Word: backed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...pattern was contagious, and neither Poe nor his immediate successors seemed anxious to move it back to America. The first big geographical jump came in 1887, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought him to London in the guise of Sherlock Holmes. Like Dupin, Holmes was an intellectual athlete, and socially he was a marvel of mobility, at home with scholars, society bluebloods, police inspectors. "Holmes," wrote Social Historian David Bazelon, "despite his eccentricities, is essentially an English gentleman acting to preserve a moral way of life." From Dickens' unfinished teaser, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to the 20th century...
Even after the mystery came back to the U.S., through the first two decades of the 20th century, crimes were committed in the grand old English manner. Murder was still a puzzle, and whether S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen or H C Bailey were writing the rules, the mari who found the answer was a citizen of superior intellect. Whatever he collected for the job, he actually worked for intellectual satisfaction. It was not until 1929 that a slim, sardonic operator named Samuel Dashiell Hammett published Red Harvest and gave murder-to say nothing of lesser crimes-back...
Despite the big money they earn the shows are filmed on a tight budget: around ?40,000 and three days for each half-hour. With rare exceptions, the all-important night scenes are faked on the back lots of Hollywood; to save overtime wages, these are shot in daylight with the cameras stopped down or filtered. Most of the all-important fights are faked too. Some actors, e.g., Craig Stevens, who was once an amateur boxer, like to throw their own fists in the closeups, but directors are leary of such heroics. So far in 51 scraps, Stevens...
...only the Private Eyes themselves are dry-cleaned. In a TV production, violence becomes strangely stylized; the corpse may have been plugged by a .45 at point-blank range, but there is only a neat hole in the otherwise unsullied forehead. The back of the skull is intact; there are no brains on the rug. In some of these spruced-up shooting matches, the Eyes carry .38s, each with a short sleeve welded inside the barrel so that real bullets cannot be fired. The blanks the pistols accommodate cost only a dime apiece. For scenes when the audience actually sees...
...very variety of the season, he thinks, is a tribute to an audience that cheerfully accepts City Center's small-scaled, tightly budgeted productions. "I don't have to do all the work for this audience," says he. "They don't want just to sit back and feel gorged...