Just One More Thing

The folks over at InnerTube noted the uncanny similarity between the real-life conflict between attorney-turned-pseudonovelist Robert Tanenbaum and his ghostwriter cousin Michael Gruber and a classic episode of COLUMBO.

Had this been a plot for a Television show, Tanenbaum would have shot and killed
Gruber before he had the chance to reveal the secret to a reporter from The
Romantic Times. (Okay, so maybe it wouldn’t have been much fun for the
victim….)

Sound
familiar? It’s the plotline for the first episode of ‘Columbo’ as a series
(third ‘Columbo’ outing overall if you count the two pilots). "Murder By The
Book" starred Jack Cassidy, who would have been the Tanenbaum-type character,
and Martin Milner as the Gruber stand-in.

Not that he ever had murder in
his heart, but Tanenbaum sounds like he would have made for the perfect
antagonist to Lt. Columbo. He was not only a lawyer and (alleged) author, but
also a teacher and a mayor! It sounds as if his social standing would have been
quite a formidable challenge to the attempts by the shabby, fumbling little
detective trying to investigate him.

2 thoughts on “Just One More Thing”

  1. This isn’t written in stone, but for y’all who are into this kind of trivia, Jack Cassidy was in several Columbo episodes, I think, and one of them–I think the one mentioned here–was written by a then-unknown writer by the name of Stephen Bochco and a then-unknown director named Stephen Spielberg.
    And if I’m wrong, well, it’s the sort of story that “should be true.”

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  2. Your post reminded me of another episode of Columbo where Jack Cassidy plays a literary agent who kills a mystery writer played, interstingly enough, by Mickey Spillane.
    Columbo was a great show, and it surprises me that the quality of the scripts fell so low in the newer episodes of the 90s.

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