Yoohoo! Mr Franklin! Here’s an end-of-year update…

Glenn Stewart says:

CP, the Columbophile community is buoyed with the update that there is improvement and optimism regarding your daughter and family. I hope that, in a rough year, you have found at least some things to be thankful for.

As 2021 comes to a close, I wanted to make sure that CP and the Columbophile faithful were aware of a Columbo book published this past July, “Columbo: A Rhetoric of Inquiry for Resistant Responders” by Christyne Berzsenyi, Associate Professor of English at Penn State Wilkes-Barre. As you can no doubt tell from the title, it’s positioning itself as an “academic” work about our favorite Lieutenant.

I bring this up because it includes quotes and references to our host CP (described by the author as “the mysterious blog writer”) and several of his blog postings. The book even includes some reader comments (if you are HARRYSBOY, Itsspideyman, or Craverguy, then congrats, you are now referenced in a scholarly work).

The book itself has some noteworthy concepts, as seen through the lens of academia. Berzsenyi traces Columbo’s style of questioning suspects back to Greek rhetorical interaction, as advanced by Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. If you have an open mind to dabbling in the arcane – sophrosyne, phantasia, Hybris, ambipathy, elenchus, aporia – it’s an interesting read. In particular, I was intrigued by just how closely the Columbo character is modelled after Dostoevsky’s Inspector Petrovich of “Crime and Punishment”. Many Columbo fans are already aware of this connection, but Berzsenyi digs into specifics about Petrovich’s interrogation methods that most casual students of Columbo’s history are unaware of, unless you yourself have actually read “Crime and Punishment” (Spoiler: I have not!). There are striking parallels.

All this would make Berzsenyi a fascinating dinner guest to trade ideas with. Sadly, her own writing style is so stilted and clunky as to make the actual book a slog to navigate. Her professorial perspective seems to demand that most every noun be immediately preceded by multiple adjectives, which may not sound like the worst thing in the world, but trust me, it’s repetitive and mentally exhausting after the first, say, 20 times you see it.

Columbo fans will be quick to highlight several episode errors, not a good look for someone laying claim to an expert opinion. Personally, I can forgive an academic brain fart like crediting Julie Andrews instead of Julie Harris as being in “Any Old Port in a Storm” (although it’s fun to imagine Mary Poppins bothering Adrian Carsini). But when Berzsenyi tells us that in “Requiem For a Falling Star”, “Nora puts an explosive device in the blackmailer’s car,” the author opens herself up to scrutiny that perhaps not all her academic research here is as spot-on as assumed.

The book’s title is something of a scholarly come-on, as that topic has to share space with other chapters, some informative (Columbo’s place in TV detective and fictional investigative history) and some that fizzle (his attitudes toward women and the Equal Rights Movement). For me, the biggest fault is that only occasional, offhand connections are made to the actual psychological concepts that Columbo uses as part of what Dr. Ray Flemming and Leslie Williams would call his “bag of tricks”. (To be fair, I’ve become rather obsessed myself with how closely Columbo’s tactics align with real-life psychology). I see this as a giant missed opportunity by Berzsenyi.

The book is a pricey $40 paperback on Amazon. But I purchased and read it so you don’t have to! If you have limited funds for Columbo books this holiday season, put your money into David Koenig’s “Shooting Columbo”.

Again, CP, best wishes for your daughter and family in the weeks ahead, and I know that I speak for all in looking forward to your regular contributions when the time is right.