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David Janssen, 29, has to be a crack sleuth just to be sure where his show is playing. Richard Diamond, Private De tective has bounced from network to network ever since it was revived from radio and put on TV as a summer replacement m 1957. Son of a onetime Ziegfeld beauty (Bernice Dalton), personable, poker-faced Dave Janssen has hung on as an actor since winning $5 as a three-year-old song-and-dance star in Alma, Neb. Hollywood got him when he was eight, but he was hard to find in the crowd. "I grew up to be the leading man's best friend's best friend. I have not small ears, and they kept wanting to cut my hair off; I looked like 200 other unidentified flying saucers." With Janssen firing from the hip, Dia mond has progressed from a seedy Manhattan Eye with a bankroll limp as a spaniel's ears to a slick Hollywood operator. Otherwise, his adventures involve the standard sluggings, and he has made so many quick changes that a wag on the set once suggested: "Maybe he should take a page from Loretta Young and come charging through a door wearing a different suit each week. Each set of threads would cue the type of case Diamond is to face : tweeds — a country squire is mur dered; blue serge — an accountant ab sconds with the company funds; grey flannel— a Madison Avenue agency man commits suicide when his show loses out in the Nielsen ratings." Efrem Zimbalist Jr., 36, lends an air of dramatic distinction to 77 Sunset Strip but as far as his qualifications for playing Private Eye Stu Bailey go, Zimbalist likes to brag : "I know less about Private Eyes than anybody I know." It is probably as well. Strip, which ambles on for an hour a show, is a wacky, slapstick variation on a familiar theme. Bailey and his partner Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith) drift around Southern California playing sleuth with a stubborn and amusing disregard tor the elementary rules of the game. And when the action threatens to lag, there is always Kookie (Edd Byrnes), the jivey parkmg-lot attendant with the hyperactive comb. Even though he sometimes winds up playing second lead to Rookie's pompadour, Zimbalist is a good bit of casting. Well-educated (at St. Paul's prep school and twice kicked out of Yale) young Zimbalist managed to fend off the efforts of his famed violinist-father Efrem Zimbalist to make a musician of him After a World War II stretch in the Army he tried to break into movies, studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse was brought to Hollywood by Joshua Logan and was just beginning to get some movie roles when he landed on Sunset Strip "I fought doing this series for six months " says he, "but I lost. As long as they dont bounce me back a hundred years into a Wyatt Earp episode, I may survive 1 am in no position to say as much for the viewer."