Episode: Season 1, Episode 1
Title:"Murder by the Book"
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Steven Bochco
Air Date: September 15, 1971
Previous: Ransom for a Dead Man
Next: Death Lends a Hand
Guest Starring: Jack Cassidy, Rosemary Forsyth, Martin Milner, Barbara Colby
Title:"Murder by the Book"
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Steven Bochco
Air Date: September 15, 1971
Previous: Ransom for a Dead Man
Next: Death Lends a Hand
Guest Starring: Jack Cassidy, Rosemary Forsyth, Martin Milner, Barbara Colby
"Murder by the Book" is the official premiere episode of Columbo. After a one-off TV Movie in 1968 and a Pilot Movie in March of 1971, Columbo debuted for real in September 1971, as part of The NBC Mystery Movie, a Wheel Program that featured several shows taking turns in the weekly rotation.
Plot summary: Ken Franklin and Jim Ferris are murder mystery writing partners who have together authored 15 books in the "Mrs. Melville" mystery series. However, it's actually been Jim writing the Mrs. Melville books for several years as Ken has been plagued with writer's block. And unfortunately for Ken, Jim has grown tired of doing all the work and only getting half the credit, and has decided to go solo.
Ken, who does not like this at all, decides on murder. Ken lures Jim away to Ken's lakeside cabin, and has Jim call his wife Joanna and tell her that he's at the office—and crucially, while Jim's still on the phone, Ken shoots him. This leads everyone to assume that Jim was in fact killed at his office. Ken later dumps Jim's body on his own front lawn and spins an elaborate story about how Jim was going to write a non-fiction expose on The Mafia. However, Ken has a problem: Lilly, who has a store near the cabin, and saw Jim with Ken. He also has another problem: Lt. Columbo is on the case.
And yes, this episode was directed by Steven Spielberg, a former intern at Universal who had dropped out of college in 1969 to take a job as a TV director for the studio. His signature style is already on display; the complex blocking, carefully-crafted moody lighting, and use of depth in the frame are a stark contrast from other episodes of the early series, which feature the flatter lightning and composition more typical of TV of the era. Spielberg would soon make a bigger mark with his TV movie Duel, which led to bigger and better things.
Tropes:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Lilly to Franklin.
- Blackmail: Lilly demands $15,000 for her silence. She also has a crush on Ken, and although she doesn't spell it out, personal attention from Ken is part of the deal.
- Blackmail Backfire: Lilly is the first of many people in Columbo to find out why blackmailing a murderer is a bad idea...
- Briefcase Full of Money: Ken brings Lilly $15,000 in a briefcase and she comments that it is more cash than she has ever seen in her life. After he murders her, he pays the money back into his account. Columbo later remarks that withdrawing $15,000 one day and returning it the day after was one of the strange activities that aroused his suspicion.
- Bullying a Dragon: Lilly, blackmailing the guy who you know just killed his partner is a bad idea; spending alone time with him is a worse idea.
- Chekhov's Gun: Jim's habit of scrawling down story ideas on random scraps of paper. This is how Columbo catches out Ken.
- Complexity Addiction: Ken opens himself up to a lot of unnecessary risk by trying to spin a story about a mob hit—if he'd just kept his mouth shut and disposed of the body, he'd have been a lot safer. (In fact, he himself points out that there is no murder case without a body note before bringing it into play himself.)
- Deadpan Snarker: Ken's claim that the reason he opened his mail after supposedly finding his partner's murdered body on his lawn was to "distract himself" is enough to elicit some atypically direct snark from the Lieutenant:Columbo: That's understandable. Bills are distracting.
- Erotic Eating: Subverted. Ken hand-feeds Lilli strawberries in classic Erotic Eating manner, but we're pretty sure he's going to murder her, so it isn't very erotic.
- Expy: The Mrs. Melville character, as she's described and by her portrait, is clearly Miss Marple.
- Fake-Out Opening: Ken knocks on Jim's office door, and greets him by pointing a gun at his face. It's a prank; Ken's finger isn't on the trigger, he's not even trying to prevent from his fingerprints from ending up on the gun and the gun isn't loaded. The real murder doesn't come until later.
- Foreshadowing: As they drive to the cabin Jim says he feels like he's been there before. The reason he has that feeling is that the murder scenario he's unwittingly a part of actually began as a story idea that Ken pitched Jim years ago.
- Funny Background Event:
- Columbo struggling with his stack of borrowed Mrs. Melville books while Franklin hits on an interviewer.
- After disposing of Lilly's body and returning to his cabin, Columbo can be seen looking around before knocking on his window.
- Graceful Loser: When he realizes he's been caught out, Ken simply accepts that he's been beaten and calmly leaves with Columbo with no hint of resentment towards him.
- Grievous Bottley Harm: Ken Franklin gets rid of Lilly La Sanka by clobbering her over the head with an empty champagne bottle.
- Irony:
- Columbo, humble as always and marveling at Ken's success as a mystery writer, says of mystery novels, "They're tricky, I could never figure those things out."
- Columbo catches out Ken because Jim was the creative talent behind their partnership and had written down the plot idea that Franklin based his plan from. Except, as Franklin ruefully notes, the idea that Franklin used actually was his own idea ("The only good idea I ever had..."); he just hadn't realized that his partner had written it down.
- Love Makes You Dumb: Lilly's so infatuated with Ken that she sees the fact that he's a murderer as an opportunity to blackmail him into paying attention to her. She is smart enough to avoid going out on the lake with him, but fails to anticipate that he'd just straight out clobber her with a bottle.
- Most Writers Are Writers: Ken and Jim are longtime mystery writer partners. Columbo, of course, was created by longtime mystery writer partners Richard Levinson and William Link.
- Musical Nod: The subdued version of the theme from Ransom for a Dead Man shows up in a restaurant scene.
- Mythology Gag: We see that one of the Mrs. Melville novels is called Prescription: Murder. This is the title of the original Columbo stage play and the TV movie adaptation in 1968.
- Never One Murder: Ken kills Lilly after she blackmails him.
- Nominal Coauthor: In-Universe: The mystery-writing team of Ken Franklin and Jim Ferris is like this. Ferris does all the actual writing, and Franklin handles all the interviews, book signings and other publicity events. When Ferris decides he wants to write more serious literature and tries to dissolve the partnership, Franklin murders him.
- Professional Killer: In an effort to throw off Columbo, Ken implies that Jim was killed off by one of these because he was planning to write an exposé on The Mafia. Columbo's quick to point out that contract killers usually don't bother getting rid of the body.
- Red Herring: Ken concocts a story about Jim investigating The Mafia, even going so far as to get Jim's fingerprints on a list of Mafia names.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Columbo's theory that Ken stole the idea of the murder from Jim—it's too clever for a hack like Ken to come up with, and his crappy attempt at a second murder basically confirms it—leads him to the smoking-gun evidence of a plot that Jim wrote down that matches the murder perfectly. However, Ken reveals that he came up with that plot, and he was surprised Jim had written it down.
- Romancing the Widow: Subverted. Ken's only charming Lilly because she's blackmailing him and he's looking for an opportunity to kill her.
- Supreme Chef: Lilly's deceased husband, a professional chef, taught her everything he knew.
- Technician/Performer Team-Up: Ken Franklin and Jim Ferris are equally credited as the authors of the "Mrs. Melville" mystery series, but Ken has been suffering from Writer's Block for years and barely contributes to the books any more. So instead he handles all the interviews, book signings, and other publicity events (the performer) that Jim (the technician) would rather not deal with. Of course, this partnership breaks down when Jim decides he'd rather go solo and write more "serious" literature and Ken responds by murdering him.
- Technology Marches On: Part of Ken’s set-up is to have Jim call from the cabin using the newly-introduced direct long-distance dialing, meaning that there was no operator to verify where the call came from. Nowadays, telephone records can be easily accessed. Not only that, but Joanna would probably have caller ID, assuming Jim didn't just use his cell phone no matter where he was.
- Too Clever by Half: Ken's first murder is intricate, well-thought out and almost flawless, but his second is sloppy and rushed. This gives Columbo the idea that Ken, the less-talented half a murder-mystery writing team, actually stole the idea for the first murder from one of the ideas his partner Jim came up for their books. Ironically, the first murder was his idea, the only one that he ever came up with for the team, but it was never used.
- What Would X Do?: Ken snidely criticizes Columbo a couple of times for not being a sleuth on the level of Mrs. Melville, saying she would've been "leaps and bounds ahead of you by now" as he's trying to lead the detective away from the truth, and praises him for finally "beginning to think like Mrs. Melville" when he shows a hint of intuition. Though he maintains his composure, Columbo can't help but stare in disbelief that this buffoon keeps bringing up his own fictional character in the middle of a real murder investigation. He turns it around on Franklin near the end, saying that Mrs. Melville would probably be disappointed with the quality of his second murder.
- Writer's Block: Seemingly a long-term problem for Ken.
