In the 1970s, I spent a few years in California as a PhD student in biophysics, and one of the strange experiences with the American authorities was the fact that they no longer had any objections to my wife working for me after I had stated that we didn't have a TV set because I had to make ends meet with my scholarship.
That couldn't be the case in the land of opportunity, so one day I carried a TV set into the living room, and although I had intended to stay away from the entertainment series on the US channels, the opposite happened the first time I switched it on. There was a crime movie on that fascinated me and was part of a whole series called "Columbo". The name came from a strangely pontificating inspector played by Peter Falk who had to solve murders. Incidentally, the screenwriter of the first episode I saw was called Peter S. Fischer, but this was not the reason for my fascination with Columbo, who has also achieved cult status in Germany, if I am correctly informed. In this country, several books try to understand the inspector's special approach, one of which is called "Columbo - the man with many questions". One of the gags of the crime thrillers was the inspector's quirk of ending an interrogation, turning around and leaving, but only to ask the suspect breathing a sigh of relief one last question that caused trouble, even if it didn't directly concern the murder. The special thing about the Columbo films was that the viewer got to see the crime before first the police and then Columbo entered the scene. The people in front of the TV sets knew more than the actors in the movie, which can lead to the question of where the series drew its suspense from. Normally, viewers try to guess "Who is the culprit?", but with Columbo they knew, and here it could only be about how the murderer would deal with his conscience and his lies.
The success of "Columbo" has to do with classic literature, as the model for the serial detective is an investigating magistrate called Porfiry Petrovitch, who appears in "Crime and Punishment" by the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky. The novel begins with the murder in question. Columbo is fascinating because people in Hollywood knew great literature. One more question: who would have thought it!
