Accent on Living

OF ALL forms of radio and television entertainments, the crime show — barring its rather complicated commercials about the behavior of the digestive tract — must be the easiest to write. There was a lime when the crime show was believed to need much the same kind of underpinnings as a mystery story. Its writers had to know how to be in two places at once or how to get out of a room with everything left locked on the inside. They were experts on rare poisons, and they knew all about the sciences. Nowadays the scientific stutl is all in the commercials. The crime show is intended “to assist American police in their war against the underworld,” but it is also intended to assist the sale of a pill, a wonderful pill containing “a new citrus bio-flavinoid.” The pill will ensure Regularity for the crime-show audience, we learn, and enough is said on this count of an evening to make us wonder how long the members of the Sherlock Holmes cult can, without misunderstanding arising, continue to call themselves the Raker Street Irregulars. What concerns us more is this business of assisting the American police, for that is what sets the modern crime show apart from the old-time puzzlers and mysteries. What does the crime show do about it?

The answer lies in the word education. The pill company is out to teach the public all about police work. It wants the public to realize that most police work is plain, routine drudgery. Hard work, long hours, a hastily gobbled sandwich — that’s what police work is like in the crime show of 1956. And if cracking the case calls for no great amount of brains, it does require much patience, especially on the part of the crime-show audience. Filling in the middle twenty minutes of the half-hour show is what counts, and this has become a straightforward interval of drudgery. No tricks, no short cuts. (A writer gets nowhere in these circles if he insists on solving in ten minutes a case budgeted for twenty.)

Thus the drudgery interval is simplicity itself. All the writer need do is select the drudgery and put his characters to work on it.

The crime itself is not important. It can be any old thing — murder, robbery, embezzlement, kidnaping — and it has already been committed when the crime show begins; in fact the squad cars are just reaching the place. Clomp, clomp, clomp. (No clomping if it’s an F.B.I. show. Clomping is just for cops.) Clomp.

Over here, Lieutenant.

Hm-m-m. Looker, wasn’t she . . .

We got two people saw the man get away. Green Chewy '55 sedan.

Anyone see the number?

Nah. Just the first three digits: 9-U-J. Too bad.

Rafferty,

Yessir.

Get some pictures of that girl and take them to every bar and joint in town. Find out her name and where she lived. Mulligan.

Yessir.

You and I have a little job to do at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

The Registry of Motor Vehicles?

Right. I$8217;nr going to findthe driver of that car if l hare to trade down every license plate in California that begins with 9-C-J! (Clomp, clomp, clomp.)

Thescreen-out at the Registry of Motor Vehicles is one of those elastic episodes that can stretch or shrink to any desired bulk. Mulligan and the lieutenant, find, at the outset, that they are up against 7000 registrations beginning with 0-1-J, and these are reduced to 733 issued to green Chevvies. This takes eighteen hours of steady plugging — about six minutes of crime-show time — before Mulligan is allowed to go out for egg sandwiches and codec.

Gee, Lieutenant, you mean we got to see all 733 of these Chevvy owners? How can -

Get going. Mulligan. We’ve still got lots to do. (Clomp, clomp.)

There is no need for the crimeshow audience to become restive at the prospect of 733 police interviews to come. Rafferty — we had almost forgotten about Rafferty — has been hard at it, meanwhile, touring the bars and night spots in his drudgery episode. He has been drawing blanks right and left. But stay—Rafferty is about to make a strike.

Nah, I never see no dame like dat.

Sure?

Nah. Hey — wait a minute. Could be she was in here last week.

Yeah ?

Yeh. You leave me out a this, copper?

Sure.

She teas wit’ Fingers Spagoni.

Okay. You’re clean, and thanks.

Comes a blast of the leaden-footed musical theme, all groans and dissonances, with which the pill companies like to surround their conunercials. An authoritative voice barks staccato questions about the pills we are now taking. Give them up, it commands, and try the new citrus bio-flav inoid. More music. And now — back to Precinct 87!

That about wraps it up. Spagoni gives up quietly, doesn’t even come out shooting. Amid a good deal more clomping, the lieutenant even retrieves from a trash can the telltale license plate 9-U-J, etc. More of the dolorous music, more about the great new pill. Fingers Spagoni, the authoritative voice informs us, paid for his crime in the gas chamber at San Quentin.

And next week, another treat, another full half-hour with This Is Your Precinct 87.

Just good, solid routine. Not a puzzle in a carload.