone for the rest of the series, which, even though it aired in the middle of the 1970s, feels deliberately quaint even for that time period, evoking as it does not merely the days of radio, but also the long-since-gone days of the British crime novel (even though this is set in New York) . It would be a mistake,...

Memory can play tricks on you. I fondly recalled the TV series Ellery Queen Mysteries ($59.98; E1), with a tall gangly Jim Hutton (father of Timothy) shambling his way through an episode and then turning to the camera (to me!) and asking if we'd figured it out. The Ellery Queen mysteries were famous for that: they provided all the clues upfront so that if you were clever and smart, you had just as good a chance of figuring out whodunit as the sleuth. Oddly, Ellery Queen has never been very successful outside of books and short stories, where he's sold a reported 150 million copies and counting. A hit radio series lasted quite a few years, but every TV incarnation was a flop, including this one, which lasted only one season. Still, it's warmly remembered by fans as faithful to...

Need a fix for your Castle craving in between new episodes? Then you'd do well to enter the Ellery Queen Mysteries DVD contest, All 22 uncut and unedited episodes of the classic NBC series starring Jim Hutton as the titular writer who helps his detective father (David Wayne) solve mysteries that "baffle the New York City police force". That sounds really familiar, doesn't it Castle fans? Well, now you can win the complete set.

With methods that were arcane and intellectual, rather than action-oriented, Ellery Queen always managed to astound his father and the force by arriving at the correct solution to a crime by purely deductive reasoning. And, in keeping with this approach, the signature of this celebrated crime series was to engage the audience in figuring out whodunit. At the end of each show, just before Queen revealed his solution to the episode’s mystery, the entire slew of...

Nan Martin was a leading character actress on stage, screen and television for over fifty years. She may be best remembered by horror fans for her role as Amanda Krueger (aka Sister Mary Helena), the mother of supernatural serial killer Freddy Krueger, in 1987’s A Nightmare in Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, with Robert Englund as Freddy.

Martin was born in Decatur, Illinois, on July 15, 1927, and was raised in Santa Monica, California. She began performing on stage while attending UCLA, and worked as a fashion model in the late 1940s. She subsequently moved to New York, where she made her Broadway debut in 1950. She appeared in several other Broadway productions, and continued to perform on stage throughout her career.

She also appeared frequently on television from the mid-1950s, with roles in such series as The Twilight Zone as Laura Ford in the 1963 episode “The Incredible World of Horace Ford”, The Invaders,...