The Saint - The Angel’s Eye (1966)

When I did my recent post comparing the stories in Leslie Charteris’s 1953 collection The Saint in Europe with the 1960s television adaptation I mentioned that I had been unable to find a copy of the TV version of one of the stories, The Angel’s Eye. That problem has now been rectified, my boxed set from Network containing all the colour episodes having now arrived. So I can now offer my comparison of this story and the TV version (which went to air in 1966 as part of the first colour season of The Saint).

This story begins with a man named Upwater and his wife asking Simon’s help in regard to a very valuable diamond. Upwater works for a jeweller and has taken the stone to Amsterdam to be recut but the diamond cutter not only refuses to return it, he denies having ever seen it. Which of course interests the Saint. In fact he is not only interested, he is enchanted. This promises to be a rather artistic swindle and Simon is a connoisseur of swindles.

The Saint is not the only one to have taken an interest in the case, which enchants Simon even more.

The twist in this tale is really not one of Charteris’s more dazzling efforts but it’s clever and enjoyable enough and a swindle involving an immensely valuable diamond gives it the characteristic flavour of later-period Saint adventures. And the swindle is, as Simon had hoped, artistic and devious. There are also some clues scattered through the story but they won’t help you unless you know a lot about diamonds.

Harry W. Junkin wrote the television adaptation. Junkin was also the script supervisor for the series. Junkin and Charteris did not always see eye-to-eye when it came to adaptations of Saint stories, and that’s putting it mildly. 

The TV version opens in England and immediately introduces us to half a dozen key characters who were not in the original story so we know that this is not exactly going to be a faithful adaptation (and we can also therefore guess that it’s probably going to be one of the episodes that irritated Leslie Charteris).

In the TV version the diamond belongs to Lord Cranmore but he’s broke and needs to sell it. This enrages his snobbish nephew Jeremy. There are a couple of very suspicious characters hanging about who look like they might be jewel thieves. Upwater in this version is Lord Cranmore’s estate manager and he his daughter are sent to Amsterdam to have the stone recut. Replacing the middle-aged Upwater’s middle-aged wife with his daughter of course allowed the script to include an attractive young lady in the cast, and attractive young ladies were always an essential element in the TV series. 

To be fair to Junkin he has kept the core of the plot intact. All he’s really done is to add a bit of extra misdirection which actually works reasonably well. There’s still the diamond cutter who mysteriously denies any knowledge of the Angel’s Eye and Simon’s involvement still follows the same course. Perhaps Junkin has added some complications that weren’t strictly necessary but on the other hand he’s also made it a bit more of a challenge for the viewer to figure out the solution. The only weakness is that the TV version doesn’t include Simon’s explanation of the clues that allowed him to solve the problem.

Overall both the story and the TV adaptation are quite entertaining. I certainly enjoyed both.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. - The Copenhagen Affair (novel)

The Copenhagen Affair is an original 1965 novel by Welsh writer John Oram based on the hit 1960s television spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and it’s a tale of flying saucers - but there's reason to believe that these flying saucers might not be from outer space.

Like the other Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV tie-in novels I've read it does deviate in minor details from the TV series but it’s quite enjoyable.

Here’s the link to my full review at Vintage Pop Fictions.

Code 3 (1957)

Code 3 is an American cop show which lasted one season (of 39 episodes) in 1957. It was aired in syndication. It deals with cases facing the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office (which co-operated in the making of the series).

Four episodes are included in Mill Creek’s Best of TV Detectives boxed set and they’re the only four episodes that I’ve been able to see. It’s hard to draw conclusions from such a brief sampling but I get the impression that Code 3 was a series that tried to emphasise a human interest angle, to see crime as a human problem. Sometimes people are well-meaning but they make mistakes. Sometimes people do the wrong thing but they have reasons for their actions. Sometimes criminals are weak, sometimes they’re foolish, sometimes they don’t see any other way out,  but they’re not necessarily evil.

Each episode is introduced by Richard Travis in the rôle of Assistant Sheriff George Barnett and there’s a brief spiel at the end by the actual Sheriff of Los Angeles County. The stories are supposedly based on actual cases. A semi-documentary feel was quite a popular approach for crime series in the ’50s.

Apart from Richard Travis (who appears only in the intros) there are no regular cast members, which is undoubtedly the reason the series only lasted one season and was not picked up by one of the networks. A successful cop show has to have regular characters whom the viewers get to know and get to care about.

Despite this Code 3 offers an interesting mix of stories.

The Rookie Sheriff deals with a central European refugee under training as a sheriff’s deputy. Rancich is quite old to be a trainee but on paper he’s ideal material. He’s intelligent and resourceful, he’s super-fit and he speaks five languages. The problem is that having been in the Underground during the war he’s much too gung-ho and he’s arrogant, overbearing and opinionated. He also thinks that if people don’t respect the police they should be taught a lesson. The other trainees hate his guts and he would have washed out of training but for the fact that the head of the academy has a stubborn faith in him.

This episode is marred by way too much speechifying. Most of the dialogue is in fact little more than speeches telling us about the perfection of American law enforcement officers and the American way of life. It’s just too heave-handed. Which is a pity because it’s actually an interesting slightly offbeat story and Rancich is in his own way a fascinating and interesting character. Despite its weaknesses it’s a reasonably good story.

In The Sniper George and Marie Thayer’s marriage is heading for the rocks. George is a not very successful real estate man. Marie is a high-flying businesswoman who also runs an art gallery. George feels inadequate and despised. 

And now somebody has tried to shoot him. It must be that sniper that they’re talking about in the papers, the crazed gunman who has murdered seven people at random. That’s the only explanation. The detectives from the Sheriff’s Department are not so sure. What’s going on here is perfectly obvious right from the start but it’s still not a bad little tale. This being the 1950s we get some pop psychology as well.

The Man with Many Faces is the story of forger Charlie Ellsworth. He is a good man and basically a solid law-abiding citizen but his fifteen-year-old daughter is dying and Charlie wants to give her a trip to Honolulu before she dies. Charlie is a skilled forger but perhaps too good. He forges cheques but they’re a bit too perfect. Despite this he might have gotten away with it if not for his hearing problem.

This is definitely an episode that takes a sympathetic view of a criminal. Quite a decent episode. 

The Benson Case takes place at the Terminal Island women’s prison. Bonnie Person is on remand, facing a murder charge. She gets wind of the fact that an undercover woman Sheriff’s Deputy has been planted in the prison and she assumes that the deputy is there to collect evidence against her. This episode has promise and some good moments but the ending seems too abrupt.

Code 3’s main virtue seems to be that the episodes are so varied, but that’s a weakness as well. The impression given by this handful of episodes is that the series doesn’t quite establish a character of its own.

Code 3 is moderately entertaining but certainly not in the same league as great 1950s cop shows such as Dragnet or M Squad. Maybe worth a rental if you really love ’50s police dramas.

Mr Rose season 3 (1968)

Mr Rose was a British crime series made by Granada Television in 1967-68. It was created by Philip Mackie who was involved as creator or writer with some of the most interesting British television series of the ’60s and ’70s such as The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Caesars and Raffles.

Chief Inspector Charles Rose (played by William Mervyn) first made his appearance in 1963 as a supporting character in the third season of a detective series called The Odd Man. He was popular enough to be featured as the central character in a spin-off series, It’s Dark Outside, made in 1964-65. It’s Dark Outside then spawned a further spin-off series, Mr Rose, three seasons of which were produced in 1967 and 1968.

In The Odd Man and It’s Dark Outside Chief Inspector Rose was pompous, high-handed and sometimes rather prickly. For the Mr Rose series the character was softened somewhat, but he was softened without becoming bland. In fact he becomes rather more interesting. The slight personality change did make some sense since Rose was now living in comfortable (very comfortable) retirement, at work on his memoirs. He is as pompous as ever but, freed from the stresses and strains of his police duties, he is more relaxed and even amiable. And his eccentricities, already present, have blossomed.

In the first season he was living in Eastbourne with his manservant/chauffeur/assistant John Halifax (Donald Webster) and his secretary Drusilla Lamb (Gillian Lewis). That first season feature some of the most delightful ensemble acting you could ever wish to see. The three characters complement one another perfectly. Mr Rose is upper class with the arrogance self-assurance of his class, but he can be charming and fascinating. Halifax is working class and is in fact an ex-criminal. Miss Lamb is middle class and takes life very seriously. Halifax is devoted to him. Miss Lamb disapproves of Mr Rose’s laziness and self-indulgence and his whimsical attitudes towards the law. All three characters are, in their very different ways, extremely likeable. And the three leading players play off each other superbly. The result was some of the best British television of the ’60s.

While he is now retired Mr Rose has by no means lost his taste for crime-solving. He is not a private detective but is now a kind of consulting detective in the Sherlock Holmes mould but on an amateur basis. Crime-solving is for Charles Rose a welcome diversion from the tedious grind of memoir-writing. The fact that he is writing his memoirs does however serve as useful leverage in a number of his cases.

Unfortunately Gillian Lewis departed after the thirteen episodes of the first season. It was a blow from which the series never quite recovered because the three characters had formed a perfect balance. Nonetheless a second season of six episodes, with Mr Rose relocated to London, followed in mid-1968. Donald Webster then left and a third and final season of five episodes screened in late 1968. That third season has its moments but the loss of Webster was a fatal blow.

Mr Rose gains a new assistant in the person of Robert Trent (Eric Woofe). In the first episode he seems rather obnoxious but after that he settles down. The problem is that he’s too much like a younger Mr Rose.

Episode Guide

In The Less-Than-Iron-Duke Mr Rose goes to the assistance of an old flame, theatrical legend Sheena Coltman, who has just opened a night-club and is being pressured to pay protection money. It appears that the man behind the protection racket is a rising star in the local organised crime world, a nasty piece of work named Eddie Rice. Mr Rose decides to fight crime with crime by persuading Harry Duke, the former gangland kingpin and know to everyone as The Duke, to deal with Eddie. But will The Duke agree to such a proposal?

The Bogey Man has a promising setup. Mr Rose witnesses a fatal traffic accident. He recognises the victim as a man named Saunders, whose is (or was) ironically traffic expert. Except that it turns out that the victim isn’t Saunders, it’s someone else entirely, but Mr Rose insists that it really is Saunders. The possibility that he might be mistaken is one that he is not prepared to entertain. There’s not just a question of identity, but also one of dates. And there’s a police sergeant who might not be a police sergeant, and there are two widows. There’s a murder that might not be a murder, or perhaps there are two murders, or even more. It’s all very baffling.

The Missing Chapter is a chapter from the next volume of Mr Rose’s memoirs. The story all involves a large amount of money withdrawn from the bank by Mr Rose, a visit to the racetrack, a mysterious telephone call from a glamorous blonde and some strange behaviour by Rose’s friend publisher Nigel Chinnery. The plot is less complex than it sounds but it’s entertainingly embellished by the amateur detective efforts by Robert and by Mr Rose’s new secretary, the detective story-obsessed Miss Tait-Fairlie.

In The Jolly Good Fellow Mr Rose is to be made a Fellow of St Stephen’s College. The college is about to be presented with a rather valuable painting. It already owns a priceless painting, and Mr Rose is more than a little concerned about the non-existent security arrangements. It’s Rag Week and Mr Rose has already been the victim of one of the good-natured pranks the students get up to at this time, all in the interests of charity. Mr Rose is kidnapped by some rather likeable undergraduates and as his ransom cheerfully hands over a cheque to a local charity. But are all the pranks being planned by the students so harmless?

Free and Easy is a bit of a mess. Mr Rose has written a play but both the director and the star, an actor named Marcus Despard who looks remarkably like Mr Rose (and is in fact played by William Mervyn), have tampered with the ending. Rose is not pleased.

This episode seems to be an attempt at political satire with some scare stuff about neo-fascist plots (a positive obsession with both British and American television at the time). It’s all too clever by half and doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

Final Thoughts

The third season isn’t as bad as I’d feared but it is a bit disappointing. The dynamic between Chief Inspector Rose and Robert Trent just doesn’t have the nuances that made his relationships with John Halifax and Miss Lamb so interesting and so delightful. This is perhaps the major weakness. In the earlier seasons the interplay between the leads made even the lesser episodes thoroughly enjoyable. In this third season the uninteresting dynamic between the two leads makes the faults of the lesser episodes more obvious.

I’ve previously reviewed both the first season (by far the best) and the second season.

My advice is to buy the complete series set from Network which includes all three seasons. If you love the first two you’ll end up giving the final season a spin as well. If you’ve bought the individual season sets of seasons one and two then don’t bother with the third season unless you’re thoroughly hooked on the series.

The Saint in Europe, and on TV

The Saint - The Covetous Headsman

This is another instalment in my project of comparing episodes of classic 1950s-1970s TV series with their literary sources. In this case I’m going to look at the stories from the 1953 Leslie Charteris collection The Saint in Europe.

Charteris’s Saint stories fall into several distinct phases with Simon Templar evolving by stages from the incredibly brash cocky hero of the 1930s to the more thoughtful, slightly wiser and just so ever so slightly sadder but more sophisticated Templar of the 1950s. So these stories all feature that final version of the Saint.

While the Saint might be older and wiser he still has a very flexible attitude towards the law. Stealing is of course wrong and the Saint would never do such a thing. But stealing from other thieves - that’s not really stealing is it? And he continues to derive a great deal of harmless amusement from causing annoyance to policemen.

Unfortunately the Saint’s larcenous tendencies had to be erased for the TV series, which makes the character slightly less interesting. That’s especially so in a couple of the stories  I’ll be discussing here - it takes away just a tiny bit of the zest from them.

The Covetous Headsman takes place in Paris. Quite by accident Simon hears of a gruesome but fascinating murder. The victim was decapitated but the head was found beside the body so it wasn’t an attempt to disguise the victim’s identity. So why cut off his head? Maybe it was the act of a madman, but Simon has to consider the possibility that there was a very good reason for it. Of course it’s none of his business but the victim’s sister is a young pretty American girl named Valerie North and pretty girls are always Simon’s business.

Discovering the identity of the murderer is not too difficult but that’s not the main problem. It’s the motive that matters. Valerie’s life may depend on the answer to that question. And the answer may lie in the past.

The Saint - The Latin Touch

The Covetous Headsman was adapted as the fourth episode of the first season of ITC’s The Saint TV series, going to air in late 1962. The source was a short story it was necessary to expand it a little to fit a one-hour time slot but apart from that the plot follows Charteris’s story remarkable faithfully. Since Charteris’s plot is pretty good, it works. Having the wonderful Barbara Shelley as Valerie also helps (in the TV version she is English rather than American).

The title caused a bit of a problem. It doesn’t mean the same thing in the TV version that it meant in the short story but I guess they thought it was too good a title to change.

The Latin Touch takes Simon Templar to Rome where gets to do something he always enjoys - saving a damsel in distress. If the damsel is young and pretty so much the better. The damsel is the daughter of a high-ranking US State Department official. She’s been kidnapped and the ransom terms cannot possibly be met. Simon doesn’t have a clue where the girl is being held but he uses his ignorance to his advantage in a very clever manner.

It’s a situation in which Simon must depend entirely on his wits - he has no objection to fisticuffs or gunplay but they’re just not going to be of any use this time. Fortunately he did pay attention to his Latin lessons at school.

It’s a neat little story.

The TV adaptation was the second episode of the first season of The Saint. There are some minor changes. The girl’s father is now the Governor of an American state rather than being with the State Department. Several minor characters are added including a comic relief Italian taxi driver (played with hammy relish by Warren Mitchell). But despite the TV version manages to retain Charteris’s core plot in its entirety. Even more so than in The Covetous Headsman every single one of Charteris’s clever plot twists is preserved. Even the Latin touch which gave the story its title is there.

The Saint - The Loaded Tourist

Which must have pleased Leslie Charteris quite a bit - he liked faithful adaptations of his stories.

These two adaptations are not just faithful, they’re delightfully entertaining.

The Loaded Tourist takes place in Switzerland. In Lucerne, to be precise. Simon witnesses a robbery. The object of the robbery was a briefcase. The briefcase is now nowhere to be found, or at least that’s the assumption of the police. The Saint however knows where it might be found, and finds it. The contents of the briefcase are none of his business but that’s never stopped him before and it doesn’t stop him mow. The contents are most intriguing and rather puzzling.

If there’s one thing guaranteed to arouse Simon Templar’s interest it’s someone telling him obvious lies and that’s what happens here. He simply has to get to the bottom of such a mystery.

This is a pretty lightweight story, not quite as clever as The Covetous Headsman or The Latin Touch, but it’s enjoyable enough.

The adaptation of The Loaded Tourist was the fifth first season episode of The Saint.

A few changes were made and a couple of additional characters added. The robbery victim now has a teenage son as well as a wife and his junior business partner now plays a key rôle. The basic plot is however mostly intact. If there’s a slight weakness in the TV version it’s that a little bit too much information is given away too early. On the other hand there is an extra plot twist at the end. On the whole it works pretty successfully.

What impresses me about these three adaptations is that whole the short stories had to be padded out the passing was done skilfully and without damaging the integrity of the essential plot, and without losing the flavour of the originals.

The Saint - The Spanish Cow

A seaside resort in the south of France provides the setting for The Spanish Cow. A very large middle-aged American widow has become the butt of everyone’s jokes due to her habit of rising to the bait every single time. What interests Simon Templar about her however is that she possesses some astonishingly valuable jewels. The Saint has no doubt that he could put such wealth to far better use. How does one go about separating a middle-aged woman from her jewels? The answer of course is Romance. The Saint’s larcenous intentions are scarcely honourable but when all is said and done he is after all a thief.

This is a very slight story with a twist that you’re probably going to see coming. It may be that the purpose of this story is to remind the reader that while the Saint is very often on the side of justice he really is a criminal. A criminal with a conscience perhaps, a criminal with a sense of honour perhaps, but a criminal nonetheless.

The Spanish Cow was adapted as the eighth episode of the fourth season. It want to air in 1965. Adapting this one posed a real challenge. Since they’d decided that the TV Saint could not ever be seen to be guilty of stealing the story was just not going to make any sense at all. Screenwriter Michael Cramoy solved the problem by throwing away Charteris’s story in its entirety and writing a completely original screenplay with the same title. In this version the American widow becomes the widow of a South American dictator. The Saint has no designs whatsoever on her jewels, but there are two groups of people who most certainly want to steal them. One group is the government which overthrew the dictator, the other is the late dictator’s brother who wants to use the jewels to finance a counter-revolution.

The dictator’s widow is given a gorgeous young female companion because every episode must feature at least one beautiful woman. Some bumbling French policemen are also added. The result bears not the slightest similarity to Charteris’s story. That’s not to say that the TV episode isn’t fun in its own way. It is. In fact it’s rather clever. But it’s a totally new story.

It’s interesting that the three season one episodes I’ve talked about here are all fairly faithful adaptations while the season four episode abandons any pretence of being faithful to the original. Does this indicate a change of policy on the part of the producers? I’ll have to do a few more short story-TV episode comparisons before committing myself on that question.

The Saint - The Rhine Maiden

TheAnd, as it happens, that crooked company promoter just happens to be on the same train. It seems highly likely that he has on his person a large part of the money he has swindled. It seems like a situation in which any adventurer worth his salt ought to do something. Rhine Maidens should not have their dreams taken away from them.

This is another story in which we see the various side of Simon’s character. He is himself on the train with him certain property which was not exactly honestly come by. He is after all a thief. But he is also a romantic. A very ruthless romantic. It’s a neat little story, and I do love mystery thriller stories set on trains.

The Rhine Maiden was episode sixteen of the third season of The Saint TV series. And it’s another story which was going to pose some problems. And the same solution was adopted as in The Spanish Cow - the TV script (by Brian Degas) has only the most tenuous connection to the original story. There is a crooked company promoter but he’s from London, not Ohio. The only Rhine Maiden here is a train called the Rhine Maiden Express. It provides the setting for a thrilling action climax but it’s not quite the same as a real live Rhine Maiden. The girl in the TV version is an English girl and she’s the daughter of the company promoter’s father.

A whole new (and admittedly quite ingenious) plot has been fashioned, based on a mysterious death and a creepy doctor with a very shady past.

If you don’t mind that it’s actually an entirely different story then it’s quite an enjoyable one.

So a pattern does seem to be emerging, with the later adaptations retaining very little of Charteris’s stories apart from the titles.

The Golden Journey is a whimsical little tale. Belinda Deane is an American girl. She is very pretty, very rich and very spoilt. It is obvious to Simon Templar that she is going to make her fiancé’s life miserable, and her own as well. Unless something is done. The Saint knows what Belinda needs. She needs to join him in a week-long walking tour across the Alps where she can learn to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, and the pleasures of roughing it and having to actually do some chores. Of course Belinda would rather die than going off tramping through the woods but Simon knows how how he can persuade her. The first step is to steal her handbag.

The Saint - The Golden Journey

Thus begins Belinda’s worst nightmare. Simon even forces her to do the washing up. Simon insists that they cannot afford to stay in guest houses and they must actually sleep in the open which of course is the last straw for Belinda.  And when she misbehaves she gets a spanking. By the end of the week she will have learnt something or perhaps she will have murdered Simon.

There’s a bit too much of the back to nature stuff in this story for my liking. I’m afraid my feelings about the great outdoors are pretty much in line with Belinda’s. But the point of the story is the Simon intends to destroy the old spoilt Belinda and create a new one. Needless to say this is the sort of story that a writer could not possibly get away with today. It’s one of those Battle of the Sexes stories that were rather popular in the ’50s. But although it’s very lightweight in the plot department it does have its amusing moments and it’s difficult not to enjoy seeing a spoilt rich brat brought face to face with some real life.

This one was adapted as the tenth episode of the first season of the TV series.

The scene of the action is shifted to Spain but the story remains completely unchanged. Simon still steals all of Belinda’s money but it was obviously felt that they could get away with this - he is after all doing it for her own good. Pretty much every incident of the short story is preserved. Belinda even gets her spanking. Erica Rogers is very good as Belinda. She’s amazingly obnoxious and petulant at first, and enraged by the fact that there’s no way out for her - she either does what Simon tells her to do or she won’t eat.

The TV version is if anything slightly more amusing than the original story.

The final story in The Saint in Europe is The Angel’s Eye. Unfortunately the TV adaptation was one of the colour episodes which are much more difficult to get hold of than the black-and-white episodes and I don’t have access to a copy. The story itself begins with a man asking Simon’s help in regard to a very valuable diamond. The man works for a jeweller and has taken the stone to Amsterdam to be recut but the diamond cutter not only refuses to return it, he denies having ever seen it. Which of course intrigues the Saint. The twist in this story is really not all that dazzling but the story is enjoyable enough.

So I’ve looked at six adaptations - four very faithful adaptations from the first season and two from later seasons that bear no resemblance at all to the source stories. Interesting.

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer season 2 (1959)

In the late 1940s Mickey Spillane revolutionised the private eye novel by massively increasing the amount of sex and violence and adding a dash of sadism for good measure. Critics were aghast but readers loved Spillane’s Mike Hammer crime thrillers which went on to sell several hundred million copies.

Bringing Mike Hammer to the small screen in the late 1950s was always going to be quite a challenge. The sex and violence wold have to be dialled way way down. The danger was that Hammer would end up being just another generic television private eye. The syndicated Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer TV series (which debuted in 1958 and lasted for 78 episodes) somehow managed to solve this insoluble problem. It retains at least some of the flavour of Spillane’s novels and it’s astonishingly violent for its time. It adds some humour to make things a bit more palatable but it’s still pretty hard-edged.

As played by Darren McGavin Mike Hammer is not just tougher, more ruthless, more sadistic and more violent than other TV private eyes of the era, he’s tougher, more ruthless, more sadistic and more violent than any American TV private eye I can think from the 60s and 70s as well. McGavin’s Hammer handles things like extracting information from reluctant sources pretty much the way the Hammer of the novels does - by a judicious mixture of extreme violence and intimidation.

The awkward part of course is that Mike Hammer is the hero and we have to like him. Somehow McGavin contrives to pull off that trick as well. Hammer can be brutal and sadistic but he can also be charming and sensitive. We just can’t help liking this guy. That’s actually not too far removed from Spillane’s original creation either - Spillane’s Hammer divides people into good people and bad people. He’ll do anything for good people but he shows no mercy to bad people. Spillane’s Hammer also divides women into two categories. Ladies and nice girls get treated with a great deal of respect. Bad girls just exist to be used for sex. In the TV series this latter aspect is obviously toned down a little but it’s still pretty clear that Hammer does see women as filling into those two categories.

Like most crime series of its era this one was made within very tight budgetary limits and with very tight shooting schedules. The best crime series of this period (like M Squad) made that liability into an asset and had extraordinary energy and urgency. And that’s certainly true of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

I still think it’s a pity that Velda, Mike’s gun-toting secretary in the books, doesn’t appear in the series but I can understand why she was left out. The half-hour format demands very tight scripts with no room for sub-plots or distractions and her presence might have slowed down the action. And Darren McGavin has more than enough charisma to carry the series on his own.

The first season was successful enough to justify a second which followed in 1959 and the second season (of 39 episodes) is the formula as before and it’s just as good.

The complete series has been released in Region 1 in a DVD boxed set and it looks pretty good for a 1950s television series.

Episode Guide

Evidence on the Record is a fun episode with Mike getting mixed up with crooked dealings in the jukebox industry.

The Commodore is a lesser episode but it manages to be a feelgood story without resorting to too much sentimentality. An old man is being fired into an old folks’ home by his niece’s husband. It’s all to do with some money (obtained by less than honest means) which has gone missing and that leads to murder. The police have their suspect and he’s certainly a very obvious one but while he’s no angel he might not necessarily be a murderer. Darren McGavin does a good job in showing us Hammer's sensitive side without making the viewer cringe.

Pen Pals sees Mike trying to help out a reformed ex-con named Marty who needs help desperately but won’t admit it. Mike is going to give him the help whether he wants it or not. A couple of hoods Marty shared a prison cell with are forcing him to be an accomplice in a series of store robberies, one of the stores being Marty’s. They kidnap Marty’s wife in order to persuade him to play ball but that’s a mistake because it makes Hammer really angry. It’s fun to see Mike Connors, later to become an ionic private eye himself as Mannix, guest starring as Marty.

In Now Die in It Mike has to look for the sister-in-law of an old friend. The girl is seventeen and she’s got herself into trouble, as they used to say in the 50s, but she won’t say who the guy is. And it might be too late anyway. It’s the sort of job Mike really hates. There is some fun though, in the scenes in the Dewdrop Club, with Mike demonstrating his ability to get reluctant witnesses to talk. A pretty good episode.

Groomed to Kill seems like it’s just a small-time shakedown. A guy about to be married is being blackmailed over a picture taken with a girl. The girl only wants a hundred bucks. It’s no big deal. Except that it leads to murder. A fairly solid episode with three quite convincing suspects.

A floating crap game is the background to Slay Upon Delivery. Bruce and Doris Green run the game and the game is not exactly honest. A thuggish ex-private detective named Murphy collects their bad debts for them. One of their customers who’s lost a lot of money is being difficult about paying up. The customer disappears and that’s where Hammer comes in. Hammer uses his customary methods (his fists) to get the information to solve the case. It’s a nicely seedy and very effectively hard-boiled little episode.

In Doll Trouble Mike decides to take a vacation so he heads off to Brussels to see the World’s Fair. And immediately finds himself with a case. A rich American woman thinks she’s located her sister’s daughter who apparently survived a concentration camp. But Mrs Putnam is no fool. She’s being asked for a lot of money and she suspects a con. Mike suspects that as well.

Now I’m quite sure that the producers didn’t come up with the money to send Darren McGavin to Belgium to film this episode but there is definitely plenty of location shooting that was done somewhere. Even if it was shot on the backlot it still manages to do a surprisingly good job of convincing us that it’s taking place in Brussels. This one has an expansive feel that is very very unusual for 50s American crime dramas. And it’s a reasonably good story with a fight sequence that is excellent even by the high standards of this series (no real surprises there since the episode was directed by William Witney who was incredibly good at that sort of thing).

Sometimes it’s better to leave the past well enough alone but that’s not how Oliver Bates sees things in I Remember Sally. He’s an old man and he’s dying and he wants to find Sally, a sweet young thing from Salt City South Dakota. But that was fifteen years ago and Hammer isn’t at all sure that Sally is the same sweet young girl that Oliver remembers. But Oliver Bates is determined to find her. Hammer finds her, but his suspicions about her were tragically correct. A good episode.

Wedding Mourning is an unexpected episode. Mike Hammer has fallen in love. That’s unusual enough. But he wants to get married. That’s very unusual. So unusual that the local bookies are offering odds on whether the wedding goes ahead or not. A good episode but very dark for network TV in 1959.

In Merchant of Menace a cheap hood named Gus Donovan, just out of the slammer, is making death threats against Hammer, which just happen to coincide with Hammer being out of town for a week. This leads to rumours that Mike is running scared and in his business he can’t afford that. So he has to find Donovan. This one has a plot with a neat twist. It’s good stuff.

In A Mugging Evening a businessman is set up by a girl in Central Park and his briefcase stolen. He can’t go to the police because he’s a married man, so he hires Hammer. All he wants is the briefcase back but the case takes a nasty turn. On the other hand Hammer does get to learn how to skate, with an attractive blonde as his teacher, so it’s not all bad. A good episode.

In Slab Happy broken-down prize-fighter Kid Dakota gets convinced that his ex-wife Julie’s new husband Mitch is beating her up. It’s a dangerous idea to put into the mind of a guy whose fists are lethal weapons, but who put that idea into his head and why? A pretty decent episode and it’s one of the rare occasions that Hammer finds himself in a fist-fight he can’t win.

Aces and Eights starts with Mike persuading a storekeeper not to prosecute a woman for shoplifting. She spins Mike a sob story which he swallows, and it turns out to be true. Her husband is being fleeced by card sharks but the mystery is how the crooks expect to collect their money from as guy who doesn’t have any. The explanation turns out to be rather sinister. A good solid episode. There’s a nice Mike Hammer moment were Mike administers a totally gratuitous but very amusing head-kicking to a bad guy.

Mike’s old buddy Emmett Gates has indulged in one too many extra-marital dalliances and now he’s being blackmailed in Swing Low, Sweet Harriet. And he could end up in much bigger trouble than that. A decent episode.

In Requiem for a Sucker a piano player is in debt to a loan shark and the loan shark is killed. The police draw the obvious conclusion, but maybe it’s the wrong one. Not a bad mystery in this one.

Mike is hired by a woman to investigate the death of her father in The Big Drop. He was an experienced window-cleaner and the daughter believes he could not possible have fallen to his death accidentally, therefore it must have been murder. It seems to have something to with a crooked investment scheme but maybe it’s a lot more complicated than that. A good episode in which Mike discovers he doesn’t like heights or breaking and entering or glamorous blondes who are a bit too coöperative.

Siamese Twinge is a story of true love running into a few obstacles. Gary Milford cute Thai singer-dancer Sondi are in love and want to marry. His mother is determined to wreck that and there’s someone else who is an even bigger threat to their wedding plans. Murder might be yet another obstacle. It’s none of Mike’s business but that never stops him. A pretty good episode with Mike’s distinctive technique for interviewing witnesses (involving extreme physical violence) proving to be as effective as ever.

In Goodbye, Al a two-bit gambler named Al Sparks wants Mike to get him off the hook for a gambling debt but Mike knows Al too well and he declines to help. Two weeks later Al is arrested for murder in a small lakeside town and Mike feels bad about it so now he has to help. This is going to lead to a confrontation with Todd Stryker who pretty much owns the town. A fairly routine episode.

Final Thoughts

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is one of the great private eye TV series and it stands up today remarkably well. It offers the perfect blend of energy, hardboiled mayhem and wry humour. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed season one.

Harry O - the pilot episodes (1973 and 1974)

The Fugitive made David Janssen a very big star. His career was a bit up-and-down after that. In 1973 he starred in a feature-length pilot for a proposed private eye series called Harry O. The pilot was Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On and it failed and the series was not picked up. A year later a second pilot, Smile Jenny, You're Dead, was made and this time Harry O was picked up by ABC.

The series was however destined to have a troubled history. The first 13 episodes were set in San Diego. Ratings were not all that great and the network decided the series was too unconventional. They demanded that it be transformed into a much more orthodox  private eye series, to be set in Los Angeles. So the second half of the first season was almost a different series. It was renewed for a second season, ratings were reasonable but ABC felt the series was still too intelligent and had worrying traces of originality. Harry O was cancelled in favour of Charlie’s Angels, a series dumb enough that even TV network executives could understand it.

It’s not difficult to see why Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On did not please the networks. It’s not so much that it’s rather dark. It’s more the character of Harry O (he’s actually Harry Orwell). He’s about as cheerful as you would expect a guy to be with a bullet lodged in his spine because when he was a cop some punk shot him during a robbery and now he’s in constant pain. And he’s  a very fallible private detective. He makes mistakes that put people in danger and he makes one really big, and costly, mistake. He chases women but most of the time he’s barely civil with his girlfriends. His sense of humour, such as it is, is pretty bleak. Harry Orwell isn’t loveable. He’s cynical. He doesn’t lack guts but he has no great interest in being a conventional hero. He’s not a white knight who rescues damsels in distress or helps out widows and orphans. He isn’t overly fond of people. He’s the sort of lead character who would make a network executive very nervous.

That’s not to say that he lacks charisma. It’s just that it’s a weird downbeat charisma. He’s actually a fascinating character. You want to find out more about him. But he’s not a conventional hero and network television likes conventional heroes.

I intensely disliked The Fugitive but that had nothing to do with David Janssen. I hated the concept of the Fugitive and I hated the scripts. Harry Orwell is a much more interesting character and David Janssen is perfect in the rôle. He gives a very low-key performance, in fact almost minimalist, but he doesn’t make Harry bland. Not at all. A really good actor in the right rôle can be low-key but still make a character fascinating and that’s what Janssen does.

Harry O - Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On

The plot has an intriguing premise. A guy breaks into his house and at gunpoint tries to force Harry to accept a large amount of money. The guy is Harlan Garrison (Martin Sheen) and he explains that he’s the guy who shot Harry four years ago. Now he wants Harry's help because the other guy involved in that robbery is trying to kill him.

Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On is smart and quirky and fascinating. No wonder the network executives hated it.

Now my guess is that Harry O creator Howard Rodman, who had been around the TV industry for a long time, knew that his idea for a slightly offbeat private eye series about a very offbeat private eye was a very good idea. But words like unconventional and offbeat make network executives break out in a cold sweat. So he decided that the only way to sell his idea to a network was to give the impression that Harry O was going to be an utterly conventional private eye series. Once he had persuaded a network to pick up the series he could always do his best to make it the offbeat series he’d always intended it to be. So when he wrote the script for the second pilot, Smile Jenny, You're Dead, he made it absolutely conventional. Five minutes into it you not only know every single thing that is going to happen, you know how it is going to happen. And sure enough that’s exactly how it happens.

It starts off with a model named Jennifer who wants a divorce so she can marry her new boyfriend. But there’s this photographer guy who’s obsessed with Jennifer and he decides he has to kill any man that Jennifer is involved with.

Harry of course falls for Jennifer. It’s difficult to understand why anyone would want anything to do with Jennifer - even by the standards of airhead fashion models she’s selfish, shallow and not very bright. But the detective has to fall in love with the woman who’s in danger. Anything else would be vaguely original and Smile Jenny, You're Dead avoids originality like poison.

Not surprisingly the ABC network executives absolutely loved it and Harry O was picked up as a series.

David Janssen and Jodie Foster in Smile Jenny, You're Dead

It’s soul-crushingly unoriginal but it is well-made, Harry Orwell is a good character and David Janssen is very good. Of course Harry Orwell was a much more interesting character, and David Janssen’s performance was much better, in the first pilot. The first pilot was also much less afflicted by sentimentality.

The sub-plot with Jodie Foster is quite amusing but like everything else about Smile Jenny, You're Dead it was a wasted opportunity - both Jodie Foster and David Janssen were capable of doing a lot more with that sub-plot.

It’s perfectly understandable that Smile Jenny, You're Dead is the way it is. There is nothing that warms the heart of a TV network executive more than that combination of predictability, maudlin sentimentality and unoriginality. If you want to get to make a TV series you have to make the network execs think that you’re going to give them something absolutely safe. Once you’ve persuaded them to give you the green light you can try to make your actual series witty and intelligent and original. You might even get away with it for the first season. That seems to have been the trajectory followed by Harry O - a quirky and incredibly interesting first two-thirds of season one before the network lowered the boom and insisted on the removal of disturbing original ideas.

Even with the network pushing the series in the direction of risk-averse conventionality the first season of Harry O is still surprisingly good and I’ll be having much more to say about it in the near future.

In the meantime Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On (which is included in the season one boxed set) is very highly recommended while Smile Jenny, You're Dead (released separately) is reasonably entertaining.