It was a brilliant show, with a great cast, and wonderful period style.  The character of Ellery Queen evolved quite a bit in the book series – going from a foppish and silly young genius to a more bookish and absentminded fellow to a more brooding modern style toward the end.  This series picked the bookish forties as it’s model, which I understand was partly modeled on Frederick Dannay – one of the writers behind the pseudonym of “Ellery Queen”.

Jim Hutton was always the perfect absentminded professor, but he was at least as famous for a number of action films he did with John Wayne, and a few conman sorts of roles.  He always brought a bit of bookishness to the action roles, and in turn, he brought a certain sly wisdom that made his Ellery formidable even when he was forgetting things.

To me, though, it was David Wayne who stole the show.  As Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery’s cranky father, he brought the perfect balance to Ellery. Just like in the books, these two were a perfect team.  Fussing and arguing at times, but also always in sync, and a formidable pair for any murderer who dared cross their paths.

Unfortunately, this show only lasted for one season, perhaps because they had such complex stories.  William Link has said that he and Levinson killed themselves to hide the clues in plain sight, and always play fair – but the stories were often too complicated for your average audience.  Years later when they started Murder She Wrote, they made it easier to find the clues and kept the stories simpler.  This was both easier on the writers and the audience.

I truly miss that show.  It is NOT available on DVD yet.  I have dear hopes that it will be.

One thing you can do for out of print works like this is to go to Amazon.com and search for the item.  Sometimes you can sign up for the “alert me” or “first to know” mailing list.  These lists don’t get you junk mail, but they do record how much interest there is in an out-of-print item, and each sign up is considered a “vote” for that item to eventually be offered for sale.  Here is the Ellery Queen TV Show link.

The other thing you could potentially do is lobby famous people.  I once met William Link at a mystery festival.  He was premiering his own new Columbo play, “Columbo Takes the Rap”(and if that ever plays in your town, go see it.  It’s a lot of fun).  I asked him: “So when is Mannix going to come out on DVD?”  He answered “Good question!”  The next year, it was out.

I now kick myself that I had forgotten that he was responsible for the Ellery Queen TV show too.  Next time I meet Mr. Link, I plan to ask him about it.

I’m now extra glad I got to meet him down in Owensboro two years ago at the Discovering New Mysteries drama festival.  I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much, but was ever so pleased that he was on the committee that selected my play to be performed there.

Kaminsky wrote four mystery series, all different, and yet all with the longtime storyteller’s depth of character and setting.

The first, and my favorite was the Hollywood series featuring down on his luck P.I. Toby Peters (or Tobias Pevsner, as he was named at birth).  Kaminsky was a film historian who concentrated on genre, and was one of the first to look at it in terms of academic criticism.  So the Toby Peters books were kind of a segue into writing genre fiction himself.

The series took place in Hollywood, and started just before the war.  Each book “starred” a Hollywood star or two as the client, and at the end of each book, Toby received a call from the star of the next book, propelling him on to the next adventure.  Kaminsky was a meticulous researcher, and these back to back stories moved through real historical time, with Toby hearing radio broadcasts and reading real headlines.

The first one, A Bullet For A Star (featuring Errol Flynn), was moody, tough and sexy, as a hard-boiled novel should be, although a lot of Kaminsky’s natural humor and great sense for the absurd shined through. He dashed through the lovely lunacy of Murder On The Yellow Brick Road (with Judy Garland). By the time of the third book, You Bet Your Life (featuring the Marx Brothers) the humor had fully taken over – although the series never really lost the philosophical weight.

He was a major influence on everything I’ve ever written. There’s an awful lot of Toby in Mick McKee.

The other series were just as meticulously researched, just as grounded in reality.  They were more serious and gave him more outlet for the deeper philosophical existentialism that he did so well – always touched with humor and an understanding of the absurdities of the universe.

While I think he got more acclaim for his Rostnikov books, police procedurals about about detectives in Russia, my other favorite series of his was his Lieberman series – about an elderly Jewish detective in present day Chicago who must deal with the conundrums of family, crooks, fellow cops, victims and congregational politics (although he himself is an agnostic).

I was just getting warmed up to his last series, about Lew Fonesca, a deeply depressed dropout of society who, in his flight from the tragedy of his wife’s death, drove until he ran out of gas in Sarasota. There he would live as a hermit, if he didn’t take occasional jobs as a process server, and as an unlicensed detective.

He wrote a wonderfully dippy (and twisty) play about a bumbling bank robber who takes the denizens of a small bookstore hostage for the Discovering New Mysteries festival. And he wrote other plays, and teleplays, and also media tie-in books for The Rockford Files and Columbo.

I have nearly all of his books, and maybe I will go back to what I used to do, re-reading them slowly, dripping them out one or two a year to make them last while I wait for a new one.  Or maybe I’ll sit down and just read them all again in a row. That will last me quite a while.