Word: shamuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Locked inside a beige file cabinet in Sarasota, Fla., is an unfinished manuscript entitled A Black Border for McGee. May it never be published. The book, as its name suggests, would write finis to Travis McGee, the perdurable, persnickety shamus whose demise, white-haired Author John Dann MacDonald once vowed, would occur after his tenth color-coded* starring role. "I keep the MS.," says the author, "as leverage on my publisher." The latest McGee, The Green Ripper, is the 18th in the Travis saga, and the best...
...Akins is a smalltown Southern sheriff in the same network's The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (a spin-off of B.J. and the Bear). ABC's Hart to Hart stars a jet-set husband-wife sleuthing team (Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers). In CBS's Big Shamus, Little Shamus, father and son (Brian Dennehy and Doug McKeon) become the first TV detectives to police Atlantic City's new casinos. For audiences who take crime lightly, ABC has a sitcom called Detective School. NBC is unveiling a James Bond clone (Robert Conrad) in A Man Called Shane...
...outset a sleazy young dope dealer vainly attempts to hire Investigator Michael Brennen to locate blue-eyed Dani, his missing girlfriend and meal ticket. Brennen has just about decided to retire from the shamus game. However, when the dealer shows up mysteriously dead, the down-at-heels p.i. takes on the posthumous assignment. Dani, it develops, belongs to a wealthy Faulknerian family held together by booze, barbiturates, bitterness, incest and greed. Brennen finally finds the girl (also mysteriously dead) and discovers that the family business is being run by a homosexual Chinatown lawyer and his epicene "nephew." The nephew...
...Late Show. Art Carney trudges through the role of washed- up shamus Ira Wells, opposite Lily Tomlin's hippy-dippy hippy, who hires Wells to find her cat and leads them both into a big mess of a sinister inbroglio. Robert Benton, screenwriter and director, does a lot of borrowing, from both classic and more recent detective flicks, but does his cribbing in style. The actors, meanwhile, are heavily, and affectingly, into themselves: particularly the kharma and vibrations-obsessed Tomlin. With the same L.A. backdrop that the great Chandler stories grew out of, this one proves as well-oiled...
...down-at-the-heels private eye named Russel Wren is suddenly victimized by a series of increasingly vigorous beatings. Someone, perhaps everyone, is out to get him, and Wren naturally wants to find out why. One good reason may be his mouth. A former college English teacher, the shamus speaks in Victorian grandiloquent, and the burden of his remarks is composed of snippets from the Great Books and library paste. Wren cannot even make a kinky pass at his secretary without providing footnotes: "Dante finds Beatrice in heaven, on one side of the Lord, with none other than the Virgin...