Holmes’ apparent death in 1893 caused outrage amongst tens of thousands of loyal fans Peter Falk taped a spot for the Romanian government to quell potential riots after the show stopped production in 1978, officials fearing import quotas would be blamed. In 1975, Emperor Hirohito visited the U.S. With its upper-crust killers, it was one of the few 70s American television shows to get play in Communist countries, thanks to its perceived anti-wealth, anti-capitalist spin. Since 1971, over 25 countries have run episodes of Columbo, and the original has remained enormously and consistently popular in countries like Japan, France, Iran and Israel. What makes Columbo and Sherlock stand out among the detecting crowd? No less an authority than Peter Falk himself has invoked the name of Sherlock Holmes in describing his eponymous show and character. Writer/producer Stephen Moffat certainly recognized this intersection of intellects when he reimagined the modern-day Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch while at the same time visualizing his own, now dormant, take on a new Columbo series. While Columbo and Holmes are not the only “thinking man’s detectives”, their cultural prominence and worldwide fame set them apart from the now-stodgy Ellery Queens of the literary sleuthing set. In this famous lineage, Columbo and Sherlock Holmes each belong in the class for cerebral investigators – keen intellects using incisive observational skills to solve the crimes likely to go unsolved by conventional officers. Thankfully, long-time blog reader and occasional contributor Glenn Stewart has done the hard yards, so I don’t have to! Without further ado let’s don our smoking jackets, curl up by the fireside and light up our briar pipes as we consider the similarities and contrasts between Lieutenant Columbo and Sherlock Holmes…ĬRIME PAYS because crime sells – in magazines and books, movies and television, true crime and fictional. From Marlowe to Marple, Spade to Spenser, Chan to Charles, Warshawski to Wolfe, Hammer to the Hardy Boys, Friday to Fletcher, the list of popular crime-busters and their crime-solving methods is a long and distinguished one. I have long contemplated penning a comparative essay on the two detectives but never quite found the time or headspace to move beyond note taking and drafting. But how much do these men really have in common when making a detailed comparison? Well, despite one being an upper-crust, cynical and occasionally drug-dependent Victorian-era Brit, and the other being from humble Italian-American stock, a grafter who has worked harder than others to get ahead, there is much to connect the two detectives – and those similarities expand way beyond a mutual love of tobacco. He may be slight of stature, but there’s no doubt that he’s earned his place at the top table with the most luminous legends of his profession.ĭespite being a very different character, and harking from an entirely different time and space, Columbo may be the closest to Holmes of all their peers in terms of mental dexterity. But tucked in there alongside the Poirots, Marples, Maigrets, Morses and Marlowes of the fictional world is a crumpled little LA homicide lieutenant going by the name of Columbo. Here’s an incarnation of Holmes who might be less than appreciative of the good Lieutenant Sherlock Holmes casts such a large shadow over the world of fictional crime fighting that one can only wonder how many of the other great detectives of the past century will be similarly remembered by future generations.
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