On October 7th, 1973, newspaperman Lou Reynolds took his young daughter Tina to the zoo, where he was killed by a sniper's bullet. The case was investigated by the famous private investigator Joe Mannix, and though he learned a great deal from the case, he never found out who actually killed Lou.
Decades later, Joe is shot in the arm while revisiting the case, and as such he is taken to Community General and treated by Mark, who has been treating Joe's many many injuries over the years. Mannix is determined to crack the case even after all these years, and finds a new web of intrigue waiting for him.
This episode was created as a sequel to the Mannix episode "Little Girl Lost".
"Hard-Boiled Murder" displays symptoms of the following tropes:
- Blackmail Backfire: Stella Carter had been blackmailing Deputy Chief Clark Nichols for decades after Lou's murder. When she bumps up her price once Mannix and Tina start looking into Lou's murder again, Clark decides she's got to go.
- Continuity Snarl: Mannix says in the episode that Leon Hanes was Lou's research assistant, who was thrown off a balcony during the investigation. Leon was actually the driver to Andrew Alfaro who got buried at sea near his boss. Lou's actual research assistant was Bill Saunders.
- Dirty Cop: Tina is covering a story of 3 cops on a task force accused of tipping off crooks to raids and faking evidence. It's soon shown that Deputy Chief Nichols is also crooked in a sense.
- Mama Bear: A rather sad example. Edie killed Lou to stop him from filing for sole custody of Tina.
- Retcon: The episode effectively overwrites several parts of "Little Girl Lost" for the plot.
- The biggest thing is that this episode says that Mannix never found the person who actually killed Lou Reynolds, to the extent that the footage shown of the shooting has the sniper's face offscreen while wearing the good old black leather gloves. However, the original episode clearly showed the killer to be a man, who Mannix did catch. Particularly egregious is the fact that one of the flashbacks to the original episode is the scene where George is taking back his money from Stella, where the nameless hitman was in the background.
- Secretly Dying: Mark eventually determines why Mannix is so dead set on solving the case again. Mannix's x-rays from the shooting reveal that he has an enlarged heart that could kill him soon.
- Special Guest: Mike Connors as Mannix, of course, and Pernell Roberts as George Fallon.
- Sudden Name Change: George's last name was briefly mentioned to be "Millard" in the original episode, but is now "Fallon" here.
