The Grassy Knoll (1993) by William Harrington

William Harrington was an American writer who ended his own life in 2000 and left behind a self-written obituary in which he revealed to have ghostwritten the detective novels credited to the daughter of President Harry S. Truman, Margaret Truman, but his claim has been disputed – describing his role as that of a research collaborator. So, while not the celebrity ghostwriter he claimed to have been, Harrington had written many novels under his own name since the 1960s and penned six original Columbo TV tie-in novels during the 1990s. Now that's something he should have bragged about in his obituary! 

The Grassy Knoll (1993) is the first of Harrington's six Columbo TV tie-in novels and he took an interesting approach to translating the series format, or formula, to the printed page.

All of the usual stuff is there with Columbo and the reader knowing who committed the murder and how it was done, but not why and figuring out the motive gives Columbo an opportunity to act as a proper homicide cop. So it's not merely Columbo stalking to the killers and waging a war on their nerves. It's an inverted whydunit presented as a modern police procedural that unmistakably takes place in the early '90s. 

The Paul Drury Show is the most popular show on the KWLF Los Angeles television station, which is basically a televised radio talk show with call-ins, whose well-known host is obsessed with one of the most famous murder cases in the history of the United States – namely the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Paul Drury had dedicated forty-eight episodes of his show to the JFK murder case, amusingly pitting dogged detectives and researchers against "some asshole who's read three books about it," which made those episodes the most popular of the show. The opening chapter shows that forty-eighth episode about the assassination that include some of the call-ins ("Have you ever heard of the Society of the Illuminati? Nothing happens those guys don't sanction").

So it was a good show and episode, but the would end very badly for Paul Drury. When he arrived home, there were two people waiting for him in his garage, Alicia Graham Drury and Peter Edmonds.

Peter is the producer of The Paul Drury Show and Alicia is his assistant producer, as well as his girlfriend and Paul's ex-wife, who have fabricated an alibi by leaving a time-stamped message with a recording Paul's voice on an telephone answering machine – using a cutting-edge piece of technology known as Sony Walkman. They also staged a burglary and finished the job by putting two bullets in the back of Paul's head. Alicia and Peter hardly can believe their luck when they meet the disheveled Lieutenant Columbo with his tousled head of hair, crumpled raincoat and wandering mind ("what a dolt!"), because, if they could have "picked a detective to investigate this case," they "couldn't have done better than him." But they pretty soon discover that Columbo is "not as dumb as he acts" as he inches towards a solution.

I was tempted to use the locked room and impossible crime tags for this review, because had the book been played as who-and howdunit, the murder Paul Drury would have looked like a quasi-impossible crime. The house is protected with burglar-alarms, hyper sensitive motion detectors and PIN card system that deactivates the system. There's not much of a mystery about it: Alicia simply held on to a spare card and Columbo knows it. The murderers were also a little to familiar with the layout of the house to have been an outsider, but there's another, somewhat dated, technological aspect to the plot.

Paul Drury was with the times and had compiled a "private electronic library" on his computer that contained "the world's largest collection of assassination minutiae," which has "the equivalent of thousands of volumes of information stored in it," but the harddisk had been wiped clean by "an outlaw instruction code" – i.e. a telephone transmitted computer virus. But did he make copies of his digital library? There's a collection of microdiskettes, or floppies, that will come to play an important role in the case. Naturally, Columbo needs some modern experts to help him make sense of these modern-day clues, which is really what sets this book apart from the TV-series.

Columbo is not depicted here as a lone wolf relentlessly stalking and pestering the murderers, like prey, but as a cog in the machine of a large police apparatus and even has an assistant, Detective Martha Zimmer. She proves very helpful in resolving another rather amusing plot-thread as Columbo has is ordered to report at the pistol range to requalify with his service revolver. Only problem is that never carries his revolver, lost it and can't shoot to save his life. More importantly, Columbo relies on the expertise of his colleagues to shed light on the various aspects of the case.

For example, the pathologist and an audio-technician proved very useful in helping breakdown the murderer's alibi, but the lack of a clear motive also forced Columbo to delve deeper into the background of his suspects and interviews several witnesses – which eventually brings him to a Las Vegas casino and Caesars Palace. What he comes across are the last remnants of the glory days of the Italian mafia, the legacy of right wing militias and newly discovered photographs that could shed new light on the Kennedy assassination. Those old, grainy photographs revealed their long-held, hidden details when they're "computer enhanced" and touched-up by an artist. So this may very well be one of the earliest examples of the zoom-and-enhance TV trope and it was used in a TV tie-in novel.

Anyway, you can see how The Grassy Knoll is a little bit different from your average Columbo episode, but Columbo is still Columbo, whose sharp mind is cloaked in a disheveled wardrobe, deceiving befuddlement, cheap cigars and homely anecdotes about Mrs. Columbo. Slowly, but surely, Columbo continues to chip away at the case and closes in on the murderers. Columbo is not able to close the whole case as the historical JFK plot-thread ended up raising more questions than it answered. But then again, I suppose that was kind of the point. I just wish Columbo actually came up with a clever solution to the mystery. Even if he couldn't officially solve it.

Nevertheless, the murder of President Kennedy had an interesting connection to the motive and story proposed an alternative motive that has to be turned into a detective or thriller novel. Columbo learns that the assassination has become "a multimillion-dollar industry" with books, documentaries, movies and television series, but those millions would dry up if Drury had "absolute evidence" proving who did kill Kennedy. It would kill a very lucrative industry, because people enjoy "some deep, dark conspiracy" more than the truth. 

So, on a whole, The Grassy Knoll is not exactly Columbo as seen on TV, but Harrington deserves praise for understanding that a few hundred pages can tell a more fully realized story than roughly 90-minutes of TV and decided to use it to flesh-out the other aspects of the police investigation – while remaining faithful to the original character. Columbo is still Columbo, but Harrington gave fans a little extra by showing more of Columbo as a homicide cop. I enjoyed it and can heartily recommended to other Columbo fans and mystery readers.

You can definitely expect more from Harrington's Columbo novels sometime in the future as I'm already eyeing The Helter Skelter Murders (1994), The Hoffa Connection (1995) and The Hoover Files (1998). But my next read is going to be an obscure, somewhat hard-to-get (locked room) mystery novel from the 1990s. I actually wanted to return to Christopher Bush or Brian Flynn, but that one arrived today and decided not to let it linger too long. So don't touch that dial!

Where the Truth Lies

"Well, whatever it is, it sure must be most unusual. Uh, the reason I say that is because, you know, when my wife and I try to remember what happened yesterday or the day before, well, we don't agree on anything."

- Lt. Columbo (Dagger of the Mind, 1972)

A warning to the reader: this is going to be a filler-post involving conflicting memories, parallel universes, Columbo and Dr. Watson's brain. This is your only chance to turn away and come back within a day or two when I have regular review up. You've been warned!

Recently, I stumbled across a website, The Mandela Effect, collecting shared, alternate memories of events and popular culture that contradict the recorded history of our plain of reality – indicating to some that we're sliding between parallel universes.

A popular series of children's books, The Berenstain Bears, is central to this phenomenon, because people across the world swear they remember the name being spelled as BerenSTEIN.

It became enough of a thing that (reputedly) the son of the creators, Mike Berenstain, felt compelled to respond to a particular blog-post to explain the history of his family name and how "most people have just misread the name." A reasonable that has done nothing to make the debate subside. Other examples include confusion over the date of Nelson Mandela's death, the number of states within the U.S. and the titles of TV-series or movies. 

Dr. John H. Watson

As a consummate reader of detective fiction, I was immediate reminded of a phenomenon known within mystery circles as Dr. Watson's faulty memory, which is especially notable in two particular short stories: "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" from His Last Bow (1892) and "The Adventure of the Resident Patient" from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893).

The stories open on a very similar, almost identical scene that has Holmes performing a mind-reading trick on Watson, which was the result of some editorial acrobats, but in their universe it's Watson's unreliable memory that recollected that moment at the start of two completely different cases. And this wasn't the only time Watson's mind became fuzzy on the finer details. He ascribed the first name of James to both Holmes' arch-nemesis, Prof. James Moriarty, and his brother, Col. James Moriarty, which makes no sense at all!

So I agree with Mike Berenstain's simple explanation. However, I can understand why some people would freak out over this, because I have a crispy clear memory of an alternative ending to one of my favorite Columbo episodes. A faulty memory I had shelved away as a Watsonian lapse of the mind, but when I came across the Mandela effect I saw an opportunity for a filler post! 

Columbo: Oh, the mind boggles, sir!

Try and Catch Me (1977) is arguably one of the greatest Columbo episodes, in which Lt. Columbo's opponent is one of the most likeable murderers you'll ever meet on the small screen: a small, somewhat elfish-looking mystery writer, named Abigail Mitchell, who avenged her niece by locking the murderer inside her walk-in safe – which eventually began to lack the oxygen needed to breath.

Well, I was quite surprised, even a little shocked, upon re-watching Try and Catch Me for the second time, because I remembered a completely different ending to the episode. I remembered Columbo allowing Abigail Mitchell to get away and even handed over the car keys, a key piece (pun!) of evidence, to her, but that was not the ending I saw the second time around. On the contrary! Columbo makes no bones about it: she's coming with him to the police station.

Abigail Mitchell even asks Columbo if he "would consider making an exception" in her case. After all, she's "an old woman, quite harmless, all in all." To which Columbo replies, "you're a very professional person in your work and so am I." However, the episode ends with a line suggesting an alternate time-line, "if you had investigated my niece's death, all this need never have happened," but that would've made for an entirely different story altogether.

There's nothing in the episode that would justify the ending I initially remembered, but I've got a possible explanation as to why my mind butchered my recollection of the episode: it was during the time I began to discover the detective genre in earnest and wanted everything to be exactly like my favorite detective stories, which, at the time, included Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934) – which is a book that shares in the blame of turning me into the mystery addict you know today. If you know the solution of that mystery and its morally ambigious ending, you probably understand why my mind did what it did.

Well, that's all I've to say on this subject. I wish I could've delivered the definitive proof of dual realities, but hey, what you gonna do.

Hopefully, I have a new review up before long and meanwhile, you could check out my recent reviews of Freeman Wills Crofts' classic debut novel, The Cask (1920), or Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee at Work (1967), which is collection of short stories.

Oh, and my sincere apologies for wasting your time with this post.

Columbo: Miracles for Sale

"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."

- Dr. Samuel Johnson

Columbo Goes to the Guillotine (1989) was the opening episode of the eight series and marked the return to the airwaves of the disheveled homicide detective after a hiatus that lasted more than a decade, but the intervening period had not dulled the lieutenants prey drive or his duplicitous appearance – never missing a beat as he doggedly pursues an opponent who's in the business of selling miracles.  

Elliott Blake is a self-professed psychic medium, who’s trying to weasel his way into a well-funded military think-tank program that studies claims of extraordinary sensory perception and finding a military purpose for it. Naturally, Blake's claims are as a legit as a stack of counterfeit bank notes and the only reason he has been getting away with his duplicity is because he has someone on the inside, Dr. Paula Hall, to help him achieve the desired results. But it also gives the heads of the think-tank hope that they finally got their hands on a genuine psychic specimen, who can perform miracles on demand and plan to stage another test conducted under the supervision of Max Dyson – an ex-magician exposing fraudulent mediums and explaining supernatural phenomena. 

Before the test, Blake and Dyson meet on a bridge cloaked in the rags and tatters of a misty evening and we learn that the gentlemen were imprisoned together in an African goal, where Dyson got out of before Blake, and the two opponents part ways like two duelists taking their paces. A very Doylean scene, if you ask me, somewhat reminiscent to Jonathan Small's story in Sign of Four (1890).

Dyson's experiment involves distant viewing and Blake is positioned in an isolation chamber, while three soldiers are scattered throughout the city in unmarked cars each with a small suitcase consisting of a blind fold, a marker, a city map book, a rubber band and a Polaroid camera. The soldiers have to blindfold themselves, flip through the book to mark a random location and drive to it in order to snap a picture and send it to HQ. Meanwhile, Blake is probing the minds of the soldiers, drawing pictures of what they photographed, and they match up pretty good! What I liked about the solution is that's basically textbook stuff, as Jonathan Creek would've said, that only works on paper, but what made it work here was that the trick was pulled-off under rigorous test conditions. It's so clever that the one trick that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to pull off becomes possible when you put a few obstacles in its way to prevent cheating. 

One, none-spoilorish, question though: were the really handheld scanners like that back in 1988/9?

The penetrating stare of a first-rate mind.

Anyway, performing a magic trick in front of a captivated audience, insistent on being fooled, is not, necessarily, a crime that garners the attention of one of the homicide squads finest, but Blake went back to Dyson when he was tinkering with his guillotine and leaves his old cellmate headless in his sealed apartment – and before long Columbo comes knocking on his door.

When the lock is cut out of the door, the lieutenant is confronted with what appears to be either a bizarre accident or a grotesque suicide, but the detective makes a few astute deductions that convince him that he's dealing with a murder. A magician friend of Dyson, Bert Spindler, puts Columbo on the trail of Elliott Blake and a battle-of-wits and deceit commences. Even though we know the murderer's identity from the outset, Columbo's observations on a screwdriver, groceries, tears shed at a funeral and the fact that Dyson died a day after his first defeat at the hands of a psychic are more clues and hints than is necessary for inverted mystery that plays out in front of your very eyes, but I love that the writer took the time to explain his suspicions. Not as much attention is bestowed on the problem of the locked doors and windows, Columbo finds the solution in a book entitled Locked Room Magic, however, I can forgive this since there was already a grand trick in this episode with Columbo reconstructing it towards the end. So I was already more than satisfied in that department.

Unfortunately, Blake is a lousy foil for the Great Detective, but only because he was accurately characterized. Blake's whole shtick is essentially being this enlightened being who unlocked the secret powers of his mind, but when you take that away you're left with a rather dumb, gullible person who gets by on a few tricks taught to him by Dyson and Columbo played him like a violin throughout the episode. Fun enough, absolutely, but I revel when Columbo has to chase a murderer as clever as him and one who sees right through him – often resulting in a nifty character sketch of the tousle headed sleuth.  

Here's the murderer from Prescription: Murder (1967):

"You never stop, do you? ... The insinuations, the change of pace. You're a bag of tricks, Columbo, right down to that prop cigar you use... I'm going to tell you something about yourself. You think you need a psychologist. Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but you are a textbook example of compensation... Compensation. Adaptability. You're an intelligent man, Columbo, but you hide it. You pretend you're something you're not. Why, because of your appearance you think you can't get by on looks or polish, so you turn a defect into a virtue. You take people by surprise. They underestimate you. And that's where you trip them up."

The killer's opinion on Columbo who was hounded by him in Ransom for a Dead Man (1971):

"You know Columbo, you're almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it's the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks... The humility, the seeming absentmindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family, the wife, you know... Yeah, Lt. Columbo fumbling and stumbling along but it's always the jugular that he's after. And I imagine that more often than not he's successful."

 And a final character analysis comes from Columbo's opponent from How to Dial a Murder (1978):

"You're a fascinating man, Lieutenant... You pass yourself off as a puppy in a raincoat happily running around the yard digging holes all up in the garden, only you're laying a mine field and wagging your tail."

I love it when Columbo has to fight a duel-of-wits on equal grounds, but that does take nothing away from the pleasure or cleverness of Columbo Goes to the Guillotine and enthusiasts of locked rooms should queue this in their to-watch-list – even if you've already seen it. Murder is just so much more fun when Lt. Columbo is fumbling and stumbling through a case, even in the re-run! 

I also reviewed Columbo Likes the Nightlife (2003).

Columbo: Final Questions

"You pass yourself off as a puppy in a raincoat happily running around the yard digging holes all up in the garden, only you're laying a mine field and wagging your tail."

- How the Dial a Murder.

Peter Falk (1927 – 2011)

It has been a busy week here, with new material popping-up at the top of the page nearly every day and the plan was to trickle down the outpour of activity a little bit after uploading the review of Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Puppets (1944). But then the news broke that Peter Falk, whose disheveled appearance, from the rumpled raincoat, stumpy cigar and a tousled head of hair, was as iconic as the deerstalker and the underslung pipe, had passed away – and I just knew I had to watch and discuss a Columbo episode in his honor. 

Columbo slipped into his wrinkled raincoat, to doggedly pursue murderers, long before I was born, but I catch-up with the decades that preceded my existence in just few short years – as I watched well-nigh every episode on DVD and enjoyed almost every minute of it. There were a few clunkers (the embarrassing episode with the robot immediately springs to mind), but even they rarely had a dull moment. But this also left me with a dilemma: should I revisit one of my favorite episodes, like Try and Catch Me and Columbo Goes to the Guillotines, or watch one I hadn't seen yet? After an internal monologue, which turned into a heated debate, I decided it would be fitting to settle on Columbo Likes the Nightlife – as it was the final episode filmed and shows this to be a series that simply will never age and that Columbo is as timeless as Sherlock Holmes.

The episode was shot in 2002 and aired in early 2003, and gives the series a fresh paint job. Remember the opening credits from the 1970/80s, in which the yellow-colored, typewritten opening credits were somewhat shakily superimposed on the screen? Here they've been substituted for flashy computer graphics and techno music, but the set-up succeeding this new opening still follows the same, unaltered classic Columbo format that we all fell in love with. 

Columbo Likes the Nightlife kicks off with the, more or less, accidental demise of Tony Galper at the hands of his ex-wife Venessa – a two-bit actress who employs her new boyfriend, rave promoter and future club owner Justin Price, to obscure the body. Their operation goes without hitch until they start receiving blackmail demands from a notorious tabloid journalist and they realize that he leaves them with only one recourse: murder!

At the scene of the crime

The murder of this two-penny mudracker is another indication that the series has moved along with the times. The on-screen killings were always very clean, usually a single gunshot aimed at the torso of the intended victim, but here we have a particular messy and graphic murder – which commences when Justin Price pretends he's dropping off the blackmail money. He slaps a cord around his neck and chokes him into semi-unconsciousness, ties the cord to a rusty old radiator and when he struggles to his feet he hurtles him out of an open window – at which the radiator is torn from the wall and plummets with its attached weight four floors to an ugly mess on the pavement. You'd almost think you're watching an episode from CSI at this point, but that delusion is quickly dispelled with Columbo's arrival on the scene – who does a top-notch job deducing, by the smell of mouthwash and toe-nail clippings, that the man was murdered and the look on the officers face as the disheveled lieutenant crawls all over the body is just funny. Note that Columbo touches everything with his bare hands and you can only imagine the apologetic shock the crew of CSI would have if they saw him "processing" this crime scene. 


From here on out, the ruffled veteran policeman does what he knows best: driving the felons with their backs up against the wall and he does it with the same playfulness as a cat before pouncing on a mouse – demonstrating that even the passing of three decades wasn't enough the blunt the edge of this old coated bobcat.

Last year, Crippen & Landru carried Columbo into the current decade with the publication of The Columbo Collection, penned by series creator William Link, and this new batch of stories impressed upon me that, even though Peter Falk is no more, the character he portrayed is still out there pursuing murderers who were laboring under the naïve assumption that they were getting away with a perfectly executed murder – and he will be on that job long after you and me have been consumed by the earth or blown to dust by the incinerator.

Oh, just one more thing... Peter Falk, thanks for more than three decades worth of quality television and may you rest in peace!