![]() I read it as a paperback about a year after it came out originally I was a fan of the 87th Precinct books, and read it as a part of that series. Has anybody here ever read the two 87th Precinct novels that were the sources for these episodes?Īs it happens, I’ve read one of them: Jigsaw, which was published in 1970 (24 years before the Columbo show was produced). Read next in the Junkyard… Columbo: Strange Bedfellows That has become the Achilles’ heel of the 90s episodes. Creating a character who is incredibly adaptable is child’s play… if you simply write him as a different character in each story. ![]() But there’s a proviso to that compliment. He’s equally at home with a team, or going it alone, and he’s equally comfortable mingling with career criminals, prostitutes, celebrities or millionaires. If nothing else, this episode reinforces how adaptable Columbo can be as a detective. As much as I prefer to see Columbo working on his own, there have been plenty of occasions where he gets a sidekick, and it does almost always work very well. I’m not sure we needed to see Tyne Daly again so soon, as she was so memorable in A Bird in the Hand… and therefore becomes a distraction here, but Harrison Page is loveable as Sergeant Brown. ![]() And if you want a safe pair of hands to play a key role in any kind of drama, Ed Begley Jr. The surprising piece of fingerprint evidence that is key to the conviction is also quite inventive, so we get something approaching a satisfying gotcha moment. Despite the photo jigsaw building up to a picture that would probably be laughably unhelpful in reality, and the silliness of the piece with the X being very predictably discovered last, it was an aspect of the episode that stuck firmly in my mind since I first watched the episode many years ago. There are aspects of the story that work well. The hard edge just beneath the surface has actually been a key part of his character right from the start, but it only works as a momentary flash of steeliness, not when it becomes his entire approach to a case. Only towards the end, when the case is narrowed down to the all-too-obvious culprit, does it feel a bit more like Columbo is being Columbo, but even then he’s acting all tough rather than being his usual self. It’s just a cop show that happens to have Columbo in it, or rather somebody who looks like him and uses his name, but certainly doesn’t behave like him. It would be far more forgivable if the story were compelling to watch, but Mrs Columbo did much better at these kinds of murder mysteries on several occasions. This episode stomps all over the creators’ original vision for Columbo. It feels so, so very wrong, like a scene borrowed from a different series altogether. Worst of all, Columbo gets brutally attacked, ending up in hospital, which is just not what this show has ever been about. I suspect this particular story was chosen so that Peter Falk could have fun with the undercover scenes, pretending to be different characters while he interacts with various lowlifes. One of the character traits that has nearly always defined Columbo is his refusal to carry a gun. He is hugely out of character for most of the episode, even becoming a gun-toting badass for one scene, which feels desperately wrong. He’s a cog in a wheel, rather than a shabby lone wolf. The gritty serial murder case, without a key suspect for Columbo to pester, forces the Lieutenant to change his tactics from his usual modus operandi, and he is acting as part of a team throughout. Undercover, in contrast, doesn’t really have any reason to exist at all. Instead, we had an interesting insight into how Columbo works as part of a team, and we saw his keen intelligence put to a different use, with the stakes as high as they could be: the life of a member of his family. No Time to Die was a qualified success, surprisingly, but I think that worked because it was personal to Columbo, and was just so different that there wasn’t even a murder to investigate. The choice to adapt a couple of Ed McBain’s police procedural novels was always an odd thing to do, simply because Columbo isn’t a police procedural show. This is most definitely not one of those. I’m all for a long-running series trying new things, but it has reached a point where a Columbo episode that feels anything like a Columbo episode has become a rare treat. I didn’t reckon with the 90s episodes, which have almost forced me to make the usual format the exception rather than the rule. When I originally decided on the format for these articles, it made sense to write about each episode in the order that events take place, starting with the motive, then the murder, then the mistakes the killer makes, etc.
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