JUST ONE MORE THING

Last year I briefly and disastrously dated a man who was much younger than me. Most of the time it didn't matter that he was much younger than me; in fact, most of the time I was barely conscious of it. Sometimes, it is true, he would use words I didn't understand. Also, we had different intuitions about socks. These were just minor details, though, and easy to laugh about, or to ignore entirely. What was much less easy to ignore, what really exposed the gap between us, was in fact something we superficially agreed on, something that should have been a point of connection: our mutual appreciation of Lieutenant Columbo of the LAPD.  

“I love Columbo,” I said one day, a propos of what I no longer recall.

“Me too,” he agreed, and this gladdened my heart, since I could imagine us spending

rainy Sunday afternoons snuggling on the sofa, watching old episodes and eating Garibaldis. 

“What's your favourite episode?” I asked.

“I've never seen one,” he replied.

“Oh,” I said, flummoxed. “But how do you know about it?”

“Memes,” he answered, but he pronounced it “meeeeemes,” deliberately stretching it out whilst slowly nodding, as if he were introducing me to a new word in a foreign tongue. 

I felt like Columbo in his final outing, 2003's 'Columbo Likes the Night Life'. In this, Columbo's antagonist is an LA club promoter, about to open a new venue. Much of the fun of the episode comes from seeing the sexagenarian Columbo, dressed in the familiar threadbare mackintosh, puffing on the familiar cigar, bumble around the rave scene, classic fish-out-of-water stuff. For the villainous promoter, all scoffing and sneers, Columbo cuts a ridiculous, even a pathetic figure. The contrast between Columbo and the milieu reaches its apogee in the final sequence, at the new club's opening night. There, in an acid and neon world, surrounded by the young and the beautiful, the shambling detective, a study in beige, does indeed cut a bizarre figure. But a pathetic one? The viewer knows better, as does, we sense, the young woman who offers him a glowstick on his way in – offers it not in mockery but in tribute. Just as Baucis and Philemon, pious Greeks, recognize that the peasants knocking at their door, seeking hospitality, are in fact Zeus and Hermes, Olympian gods in disguise, so the woman recognizes that Columbo is not just a seedy man in a cheap suit but the agent of some mighty power. Like the viewer, she already understands that the night belongs to him, not to the promoter; that the club is the setting he has chosen, with a sense of irony and theatre, for a scene that he will orchestrate, and that will culminate in the revelation of the truth and the promotor's arrest. The glowstick she gives Columbo will serve as both conductor's baton and sword of justice. 

We know all this because we have seen Columbo pull this routine before, perform the role of befuddled naïf, floundering in an unfamiliar environment. In this episode, as in many of the later ones, he leverages his age to make himself look as out of place as possible; in earlier episodes, before he could really inhabit that avuncular persona (his frequent references to nieces and nephews notwithstanding), he exploited class difference to the same end. Ashing all over the deep-pile carpets of the murderers' fancy Beverly Hills mansions, he presented himself as a simple, salt-of-the-earth type, lacking in refinement, lacking in sophistication. His antagonists – expensive lawyers, expensive doctors, high-powered TV executives, art critics, concert musicians, architects, fine-dining chefs, chess grandmasters, spies, novelists: in short, cultured cosmopolitans – are happy to believe that he is also lacking in acumen. That's why they always answer that one last question. What harm could it possibly do to confirm that no, they don't remember turning off the lights when they left; yes, they had sushi last Tuesday. (Oh, Mrs Columbo prefers Chinese? But what about the MSG?) The details Columbo truffles out are always so trifling, so trivial: what can he do with them? How can he put it together from all those loose ends? It would be like reconstructing one of his cigars from its ashes. And in any case, the murderers – very clever people, very ingenious people; Mensa material all – have always contrived adamantine alibis. He can suspect all he wants, but if he can't prove any of it... And in any case, the murderers think, the police commissioner is a personal friend, the governor is a personal friend; they can always pull some strings, claim harassment, and have the exasperating little man taken off the case. The murderers are always so cocky, so sure that they'll get away with it. Too late do they realize that they have been the victim of an imposture, that the fumbling, bumbling, perpetually dishevelled policeman is not the rube. He's a shark; they're the rubes.

Hence the double pleasure Columbo provides. First, there is the pleasure of seeing the supercilious and overweening punished for their presumption. But a Columbo episode is not first and foremost a morality tale. (And the antagonists, it should be noted, are not always sneery and hubristic: for a sympathetic murderer I recommend the peerless Ruth Gordon in 'Try and Catch Me': she plays a mystery novelist who kills her niece's widower, convinced that he staged the boating accident in which her niece died but in which the police chose to see nothing suspicious. As she notes in the final scene, if Columbo had investigated her niece's death, she would probably never have had to do what she did.) More fundamentally, Columbo offers a purely aesthetic experience: the joy of watching a virtuoso performance. In fact, there are two virtuoso performances, so the joy is squared. There is Falk's performance as Columbo, and there is Columbo's performance of his hapless, hopeless persona. The unassumingness, the absent-mindedness, the scraps of paper and stubby pencils... all part of the act, designed to trick the murderer into putting their own head into the noose. Indeed, every episode has something of the structure of a magic trick (it is no accident that there are two episodes set in the world of stage illusionism: 'Now you see him...' with Jack Cassidy and 'Columbo Goes to the Guillotine' with Anthony Andrews). It is an unusual magic trick, though, since Columbo himself occupies three roles: he is the pledge (the perfectly ordinary object the magician shows us at the start), the prestige (the big reveal) and the conjuror. The glowstick is also a magician's wand. He works a transformation, and he is the thing transformed.

But Columbo is only ever transformed in the eyes of the murderer. The viewer is always already aware that he is not merely an obtuse but vexingly persistent policeman, but an invincible foe. Like the heroes of old, we learn everything we need to know about him the first time we meet him, and every subsequent encounter simply confirms what we already know. In this sense, he is very much in the tradition of the mythic heroes of antiquity – your Herculeses, your Odysseuses (and indeed Odysseus, with his wiliness, with his habit of disguising himself as a beggar, with his faithful wife, would surely recognize in Columbo a distant descendant). As Umberto Eco notes in his essay 'The Myth of Superman', the mythic hero never changes; they have 'immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny' [Diacritics 2.1 (1972), 14-22 (p. 15)]. It is this that made them particularly apt for representation in statuary in the ancient world: they could be represented at any given moment of their geste, because the entirety of the story is folded into every moment. 

Eco insists, therefore, that the mythic hero 'must be in part predictable, and cannot hold surprises for us' (p. 15). He then draws a straight line from the mythic heroes of antiquity to the fictional detectives who have proliferated since Poe first introduced his Chevalier Dupin to the reading public in 1844's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'. Fictional detectives, he points out, come with a panoply of keynote characteristics, idiosyncrasies, and accessories. Indeed, they are often wholly reducible to their keynote characteristics, idiosyncrasies and accessories: Holmes has his pipe, his violon, his addiction and his genius; Poirot has his vanity; Maigret has his doggedness and pipe. (There is a PhD to be written on tobacco in detective fiction, on transitional objects in detective fiction.) Eco's essay was written in 1972, after the first two pilot episodes of Columbo (1968's 'Prescription: Murder' and 1971's 'Murder by the Book', another Jack Cassidy guest turn), and whilst the first series was being shown on NBC. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he does not mention Columbo, of whose existence we can presume he was unaware, but the LAPD lieutenant slots perfectly into Eco's list of mythic detectives: he has his coat, his cigars, his schtick. Indeed, part of that schtick is resistance to change: he always gets the chilli at Barney's Beanery and he is largely uninterested in advances in forensic science. Of course, Columbo is also a paragon of marital fidelity, of emotional constancy. The fact that the Columbos, as far as we know, have no children also seems significant in this respect. Children bind their parents to linear time; it is easier, perhaps, to make the leap into the timeless world of myth without them. It is that timeless world to which Columbo, pre-eminently a man of immutable characteristics, belongs. And just as his ancestor, Odysseus, was celebrated in statuary, so Columbo is celebrated in its contemporary equivalent: the meme. For the internet, like the realm of myth, and like the unconscious, knows not time, or at least knows it not as mortals know it, as a relentless movement to death. It is precisely because he seems to exist in some sense outside time that Columbo lends himself to memification. Spell check, I see as I write this, wants to change 'memification' to 'mummification', quite appropriately: the meme, like the mummy, and like the statue, has been abstracted from the order of time, frozen at a given moment. 

Columbo confirms another of Eco's intuitions about detective fiction: that the element of suspense generated by the 'whodunit?' storyline is in fact superfluous. For Eco the true pleasure of detective fiction lies not in uncovering a truth hitherto concealed, but rather in recognition: '[t]he attraction of the [detective] book, the sense of repose, of psychological extension which it is capable of conferring lies in the fact that, plopped in an easy chair or in the seat of a train compartment, the reader continuously recovers, point by point what he already knows, what he wants to know again' (p. 20). We don't read detective fiction for the reasons we think we do, i.e. to enjoy the passage from ignorance to knowledge (through discovering the identity of the culprit), but rather to enjoy the sense that we always already know enough. Thus Eco writes: 'Paradoxically, the same detective story that one is tempted to ascribe to the products that satisfy the taste for the unforeseen or the sensational is, in fact, read for exactly the opposite reason, as an invitation to that which is taken for granted, familiar, expected. Not knowing who the guilty party is becomes an accessory element, almost a pretext' (p.21). Now, Eco's opinion is perhaps a minoritarian one among writers and connoisseurs of detective fiction, who more normally insist that the deep anthropological root of its appeal is connected in some way to a hungering after knowledge, but it seems to have been shared by the creator of Columbo, who made the bold decision entirely to suppress the 'whodunit' element of the story. Every Columbo episode opens with the plotting and commission of the murder; Columbo only ever turns up in the second act. The viewer always knows the identity of the killer, right from the start. As does Columbo (most of the time: there are episodes that tinker with the formula, but they are exceptions that exist to prove the rule.) At the end of 'Murder Under Glass', the antagonist (played by Louis Jourdan), asks Columbo when he first suspected him. ‘About two minutes after I met you’, he replies. At the end of 'By Dawn's Early Light', one of Patrick McGoohan's many appearances as the antagonist (he also directed several episodes), his villainous army chief, realizing the jig is up, realizes at the same time that the jig was always up: ‘You knew it was me right from the start, didn't you?’ ‘Just about, sir’, Columbo replies, with characteristic deference. 

The viewer always already knows everything there is to know; Columbo always already knows everything there is to know. This sounds like a formula for a very boring TV show, a show with no surprises, and how can secular narrative fiction – as opposed to myth – function if entirely denuded of surprises? Fortunately, there are surprises in every Columbo episode – myriad, tiny surprises that lie in details that sometimes border on the absurdist. For example: Columbo comments on a suspect's needlepoint; she asks him drolly if he himself is a practitioner of the craft; the viewer anticipates a reference to Mrs. Columbo. Instead, we get this flash of the unexpected: 'My nephew's the needlepointer. It seems to relax him before he goes into those weightlifting contests.' More generally, Columbo's turn of phrase is a consistent source of delight. In 'Murder, Smoke and Shadows', he tells his dog (whose name is Dog) that he can't have another treat: 'Soon you're gonna be big like a dirigible.' Then there are the interactions between characters. In every episode there are scenes that serve no purpose in terms of plot or character development; they are instead just bits – Columbo being reprimanded by a waitress in a coffee shop for trying to eat a donut purchased elsewhere; Columbo having a meal foisted on him at a soup kitchen by a nun who has mistaken him for one of the homeless men she feeds; Columbo playing 'Three Blind Mice' on a tuba. The Columbo experts (shout-out to the Columbophile blog) tell us that Falk often improvised within scripted scenes, adding unscripted gestures, unscripted lines, and some scenes were more or less wholly improvised. No doubt it is this use of improvisation that infuses into each episode a sense of playfulness, of fun, a sense of pleasurable surprise. It's a show to which the whole concept of the 'the spoiler' is inapplicable, and yet it is a show in which you never quite know, moment to moment, what is going to come next. 

It is also the case, of course, that although the viewer knows everything right from the start, and Columbo knows everything right from the start, the antagonist does not. In most detective fictions, the murderer is, initially, in possession of a secret. The job of the detective, and by extension the reader or viewer, is to discover that secret. In Columbo, the tables are turned: it is the viewer and the detective who know something the killer doesn't initially know, since he doesn't know that we know the secret of their guilt. There is thus a movement from ignorance to knowledge in the course of each episode, but it is on the part of the murderer. In Eco's terms, then, while Columbo is a 'mythic type', Columbo's antagonists belong not to the world of myth but to that of narrative fiction, the pre-eminent form of which used to be the novel and is now the long-form TV series. Of characters in narrative fiction, Eco writes: 'the character of a novel wants [...] to be a man like anyone else, and what could befall him is as unforeseeable as what may happen to us' (p. 15). The mistake Columbo's antagonists make, week after week, is to believe that they belong to the category of the mythic, as if wealth and influence alone could promote them to the ranks of heroes and gods, as if money had any purchasing power when it comes to metaphysics. It is not an accident that so many of the cases turn on Columbo breaking an unbreakable alibi. In arranging their perfect alibis, the murderers try precisely to juggle with time. Columbo's job is to reveal to them the impossibility of doing so: they have always been, and will always remain, mortal, which is to say that they cannot bend time to their will, can only be carried along by it. 

Here we reach, then, the crux of the matter, the deep metaphysical root of Columbo's appeal: each episode stages a conflict between two different temporalities, the mythic and literary, with Columbo embodying the former and the murderer the latter. Even the case-of-the-week format speaks to this: the antagonists come and go, Columbo endures. This is quite different from other modern mythologies – Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, Superman – where the hero repeatedly encounters the same villain(s). In these serials, all the characters seem to have escaped time's raptor claws. In Columbo, this is the prerogative only of the detective and, for the ninety minutes or two hours each episode lasts, of the viewer. Successfully to offer an escape, however brief and however illusory, from the sublunar realm, where the clock ticks relentlessly, is surely one of the principal consolations of art. Columbo is especially consoling, however, because it illustrates the truth of Gore Vidal's maxim that it is not enough to succeed, others must fail. While the viewer of Columbo is getting a brief respite from that ever-ticking clock, the antagonist finds themself bound more and more tightly within the order of time. 

It is often pointed out by wags on the internet that Columbo is probably not very good at his job, if his job is understood not simply as cracking cases but as gathering sufficient evidence to ensure that the murderer is convicted following due process in a court of law. A Columbo spin-off series showing the cases coming to court would probably end more often in acquittals than guilty verdicts, owing to Columbo's relative lack of interest in gathering probative evidence. Columbo always gets a confession, sure, but since he never reads suspects their Miranda rights, the confessions are inadmissible. All the murderers need to do is keep schtum once they get to the station and the case against them collapses like a house of cards. The wags on the internet have a point, then, but they are also missing one: that the workings of human justice, in the form of the DA, the judge and the jury, are of secondary importance in Columbo. The antagonists aren't just betting they can beat the criminal justice system, but seeking to prove that they belong to the world of myth, not the everyday, everyman world of the novel. Or, to put it in the terms used by their common ancestor Raskolnikov in Dostoïevski's Crime and Punishment, the novel on which Columbo was originally based, that they are not lice but Napoleons. They don't need a jury to convict them to realize they've lost that wager.

The deep meaning of Columbo, therefore, is about the dichotomy in human nature, particularly as that dichotomy expresses itself in relation to time. But this dichotomous relationship to time is not just inscribed in each individual episode but also functions across the series as a whole. The first Columbo episode aired in 1968; the last one 2003. Yes, Columbo is a mythic figure, but Peter Falk was a mortal, and therefore necessarily aged over the course of those 35 years. I started watching Columbo in the late 1980s or early 1990s and I still watch it now. Reader, I too have aged over those 35 years. When I first started watching Columbo, it was on Sunday afternoons in my granny's front room, either nestled on the green sofa in the crook of my dad's arm or sitting on the fawn-coloured tasselled footstall in front of the three-bar gas fire (which I always think of, nonsensically, as 'roaring'), nibbling a slice of Battenberg or a custard cream. (Who am I kidding? – I'm a scoffer not a nibbler.) It was a cream, green and brown world in Granny’s bungalow, and Columbo, with his tan and taupe palette fitted in perfectly. For reasons connected to my dad's job, I spent slivers of my childhood in the Hollywood Hills, a long way from granny's bungalow in an outer London suburb, but Columbo brought these worlds together. He was familiar to the point where he could be one of the family, and I tended to think of him as a distant uncle. (Since my father had no family, except the one he had made for himself relatively late in life, and my mother only a small one, I was always keen as a child imaginatively to extend our pollarded genealogical tree.) In particular, I perceived a family resemblance between my father and Columbo which I didn't understand at the time but now do: just as Columbo's percipience was disguised by a shabby raincoat, my dad's was hidden by a comedically thick eastern European accent, combined with an idiosyncratic turn of phrase, behind which it was difficult sometimes for people to detect the sharpness of his intellect, mistaking lack of linguistic proficiency for lack of acuity. Since Columbo always triumphs in the end, it was a cosy comfort blanket to hunker down under. Columbo is still a comfort blanket, but not for quite the same reasons. Now, when I turn on the TV on a Sunday afternoon to find the repeats on the nether reaches of freeview, where all the ads are for stairlifts and walk-in baths, it is not just an old TV show I am looking for: it's a portal to the past. When I hear Columbo's voice, wherever I am I am back in granny's front-room, with a Tunnock’s caramel wafer and sugary tea. But just for a moment, before time reasserts its empire once more.