These Gunns for Hire

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His work habits are abominable. He is busiest when the sky over the city is a grey suspicion of dawn, the hour when streetwalkers quit, grifters count their take, and busted junkies begin to jitter with the inside sweats. He is a loner, but his world is filled with friends. He knows the cop with the abused arches, the complaisant heiress, the slick saloon proprietor, the sick comic, the sullen stoolie who talks in the guarded whisper of cell block and exercise yard. He is furiously honest, but he can spot a rigged wheel with a sharper's skill. He is hard-muscled, handsome, handy with a snub-nosed, 38, and his hide is as tough as the bluing on a pistol barrel. Decent, disillusioned and altogether incredible, he is a soap opera Superman. He is television's "Private Eye."

Smarter than the cops, craftier than the crooks, too quick to be caught and domesticated by the classiest doll, TV's private detective runs second to only one competitor in the race for ratings. So far, in a season riddled with old scandals and new specials, the Cowpoke is still top draw, but the Eye has impressive fire power, and by year's end he may well be top gun. The TV tally sheet already lists 62 shows (network and syndicated) devoted to some variation of Cops & Robbers. Police detectives practice their profession on the networks only a few hours a week; it is the civilian shamus who lays down by far the heaviest barrage. At least 15 of the Private Eyes now visible have survived other seasons; the four newcomers--Staccato, Philip Marlowe, Bourbon Street Beat, Hawaiian Eye--came on behind a resounding drum roll of publicity. On the ABC network alone there are twelve detective shows, three of them back-to-back on Friday nights.

This surge of interest in the armed support of law and order calls for a combined budget of upwards of $1,250,000 a week--a bankroll that supports sleuths ranging from a corn-fed country operative named Hannibal Cobb, who appears in five-minute syndicated slices, to a brand-new sunburned entry, Hawaiian Eye, with a mixture of lets and lead, and a full hour on the screen. As the corpses pile up in the living room, citizens who know crime only from the tabloids follow the Eyes like men on the trail of their most desperate hope. And as the evenings pass, one Eye blurs inevitably into another, a TV trouble that even an honest repairman cannot cure.

Tricks & Schticks. Each Eye is an unabashed copy of the last. Characters who ought to be able to trace their lineage all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe have been changed by their packagers until each one looks and sounds like the spawn of a supercilious contemporary named Peter Gunn. Ever since last fall, when Gunn began to impress the public as a guy who could probably carry out his own dead--and ever since the program's hipped-up background jazz began to sell on disks--the TV imitators have been at work. Just as Stu Bailey's 77 Sunset Strip is a far-out California version of Gunn, the new Hawaiian Eye might well be called 77 Waikiki. Johnny Staccato takes the audience back to Manhattan, but, though Star John Cassavetes is an actor of considerable talent, this time he is only Gunn at the piano, in a minor key. Diamond and Marlowe are Gunn from the cut of their Ivy League threads to the last high-rising whine of their score. Like Gunn's, their faces are stiff with concern for their clients--or anyway, with something that makes their faces stiff.

Tough as they are. the TV Eyes have been manhandled by the scriptwriters. All that they have of their own is an occasional schtick (a show business adaptation of a Yiddish word meaning bit, or gimmick). Gunn has Edie Hart (Lola Albright), an insinuating saloon singer who keeps his hearth warm while he prowls the streets. Staccato has his Steinway, which is hardly an adequate substitute. Richard Diamond comes considerably closer with Sam, a sultry answering-servica operator who never slinks into camera range above her comely neck. Sunset Stri) has Kookie (Edd Byrnes), a bop-talking car jockey minus a haircut. Philip Marlowe has to make do with a suggestive scar on his cheek.

Moments of Truth. But under the schticks, they all have the same style. They start work on a case with hardly enough leverage to lift a dime off a cigar-store counter; they consult their pals from the far edge of the underworld to the higher echelons of the police. It is proper this season for TV Private Eyes to get along with the police, a typically unrealistic TV compromise, for even on TV no real cop would dream of asking a detective for so much as the loan of a leather-covered sap. Of course the Eyes absorb their beatings, and in the end they beat the cops to the kill. "The whodunits we make," says Marlowe Producer-Writer Gene Wang, "are as ritualistic as a bullfight."

A veteran of Perry Mason and radio's Thin Man, Wang speaks with authority. "The bullfight parade," he explains, "is, for us. the parade of suspects. The entrance of the torero is the entrance of the detective, the point at which he takes the case. You cannot leave the audience wondering why the detective's clients have not gone to the police. The cape work is when the detective sees his various suspects. The picadors come on, and it's the time of murder. The moment of truth is when the Private Eye says, 'You killed Cock Robin.' "

Faithful to this rigid ritual, few writers busy paying for their swimming pools and Thunderbirds with Private Eye cash could take the facetious oath of Britain's Detection Club--that their heroes "shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them . . . not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God."

Like the Western. TV's Private Eye certainly cannot lay claim to realism, either. His real-life counterparts work out of the country's 5,000 agencies (and earn a collective income of about $250 million a year), not out of swank bars and seedy clip joints. They spend more time at plant protection or gathering over-the-transom divorce evidence than avenging mink-clad corpses. TV Eyes, says San Francisco's crew-cut professional Eye, Hal Lipsett, are altogether too tough. They ignore the real Eye's tricky devices and subtle techniques--the telephone tap, the hidden recorder, the infrared camera, the fishhook microphone (which can be cast as lightly as a dry fly onto an upper-story windowsill). On TV, the Eyes shoot the joint up like maniacs, or "they all throw their revolvers away and use their fists and are too damn smart. A good Private Eye doesn't get in trouble--he doesn't get hit with surprises. If you do a decent job, you don't have violence." In 13 years of sleuthing, says 41-year-old Investigator Lipsett, he has been involved in only one serious scrape.

And yet, despite all the stereotyping, the TV Eye can be topnotch entertainment. He is what sometime Saturday Review Critic John Paterson called "every man's romantic conception of himself: the glorification of toughness, irreverence, and a sense of decency almost too confused to show itself." The Private Eye is the ordinary citizen "become suddenly, magically aggressive, become purified by righteous and legitimate anger--and become, at last, devastatingly effective." Properly presented, he is as much a part of American legend as the super-cowboy, just as surely escapes the conventional, rule-ridden world by taking the law into his own hands. He does not know the wide-open spaces or the purple sage, but the narrow, closed-in spaces of saloons, and the windswept, nighttime highway can give him a similar sense of freedom. "The Private Eye show," says David (Richard Diamond) Janssen, "has the same elements as the western: the hero is invincible; he gets the girl and never marries her; the convertible car has replaced the horse."

Marvel of Mobility. Stubborn addicts of the classic whodunit consider the TV Eye a boor. Some paperback browsers, still slavering over Mickey Spillane's sleuthing satyrs, consider him a sissy. But the TV Eye often has more taste than his critics. At his best, he is a healthy step backward toward the hardboiled heroes who swaggered onto the American scene in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

The literary investigator has been around for little more than 100 years. The world's first detective bureau was established in Paris by Eugene null Vidocq in 1817, but it was not until 1841 that Edgar Allan Poe recognized the adventure available to a man who was a detective without being a public cop. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual Eye who was the hero of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, was a Parisian gentleman devoted to the dual task of outthinking a murderer and outwitting the police.

The 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 whimsy of Dorothy L. Sayers, crime was cleaned up until it became an intellectual puzzle, as safe for the amusement of high-chokered ladies as it was satisfying to the fantasies of high-angled gentlemen.

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 to the people who are ordinarily involved.

Private Lives. Hammett had been a Private Eye himself. He knew that "house burglary is probably the poorest-paid trade in the world." He had been mistaken for a Prohibition agent, hired by a woman to fire her housekeeper, was friendly with a man who stole a Ferris wheel. And he had stumbled upon a young woman who did not tell him that she thought his work was interesting. Unlike

Holmes, Hammett's Eyes were driven by no moral obligation; they had a job, and they tried to do it competently. With an irreverent sneer at their proper predecessors, they succeeded and survived because they were tough, not because they were notably intelligent. Things happened to them: they faced pistols, boredom, and bad stomachs from too many foul meals eaten on the run. Hammett's Sam Spade soon found an acceptable running mate in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who would tell the girls: "The first time we met, I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don't play at it." At his best, the TV Private Eye operates in that tradition.

With Spade and Marlowe as models, hardboiled Private Eye fiction began to crowd the polite puzzlers off America's bookshelves, was in turn hard pressed by the likes of Mickey Spillane and even, strange as it seemed, by mystery stories about honest, intelligent cops.

But competition at the bookstores could hardly faze the fictional Eye. After a profitable stay on radio,* he bought a new set of threads, polished up some new schticks, and began to practice his profession on TV.

To find a niche on TV, the Private Eye needed a new face. In his movie incarnation, he had worn the unforgettable masks of Humphrey Bogart, Bob Montgomery William Powell. On TV, he allowed a few established stars to impersonate him--Ray Milland signed up as Markham, an international op, Robert Taylor pinned on the badge of Police Detective Captain Matt Holbrook in The Detectives, Peter Lawford took over as The Thin Man. But mostly, the Private Eye TV programs proved a bonanza for Hollywood oldtimers who had been playing second leads too long, newcomers who had begun to worry about the first big break. Among the best of the newer names:

Craig Stevens, 39, plays Peter Gunn with a Gary Grant haircut, an Ivy League wardrobe, and the tight mouth of a top-notch ventriloquist. Despite the suspicion that the moment he relaxes he will burst out laughing at himself, Stevens has parlayed his slim, handsome assets into the most entertaining Eye on the air. From Kansas City via 20 years of small parts on stage and screen, Stevens has been happy to let his scriptwriters turn him into a sophisticated skeptic with a heavyweight wallop and a nice, lightweight touch with the wise-guy gag. The company he keeps is enough to keep any Eye open for trouble. Edie Hart (Lola Albright) whispers her songs as a reminder that Pete does have a private life, Police Lieutenant Jacoby (Herschel Bernardi) is a sour reminder that there is a law, and every pimp, plug-ugly shiv artist and safecracker in town is there to prove that there will always be a need for a Gunn. Some viewers insist on treating the show as pure parody. But Pete and his pals usually manage to keep their half-hour filled with an aura of danger-- danger-like the smell of powder smoke in the victim's parlor after the trigger has been pulled.

David Janssen, 29, has to be a crack sleuth just to be sure where his show is playing. Richard Diamond, Private De tective has bounced from network to network ever since it was revived from radio and put on TV as a summer replacement m 1957. Son of a onetime Ziegfeld beauty (Bernice Dalton), personable, poker-faced Dave Janssen has hung on as an actor since winning $5 as a three-year-old song-and-dance star in Alma, Neb. Hollywood got him when he was eight, but he was hard to find in the crowd. "I grew up to be the leading man's best friend's best friend. I have not small ears, and they kept wanting to cut my hair off; I looked like 200 other unidentified flying saucers." With Janssen firing from the hip, Dia mond has progressed from a seedy Manhattan Eye with a bankroll limp as a spaniel's ears to a slick Hollywood operator. Otherwise, his adventures involve the standard sluggings, and he has made so many quick changes that a wag on the set once suggested: "Maybe he should take a page from Loretta Young and come charging through a door wearing a different suit each week. Each set of threads would cue the type of case Diamond is to face : tweeds -- a country squire is mur dered; blue serge -- an accountant ab sconds with the company funds; grey flannel-- a Madison Avenue agency man commits suicide when his show loses out in the Nielsen ratings." Efrem Zimbalist Jr., 36, lends an air of dramatic distinction to 77 Sunset Strip but as far as his qualifications for playing Private Eye Stu Bailey go, Zimbalist likes to brag : "I know less about Private Eyes than anybody I know." It is probably as well. Strip, which ambles on for an hour a show, is a wacky, slapstick variation on a familiar theme. Bailey and his partner Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith) drift around Southern California playing sleuth with a stubborn and amusing disregard tor the elementary rules of the game. And when the action threatens to lag, there is always Kookie (Edd Byrnes), the jivey parkmg-lot attendant with the hyperactive comb. Even though he sometimes winds up playing second lead to Rookie's pompadour, Zimbalist is a good bit of casting. Well-educated (at St. Paul's prep school and twice kicked out of Yale) young Zimbalist managed to fend off the efforts of his famed violinist-father Efrem Zimbalist to make a musician of him After a World War II stretch in the Army he tried to break into movies, studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse was brought to Hollywood by Joshua Logan and was just beginning to get some movie roles when he landed on Sunset Strip "I fought doing this series for six months " says he, "but I lost. As long as they dont bounce me back a hundred years into a Wyatt Earp episode, I may survive 1 am in no position to say as much for the viewer."

Raymond Burr, 42, gives Erie Stanley Gardner s invincible legal Eye Perry Mason, the first TV face he has had since the reports of his cases started spraying from the presses (62 books in 26 years) Sad-eyed, spade-jowled Actor Burr fits Mason to the last wrinkle of his frown-tor the simple reason that Author Gardner never yet has got around to describing his hero. A so-so player for ten years in Hollywood, Burr closed in on Mason with the tenacity of a man who has landed the big role at last. He studied courtroom procedure, lectured to lawyers' groups even insists that he really wants to get a law degree. It seems a lot of unnecessary effort. According to the script, Perry always wins, and he does not need legal knowledge so much as a passion for digging up evidence and that scowling aggressive courtroom demeanor that eventually forces a confession on the witness stand. Like Gardner, Burr feels that the show is brightened with moral uplift--the murders are almost always offstage and the girls are not overly shady Perry's legman is Paul Drake, a suave, civilized type played by Bill Hopper, Columnist Hedda Hopper's son. District attorneys across the country are beginning to cry havoc: it just does not seem right for Perry & Co. never to lose a case.

Philip Carey, 34, has a hard-eyed face and a big (6 ft. 4 in., 207 lbs. ) frame that lend Philip Marlowe the look of a man who has been around. These days Raymond Chandler's Eye seldom travels from L.A., but like his original, Carey maintains the air of an adventurer, a man who might take one drink too many and wind up m Singapore with a full beard. Up from Hackensack, N.J., with stopovers as a Wall Street runner and a Jones Beach lifeguard, Carey has long been an admirer of Chandler's books, is openly proud of the fact that Chandler told him he would make a great Marlowe. What Chandler (who died last March) would think of the rest of the TV show is not quite so certain. On the picture tube his man lives a little too high, operates with a little too much fash. The original would have looked at the posh bachelor apartment, the white convertible, the sharp wardrobe, and bet the lonely fin in his pocket that this guy was on the take from some wrongos.

Stylized Violence. Though these five Eyes have latched onto the classiest clientele scores of lesser peepers operate on IV. Hollywood sound stages, dominated until a few years ago by all sorts of B movies from gangster yarns to Abbott-and-Costello comedies, now harbor an endless succession of Private Eye productions (they are B pictures too, but nobody calls them that). Hollywood prop men account for more blank cartridges in a week than the L.A. police force can match with live bulletsin the line of duty in a year Everyone is getting into the act. At Warners, where TV production accounts for a large part of the company income, Private Eye shows pack so much publicity potential that TV Chief Bill Orr keeps the press away from his crews-writers, directors producers. He handles the interviews and hangs onto the credit.

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 has had only one accident--a torn fingernail. Darren (Mike Hammer) McGavin has also had only one accident: a broken rib. Still, the producers prefer the standard technique of organizing camera angles so that stunt men can take over. (The stunt men get paid well; they can afford an occasional puffed lip.) The heroes must survive, pressed, currycombed and unscrambled.' for next week's case.

Not 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 a man shot down, "blood capsules" fired from compressed air guns splatter against Plexiglas plates hidden beneath the victim's clothing. There are special bullets filled with flaked aluminum to simulate shattering glass; others are packed with a sticky powder to make telltale puffs of dust when they ricochet off a wall.

All this special Private Eye technique has opened up a new area of employment for talented extras, men who know how to simulate the absolute stillness of death (corpses are embarrassing when they breathe), who know how to wear a cop's uniform with ease. On location in Manhattan, actor cops get up to $100 for a day's work ($22.05 if they have no lines). Real New York policemen pound their beats for salaries starting at $15 a day.

Taboos of the Tube. For writers, too, the Private Eye shows make a socko source of income. For them, the big trick is the art of telling a story without tripping over the plot. The picture on the tube cries for action; the detective who takes time out to think becomes tedious. It was different on radio, says Writer-Producer Dick Carr, a veteran of radio's Richard Diamond and now a writer on TV's Staccato. "In radio you could always use a narrator to tie up the loose ends. I could cover any hour TV show today in one half-hour of radio with the use of narration. The hour TV show has room for only a half-hour of ideas."

Another problem never encountered by Poe, Conan Doyle or Chandler lies in TV's special taboos. "Any professional writer," says Professional Writer Carr, "learns all about them fast. We had to be careful on one of our Eye shows because it involved dope, and one of the sponsors was tied in with Pharmaceuticals. On Staccato, Johnny was not allowed to ask the heavy for a cigarette. An executive reminded us that the sponsor (Salem) sells cigarettes, and that even the heavy would never be without them. Ask him for matches."

Most TV writers bat out their Private Eye scripts in two or three days. Not long ago one producer tried to persuade a writer to take more time for real quality work, offered an above-average $2,250 per script. "He did some figuring on a piece of paper and said, 'I'm sorry. I have to make $50,000 for the year, and I couldn't afford to take that much time with one script.' " Concludes 45-year-old Writer-Producer Roy (Maverick) Huggins, whose novel The Double Take was the model for Sunset Strip: "Television is for younger men--about 14 years of age --and I'm getting out."

Most Private Eye writers (all above the age of 14) are either too busy or too contemptuous of their subject matter to get into the guts of their characters. With too few exceptions, the type they have created is a cardboard clotheshorse carrying a schtick. But there are some hopeful signs that future TV sleuths will be cut to more varied patterns. M-G-M-TV is getting ready with a video version of Agatha Christie's little Belgian cerebrater, Hercule Poirot. Writer Frank Gruber, who has already turned out more westerns than he cares to count, is dusting off an Eye named Johnny Fletcher, a slick spieler who never won a fistfight in his life. Herb (Have Gun) Meadows has tried to combine the oater and the peeper; his Man from Blackhawk is a 19th century investigator operating in the old West.

Even in his most stereotyped form, the TV Eye occasionally manages to shoot his way through to an evening of satisfactory recreation. And he is collecting such rewards that his bosses may yet do him justice; they may treat him with respect and turn him into a man. If that happens he will be closer to Chandler's hero: "A relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all ... He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge . . . He talks as a man of his age talks--that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham and a contempt for pettiness." He will also be closer to the real Private Eye, who earns his living on the streets--the keyhole peeker, the credit investigator, the man at the other end of the telephone tap. Between those two extremes, the TV Eye may yet make a few more hours of television worth watching.

* Of 28 Private Eyes once on radio, only one remains: Johnny Dollar (CBS).

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