Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982-83)

Tales of the Gold Monkey is a U.S. action/adventure TV series which ran for a single season from 1982 to 1983. It was created by Donald P. Bellisario who was also responsible for such cool 80s TV classics as Magnum, P,I. and Airwolf. The cancellation of the series was not due to poor ratings. The show was a huge hit. It was network politics that killed it.

Although you could certainly be forgiven for assuming that Tales of the Gold Monkey was clearly hoping to capitalise on the recent success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (it does belong to the same “rugged individualistic adventurer in exotic locales” genre) in fact Bellisario pitched the series to the network a year before Spielberg’s movie was released. His inspiration was the classic 1939 Howard Hawks movie Only Angels Have Wings.

The setting is the fictional South Pacific island Bora Gora, a French colonial possession.

Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) is an American airman with a small air cargo operation using a Grumman Goose amphibian (which happens to be my favourite aircraft of all time). He has an offsider named Corky (Jeff MacKay), a genius mechanic but with a chronically poor memory due to over-indulgence in alcoholic beverages. He also has a bad-tempered one-eyed dog named Jack.

Jake has a habit of trying to rescue damsels in distress but in the pilot episode his latest attempt, involving cute red-headed chanteuse Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O’Heaney), gets him into all kinds of trouble. Sarah will become a regular character. There’s something very important about Sarah that Jake doesn’t know. She’s a spy.

Another regular character is Bon Chance Louie. He owns the Monkey Bar which is the island’s social hub and he’s the local representative of the French Government. He has the reputation of being lucky. He did after all survive the guillotine. In the pilot he is played by Ron Moody but Roddy McDowall takes over the role in the series.

Another regular is German missionary Willie Tenboom (John Calvin). We know from the start that he’s a German spy but he’s a sympathetic character and a nice guy. He is devoted to his parishioners who seem to be entirely attractive young women. One of them acts as his personal assistant. If she’s a good girl he gives her a blessing. She looks forward to that. There’s nothing a girl likes more than a good blessing. The Reverend believes that young women need to be blessed as often as possible.

And then there Princess Koji (Marta DuBois). She’s a Japanese princess involved in various ventures of dubious legality. She has a private samurai army. She’s a sexy bad girl, but not really evil.

Jake is also in trouble with Jack, having lost the dog’s false eye (which is a sapphire mounted in an opal) in a poker game.

There are monkey-men, venomous snakes and samurai warriors. And the island of Baku is an active volcano. A very active volcano.

There are spies everywhere on Bora Gora, from various nations. There are German, American and Japanese spies and possibly some freelancers. The German spies are in search of the legendary gold monkey of the island of Baku.

You have to remember that this is 1938. Japan was at peace with the U.S. and France. Germany was at peace with the U.S. and France. Princess Koji does not have the slightest dislike for the French or the Americans. She’s a businesswoman. Louis has no issues with her as long as she doesn’t break any French laws within French territory (which she never does). She’s oddly fond of Jake and would rather like to get him into bed. The Reverend Willie Tenboom is an agent of German military intelligence but he’s not Gestapo and he’s a seriously nice guy. Everyone likes him and he likes everyone. Sarah is an American agent but it’s peacetime so her job is just to gather information. All the recurring characters are in fact good guys. They all get along pretty well.

Episode Guide

In the first episode there are spies and double agents everywhere and a plot to build a super-bomb. In the second episode, Shanghaied, Corky is shanghaied by a disreputable sea captain who needs his ship repaired. The captain is involved in an illicit and very nasty trade.

In the third episode, Black Pearl, a flying buddy of Jake’s from the old days in China shows up. He’s a bit disreputable but mostly he’s just an irresponsible dreamer, forever chasing after imaginary treasures or lost cities. Now he’s hooked up with a Watusi tribe who live on a nearby island. It’s crazy. What is a Watusi tribe doing on a Pacific island? Jake’s buddy is sure it has something to do with King Solomon’s Mines.

In the fourth episode, Escape from Death Island, Jake and Corky fly a visitor to a French penal island and find themselves imprisoned.

In Trunk from the Past a trunk is sent to Sarah containing relics collected by her late archaeologist father. He devoted his life to finding the tomb of a certain Egyptian Pharaoh and came up with a crazy theory that the tomb was located on an island in the South Pacific.

In episode six another old flying buddy of Jake’s turns up. And Randall McGraw (Lance LeGault) is always trouble. His cargo plane has gone down and it was carrying something that simply must be retrieved.

In Honor Thy Brother a Japanese fighter pilot wants revenge, Corky gets a wife he doesn’t want and Jack gets his eye back. Next up Jake crash lands on an island within the Japanese Mandate and it’s inhabited by Amish. And a tiger. And a Japanese officer obsessed with cowboy movies. In the next episode something very bad has happened to Sarah on a mission to Manila. It has something to do with General Macarthur.

In the next episode a baseball star visiting the island lands himself in very big trouble involving a local girl. Trouble that could get him lynched. In the following episode Jake, Corky and Sarah crash land on an island inhabited by apes, and they find an ape-boy. In High Stakes Lady Jake is tempted by high stakes poker and a glamorous blonde and of course he falls for her. But the stakes are more than just money.

In Force of Habit Jake discovers that nuns can be pretty dangerous.

In Last Chance Louie it’s Louie who finds that the past cannot be escaped. A new guest arrives on the island and Louis immediately shoots him. It seems that Louis is embarked on a course of self-destruction but he refuses to explain his strange behaviour.

In the next-to-last episode the trouble starts with an eclipse and then a politico-religious cut leader decides that Sarah must be punished for offending the gods. And then things get explosive. Literally.

In the final episode Princess Koji hires Jake as his bodyguard. It’s a very dangerous occupation.

Final Thoughts

There’s plenty of cheesiness but it’s undoubtedly deliberate and it’s combined with a considerable amount of coolness which for me is an intoxicating mix. The cast is uniformly excellent.

For my money Tales of the Gold Monkey is the best action-adventure series of the 80s. There’s just enough humour and romance, the plots are delightfully implausible but fun, the entire cast is excellent and it looks like a very very expensive series (which it was) in which the money was well spent. Very highly recommended.

The DVD release is still in print and extras include a very good “making of” documentary.

The Prisoner TV tie-in novel

In 1969 and 1970 three original novels based upon the television series The Prisoner were published by Ace Books. Since there is some ambiguity about their place in the timeline of the series it’s probably a very sound idea to watch the series before reading the novels. In the case of the first novel you really must be at least vaguely familiar with the TV series. That doesn’t mean you need to rewatch the entire series before reading it, but you need to know what the series is about.

The first of the novels is The Prisoner (later reissued as I Am Not a Number!) which was written by Thomas M. Disch. Disch was a prominent figure in American New Wave science fiction in the 60s. Given that The Prisoner has a very slight science fictional flavour and that New Wave SF tended to be paranoid and edgy Disch was perhaps a fairly appropriate writer for the assignment.

A man and a woman are having dinner in a restaurant. The relationship between them is not entirely clear but there’s some heavy flirting going on. The man has just quit his job. The woman is surprised that he was allowed to do so. He has bought himself a little cottage, a converted gatehouse, in Pembroke in Wales. He has only seen photographs of the cottage but he is sure it will suit him. He has spent the day looking at the furniture he would love to buy for his new home but it’s all hopelessly out of his price range. He will have to be content with cheaper more utilitarian furnishings.

He boards the train for Pembroke. A taxi takes him to a village which is disturbing in its excessive attempts at cuteness and cosiness. He had never been here before but it seems oddly but subtly familiar. He spots his cottage. It looks just as it did in the photos. He attaches no significance to the number 6 on the door. He is puzzled to find that all his furniture is there - the furniture he had fantasised about buying. The furniture that nobody had known that he desired.

He quickly discovers that he is a prisoner. Everybody in the Village is either a prisoner or a jailer but there is no telling which are which. Everybody is referred to by a number. He is Number 6. The person in charge is Number 2.

So it begins exactly as does the TV series, except that it’s not quite the same. There’s that  slight feeling that he’s been here before. If you’re familiar with the TV series you will know what’s going on, except for Number 6’s feeling of déjà vu. There’s something else going on here. And Number 6 has some strange gaps in his memory.

Of course if you know the TV series you know that Number 6 is a British secret agent who has quit the Secret Service. Disch obviously assumes that you do know the TV series and that you do know this but oddly (and I assume deliberately) the words spy or secret agent are never mentioned. Perhaps it’s those gaps in Number 6’s memory. He is obviously aware that he had worked for the government in some capacity connected with security or intelligence but perhaps he no longer remembers exactly what his job had been. Perhaps he no longer possesses the information that Number 2 wants.

When writing a TV tie-in novel it is essential to do nothing to undermine the premise of the TV series. Disch obeys this rule. There is nothing in the novel that is in any way in conflict with the TV series. It’s clearly the same Village. Number 6 is clearly the same Number 6. The themes of the novel are all present in the TV series. This is not a reboot or a re-imagining, but nor is it merely a retelling of the same story.

Disch has added nothing but has put slightly slightly more emphasis on aspects present or implicit in the series. Memory and identity become extremely important. Number 6 is desperately trying to cling to his sense of identity but if one loses parts of one’s memory one’s identity is in a sense threatened. That’s the case not just with Number 6 but with Number 41. She is the woman with whom he was having dinner at the beginning of the novel. Or she might be. Her name is really Liora. Or it might be. It might also be Lorna. How does she come to be in the Village? Is she a prisoner or a jailer? Can Number 6 trust her? Are any of the things she has told him true? And can she trust Number 6?

The paranoia goes deeper. There are things that are genuinely puzzling to Number 2. There are things about Number 6 that are not in line with Number 2’s expectations. And Number 2 also does not know whom he can trust. Even worse, he’s not sure if Number 1 trusts him.

So Disch amps up the paranoia and the sense of an intricate web of lies and deceptions, and the threat to identity. All of which are of course part and parcel of being a spy. And Disch handles these aspects with great skill.

And then Number 6 is persuaded to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, after which things get seriously weird.

I’m not sure this novel could really be considered as strictly belonging to The Prisoner canon but it’s an interesting riff on the same theme and a wild crazy science fiction spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed The Prisoner (1967-68) TV series.

The Lost World (1999-2002)

The Lost World is an adventure TV series based (rather loosely) on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic 1912 science fiction adventure novel of the same name. It was a Canadian-US-New Zealand-Australian co-production and was shot in Australia (in Queensland). It ran for three seasons.

The two-hour pilot episode (which was later split in two to comprise the first two episodes of the first season) is more than enough to get me interested. The fact that it’s directed by Richard Franklin helps. He was not only experienced but had an impressive background in feature films and gives it a cinematic look and feel.

The time setting is the 1920s, a good choice. This is a story that would be just too wildly implausible in a later time period.

Professor Challenger has found a manuscript, apparently the record of a journey to a hitherto unknown plateau in the wilds of South America. Challenger is convinced that the evidence in the manuscript will cause all existing theories on human evolution to be tossed out the window. The dinosaurs were not creatures that existed millions of years before humans. They are our contemporaries! The scientific establishment mocks him. The mockery is led by Dr Arthur Summerlee (Michael Sinelnikoff). Challenger announces that he will lead an expedition to find hard evidence. Dr Summerlee can join the expedition if he dares. Dr Summerlee does dare.

Other volunteers include experienced hunter and explorer Lord John Roxton and American newspaperman Ned Malone (David Orth). Malone has experience with hydrogen balloons and there’s no other way to reach the plateau. But there’s no money to fund the expedition until wealthy heiress Marguerite Krux offers unlimited funds as long as she can go along.

All of the characters have their own quirks. Challenger was one of Conan Doyle’s great creations, a gloriously bad-tempered argumentative tempestuous scientific genius. Peter McCauley plays him as rude, arrogant and overbearing but clearly a man with vision and charisma. That’s close enough to Conan Doyle’s conception for me. William Snow as Lord John Roxton is extremely good - he’s cynical and abrasive but he has charisma.

The weak link is the cast Jennifer O’Dell as jungle girl Veronica - she’s not terrible but she doesn’t convince us that she is a young woman who has lived alone in the jungle for eleven years. She seems too modern, too citified. Her attitudes are stridently and irritatingly late 90s. She’s totally out of place in this series. I found myself disliking her quite a bit at first, even though I have a thing for cute scantily-clad blonde jungle girls. I did however gradually warm to her quite a bit.

The standout performer is Rachel Blakely as Marguerite Krux. From the start Marguerite is a Woman of Mystery. We soon suspect that she is a Sexy Bad Girl. And then we discover that she is a treacherous scheming bitch and she’s well-versed in the art of using sex as a weapon. Which just made me love her even more. Marguerite isn’t trustworthy but she isn’t evil. Rachel Blakely oozes delicious naughtiness. She’s a delight.

The best thing about this series is its old-fashioned feel. The writers are not constantly agonising over whether the scripts might be problematic. What matter is - would this be a cool story for the next episode? There’s a refreshing lack of ideological lecturing.

And the writers are not afraid to let their imaginations run a bit wild.

The CGI dinosaurs are really only there because they were a commercial necessity. They were a major selling point. They’re of no importance. The focus is invariably on the strange bizarre human societies that our explorers find. And they’re strange and bizarre in interesting ways. There are villains who are not necessarily villains, wise virtuous leaders who may be neither wise nor virtuous, evil queens who might me misguided rather than evil. The stories are impressively varied and are not always resolved by heroic deeds.

It must have become obvious early that six regular cast members would be unwieldy so in most episodes we get two storylines running in parallel, each featuring three of the regular characters.

The Episodes

The pilot episode gets our adventurers to the plateau. There are indeed dinosaurs. And hostile tribes. And ape-men. Professor Challenger can easily collect the hard evidence he needs. The one fly in the ointment is that there is no way off the plateau.

They meet a cute blonde jungle girl, Veronica. She has lived on the plateau for eleven years since her scientist parents disappeared. She doesn’t care about science but she is obsessed with the idea of finding her parents.

In the next episode, More Than Human, our explorers find a lost culture. It’s like ancient Rome but ruled by lizard-men with humans as their slaves. This episode borrows a little from Planet of the Apes and very heavily from countless gladiator movies. How many clichés can you pack into 45 minutes? A lot! It doesn’t matter. The action keeps racing along and it’s fun.

Nectar is great fun. Giant killer bees! A sinister bee-woman! And a hideous fate awaiting if your heroes cannot escape from the world’s largest bee-hive.

Cave of Fear gives us a deliciously evil villainess, Lady Cassandra Yorkton (Rebecca Gibney). And the various members of the party have to confront guilts and fears from their pasts.

In Salvation Summerlee saves a drowning child and is accused of witchcraft. The most interesting thing here is a tribe that follows a religion that is a blending of Aztec religion and Roman Catholicism. And we discover something odd about Marguerite. She can read ancient inscriptions in a language of which she knows nothing. She doesn’t know how, but somehow she just knows the meaning of the inscriptions.

There’s been plenty of fun so far but obviously the series needed vampires. So in Blood Lust we get vampires. We get a sexy lady vampire who lives in a gothic castle. Both she and the castle look like they’re straight out of Hammer gothic horror film. It’s all very silly but very enjoyable.

In Out of Time Marguerite may have discovered her destiny as a high priestess and Veronica may have discovered her destiny as a mother. Packed with too many ideas most of which are pretty cringe and coherence falls by the wayside but somehow it works. It works because this series has that pulp fiction/old-time adventure yarn/B-movie sensibility that just makes it so much fun.

Paradise Found turns out to be the most flawed paradise imaginable.

In The Beast Within Malone is killed, but maybe not permanently. Whether the sham who saved him intended to do him a favour or not remains to be seen.

In Creatures of the Dark Marguerite, Malone and Challenger are trapped in a cave-in, they find a lot of gold and a lost race. All very interesting but the fact that they’re all sitting on top of an active volcano is of more immediate concern.

Things get seriously weird in Absolute Power. The explorers find an ancient ruin but there are some odd things about it. Such as the presence of a nuclear reactor. And then things get much stranger and maybe we’re dealing with two different realities at once. An ambitious episode but it’s pretty cool and it makes excellent use of the two storylines running in parallel technique.

Camelot is delightfully quirky. A distant descendant of King Arthur rules a tiny kingdom in which time has stood still. There are brave knights, dragons to slay (the dragons are of course dinosaur) and maidens to rescue. And of course, like King Arthur, this young king has a traitor in his midst. This episode is whimsical fun.

In Unnatural Selection Challenger meets an old scientific colleague who is conducting certain experiments. We quickly find out that he is a full-blown mad scientist. There are definite Island of Dr Moreau vibes here. And the secondary storyline involves a fairy princess!

Time After Time involves two time travellers with two very different agendas and Marguerite learns things about her destiny. There are also ninjas, but fortunately they’re remarkably incomp
etent ninjas.

In Prodigal Father Veronica finally finds her long-lost father but the reunion doesn’t turn out as she’d hoped. At this stage in the series you’re probably thinking that the one great disappointment is that we haven’t seen Marguerite and Veronica mud-wrestling. Well that omission is corrected in this episode.

Birthright begins with Marguerite, Ned and Roxton digging up the mummy of a long-dead Egyptian pharaoh. Only he’s not so dead. And he has a sister and our adventurers get mixed up in the family feud.

Resurrection starts with Roxton getting killed. Well, sort of. A strange disturbing child offers him a deal. He can live, but another man must die in his place. Roxton doesn’t like this idea but the kid adds that unless he accepts the deal Marguerite will die. Roxton will accept any conditions in order to save her. There’s also a magical sword involved.

In The Chosen One Roxton and Marguerite save a young man.

In Prophecy our explorer meet a larcenous gypsy fortune-teller, and there are disturbing signs that the raptors and capable of learning.

In Barbarians at the Gate one of those lizard-men makes a reappearance but maybe this time he will be an ally, albeit not a very reliable one. The episode ends with a fine old-fashioned cliffhanger.

Final Thoughts

Rip-roaring rollicking adventure just like in the good old days. Immensely entertaining and highly recommended.

Peter Gunn season 1 (1958)

Peter Gunn belongs to the first golden age of American private eye TV series. In the closing years of the 50s 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye and Richard Diamond, Private Detective all hit the airwaves. And, more interestingly, there was at the same time a crop of decidedly hardboiled TV private eyes - Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Johnny Staccato and Peter Gunn. These three series were all heavily influenced by the great American private eye movies of the 40s and early 50s and by the style that later came to be known as film noir.

This was no coincidence. The classic American B-movie had been largely destroyed by the advent of television but there was still an audience for slightly gritty crime thrillers. The TV private eye series more or less took over the audience of the crime B-picture. Of all these series Peter Gunn was probably the biggest commercial success.

Peter Gunn was created by Blake Edwards who wrote many of the episodes and directed several.

I reviewed the second season of Peter Gunn a while back (at that time the first season was unobtainable on DVD) and I was somewhat underwhelmed. Compared to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Johnny Staccato it seemed rather tame and rather conventional and even a bit strait-laced. It seemed a bit too sanitised. A reader left a comment on that review suggesting that the first season might be much more to my taste. The suggestion was that Peter Gunn, like so many American TV series, started very promisingly in its first season and then in subsequent seasons fell victim to the perennial timidity of network executives.

Apart from Craig Stevens who is very good as the title character there are three other recurring characters. Lieutenant Jacoby (Herschel Bernardi) is Gunn’s patient long-suffering cop pal who is usually willing to cut Gunn some slack, sometimes against his better judgmeent. Mother runs the night-club that is more or less Gunn’s second home. Edie (Lola Albright) is Gunn’s cute chanteuse girlfriend who can’t quite get him to commit to her although she has no intention of giving up.

Selected Episodes

The opening episode, The Kill, was written and directed by Blake Edwards. It opens with the murder of a gangster. The new gangland boss who takes his place seems likely to be even nastier and more unpleasant. This episode has a definite film noir look and fell. It establishes Gunn as a guy who stocks by his friends and also as a tough guy who can be ruthless when necessary. There’s a bit on an edge to the character which was missing in the second season.

Streetcar Jones is a jazz musician suspected of murder but he doesn’t strike Gunn as the murdering type. Somebody wants to stop Gunn from proving Streetcar’s innocence. An OK episode.

In The Vicious Dog Pete has to see a man about a dog. A journalist believes that a dog attack was an attempt to intimidate him, and Pete agrees. The dog angle makes this a bit more interesting than most stories of this type.

In The Blind Pianist there’s only one witness to a murder and he’s blind. He can’t identity the killer. Or can he? And if he can, will he?The audience knows the identity of the killer so the interest is in Gunn’s attempt to prove a case with only a blind witness. Not a bad story.

The Frog is a small-fry gangster who wants to talk with with Pete but when Pete gets to the meet all he finds is the Frog’s hat floating on the water. The Frog’s boss, mobster Swink, obviously had him killed but why did he have the Frog’s apartment searched afterwards? A routine plot but fairly hard-edged by the standards of this series. It works pretty well.

In The Chinese Hangman Pete is hired by a religious cult leader to find a woman who stole $200,000 from him. Pete tracks her down but with unexpected consequences. A much darker episode and a very good one.

In Lynn's Blues Edie is worried about an old friend, a night-club-singer named Lynn. Pete goes to see her and it’s obvious she’s seriously scared. She’s got a gangster boyfriend, she wants out and he doesn’t see it that way. A fairly routine episode but still very enjoyable.

In Rough Buck a very promising boxer, Tony Triano, is shot and it looks like a professional hit. But everybody liked Tony. Nobody had a motive to kill him.

In Image of Sally Si Robbin, just out of prison, kills a guy. The man he killed was a professional killer. It was self-defence but he can’t prove that so he’s charged with murder. Si hires Gunn, not to beat the murder rap but to find his girl Sally. At least she used to be his girl. Now she’s Joe Nord’s girl and Joe Nord is a big-time criminal and a nasty piece of work. Pete gets some help from some beatniks (who look the way middle-aged men who’ve never seen a beatnik imagine beatniks to look). It’s another noirish episode with Si being not such a bad guy but he’s got himself into deep trouble, and Sally certainly has some femme fatale qualities.

The Man with the Scar is a very good episode. A young man is with his girlfriend when a man with a scar interrupts them, there’s a fight and the man with the scar is killed. The girl tells him not to worry, that it will be taken care of, but actually he has very good reason to worry.

The Torch is a case of arson and murder. The widow of the man killed in the fire is a suspect. She hires Pete to prove her innocence. It’s a fairly straightforward story but well executed.

The Jockey is an impossible crime story. The girlfriend of a successful jockey is a night-club singer. In between sets she goes up onto the roof. This time she fell through the skylight and was killed. There was nobody up there with her and nobody could have been up there with her, so it was accident. But the jockey thinks she was murdered. Pete doesn’t know if it was murder or not but he’s been given a case so he’ll do some digging. And he digs up something that really interests him. Not a bad story, but just a tad predictable.

In Sisters of the Friendless a young man is facing a murder charge. He has an alibi but there’s a problem. The one person who can confirm his alibi cannot do so for rather unusual reasons. A low-key story, pretty lightweight.

The Leaper is about a man who jumps to his death from a tall building. Except he didn’t jump. Pete doesn’t know that yet but he’s looking into the case for the widow. The curious thing is that the leaper was a professional carnival performer, a human fly. It’s Lieutenant Jacoby who makes the vital connection this time.  A good episode.

The Fuse is a very film noir episode. Honest union boss Carlo Matzi is murdered. Everyone knows that crooked union boss Jake Lynch was behind the murder. So why is Pete working for Lynch? He has his reasons. A solid story that isn’t dazzlingly original but it’s executed with a lot of style. Another very good episode.

Let's Kill Timothy tries to be whimsical but misfires. We get a couple of awful songs, we get Pete hired as bodyguard to a seal and some excruciating comic relief from a beatnik artist.

In The Missing Night Watchman (written by Blake Edwards) Pete is hired to investigate a robbery. Valuable jewels were stolen from a shop and the owner doesn’t want the police involved. He’s afraid of losing his best customer, the irascible Mr Lansdown (a wonderful performance by Murray Matheson). There’s also the matter of the missing night watchman and what’s going on with Mr Lansdown’s Buddha? An enjoyable romp.

Murder on the Midway is a carnival story and I just love murder mysteries with a carnival setting. The magician is doing his usual trick, making his glamorous lady assistant disappear, only she winds up dead. Pete thinks Rowena, who does the girly show, knows something. Rowena is one of those dangerous blondes, the type that men should avoid but they never do. A pretty decent plot with several plausible suspects. A very good episode.

Pecos Pete takes Pete to Texas. A rich cattleman wants to find his brother’s murderer. Pete has to do the cowboy thing, and it’s a fun if rather slight story.

Scuba has a great opening sequence and the plot revolves around scuba diving. There is murder as well, of course. A fine episode.

The title of Edie Finds a Corpse is totally accurate. She does find a corpse. In her bathroom. She is not happy about it. Pete isn’t happy about it either.

The Dirty Word has a nice slightly off-kilter atmosphere. A low-rent crooked private eye named Sam Hayes is framed for the murder of a rich guy named Sinclair. Pete doesn’t approve of Sam but he owes him a favour. Sinclair was surrounded by oddballs and there were things about him that didn’t add up. A good taut plot and good atmosphere.

The Ugly Frame begins with a nice old guy who runs a delicatessen getting murdered. Murdered for fourteen dollars. Lieutenant Jacoby had known the old guy for years. Jacoby wants the killer really badly. But maybe the case is not as straightforward as it looks. Jacoby ends up in an awkward situation. Maybe Pete can get him out of it. A solid episode.

The Lederer Story begins when a rich lady yacht owner, Mrs Lederer, drops dead in Mother’s. Before expiring she had asked to speak to Peter Gunn. Pete figures he’s more or less morally obliged to find her killer. Yes, her killer. The lady died from poison. Pete is convinced that the answer to the puzzle will be found on Mrs Lederer’s yacht. But he finds that boats can be dangerous places. A good solid episode although the mystery isn’t that hard to figure out.

In Keep Smiling a guy from out of town winds up dead. That’s Lieutenant Jacoby’s problem. Pete’s problem is a client in town for a bowling conclave who’s fallen victim to a blackmail racket. Since the dead guy was also in town for the bowling conclave Pete figures that his problem and Jacoby’s problem are probably the same problem. All Pete has to do is set himself up as an obvious blackmail victim. A fairly straightforward episode but enjoyable enough.

Breakout begins with a prison break. Then a guy hires Pete to find somebody but Pete is pretty suspicious. And Frank Norbert doesn’t want to be found. A solid film noirish episode with double-crosses and betrayal, and a father who can’t figure out what went wrong with his boy.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed the first season more than the first. It has a bit more of an edge. It’s a bit more noir. Not as good as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer or Johnny Staccato but still entertaining. Recommended.