(3 of 9)
Faithful to this rigid ritual, few writers busy paying for their swimming pools and Thunderbirds with Private Eye cash could take the facetious oath of Britain's Detection Club—that their heroes "shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them . . . not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God."
Like the Western. TV's Private Eye certainly cannot lay claim to realism, either. His real-life counterparts work out of the country's 5,000 agencies (and earn a collective income of about $250 million a year), not out of swank bars and seedy clip joints. They spend more time at plant protection or gathering over-the-transom divorce evidence than avenging mink-clad corpses. TV Eyes, says San Francisco's crew-cut professional Eye, Hal Lipsett, are altogether too tough. They ignore the real Eye's tricky devices and subtle techniques—the telephone tap, the hidden recorder, the infrared camera, the fishhook microphone (which can be cast as lightly as a dry fly onto an upper-story windowsill). On TV, the Eyes shoot the joint up like maniacs, or "they all throw their revolvers away and use their fists and are too damn smart. A good Private Eye doesn't get in trouble—he doesn't get hit with surprises. If you do a decent job, you don't have violence." In 13 years of sleuthing, says 41-year-old Investigator Lipsett, he has been involved in only one serious scrape.
And yet, despite all the stereotyping, the TV Eye can be topnotch entertainment. He is what sometime Saturday Review Critic John Paterson called "every man's romantic conception of himself: the glorification of toughness, irreverence, and a sense of decency almost too confused to show itself." The Private Eye is the ordinary citizen "become suddenly, magically aggressive, become purified by righteous and legitimate anger—and become, at last, devastatingly effective." Properly presented, he is as much a part of American legend as the super-cowboy, just as surely escapes the conventional, rule-ridden world by taking the law into his own hands. He does not know the wide-open spaces or the purple sage, but the narrow, closed-in spaces of saloons, and the windswept, nighttime highway can give him a similar sense of freedom. "The Private Eye show," says David (Richard Diamond) Janssen, "has the same elements as the western: the hero is invincible; he gets the girl and never marries her; the convertible car has replaced the horse."
Marvel of Mobility. Stubborn addicts of the classic whodunit consider the TV Eye a boor. Some paperback browsers, still slavering over Mickey Spillane's sleuthing satyrs, consider him a sissy. But the TV Eye often has more taste than his critics. At his best, he is a healthy step backward toward the hardboiled heroes who swaggered onto the American scene in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.