The Shabby Detective: Yet Another Columbo Podcast

How many push-ups can you do? 

Between Columbo seasons, Mike and Chris dig into another Richard Levinson and William Link production: Murder by Natural Causes (1979), directed by Robert Day for CBS. Hal Holbrook stars as Arthur Sinclair, a stage mentalist whose heart condition makes him an inviting target: his younger wife Allison (Katharine Ross) and her lover, struggling actor Gil Weston (Barry Bostwick), cook up a plan to literally frighten him to death with a staged home invasion. Naturally, nothing goes as planned. Arthur's lawyer George (Richard Anderson) has his own designs on Allison, and the film piles on twist after twist — the kind of nested double-crosses Levinson and Link built entire careers on.

Holbrook and Ross had already played off each other in They Only Kill Their Masters, and Bostwick brings a slippery, vain energy to Gil that makes his scheming both funny and pathetic. Mike and Chris talk through how the film's chamber-piece structure (four characters, one house, one long night) squeezes maximum tension from minimal sets, how it fits the "TV movie as filmed stage play" tradition Levinson and Link mastered, and why the finale's final line lands as one of the great mean little punchlines in their catalog.

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Mike spends the cold open dodging one simple question: why, exactly, are he and Chris watching a 1979 Romanian comedy called Nea Mărin miliardar? He won't say. The answer arrives thirty minutes and seventeen seconds in, when a stranger billed as Detective Columbo shuffles into frame and asks for one more thing.

Director Sergiu Nicolaescu's mistaken-identity farce casts Amza Pellea in a double role as a bumpkin uncle and the American billionaire he's confused with, with Puiu Călinescu doing his best Peter Falk impression as the country's most inexplicable cameo cop. Two sets of gangsters, a kidnapped heiress, a doubled briefcase, and a laundry chute all get involved. Mike and Chris trace the Columbo Connected Universe to Ceaușescu's Romania, debate whether Falk owns the character even secondhand, and confirm that Columbo was universal.

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Peter Falk said no. Richard Levinson and William Link said no. Fred Silverman did it anyway. Mike and Chris take a detour into the Columbo universe's most dubious corner: Mrs. Columbo, Season 2, Episode 5, "A Chilling Surprise" (aired November 22, 1979). Kate Callahan — no longer even Mrs. Columbo in any meaningful sense — investigates a body that won't stay put in a restaurant freezer.

When her friend Zev Arno collapses and promptly disappears, Kate finds herself chasing a tangle of affairs, frame-ups, and frozen corpses while no one, least of all Det. Sgt. Mike Varrick, believes a word she says. Directed by Philip Leacock and written by E. Arthur Kean, the episode features a gloriously charismatic Armand Assante doing his best with very little. It's 45 minutes that feels like three times that — a cash-in spinoff that couldn't even commit to its own premise long enough to keep the title.

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Mike and Chris close the book on Season Seven with "The Conspirators," a 1978 episode that takes Columbo somewhere the series rarely ventured: the murky, morally weighted world of real geopolitical conflict. Clive Revill — Tony-nominated stage actor, Matilda's trainer in the boxing kangaroo film of the same name, and the original voice of Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back — plays Joe Devlin, an Irish poet and public charmer who moonlights as a gun-runner for the IRA. 

Devlin doesn't irritate Columbo the way most killers do — he disarms him. They exchange verse, play darts, share whiskey, and trade jokes about their respective cultures, two sides of the same immigrant coin. We weigh whether all that conviviality comes at the cost of tension. An episode this pleasant can sometimes forget to be dangerous.

Directed by Leo Penn and written by Howard Berk, "The Conspirators" is not Season Seven's sharpest hour.  As the last Columbo of the 1970s, the last on NBC, and the last new case the Lieutenant would face for nearly eleven years, it leaves a lot to be desired. 

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What's the perfect alibi? Being at the doctor's office while your dogs do the dirty work. Mike White and Chris Stachiw sink their teeth into Season Seven's "How to Dial a Murder," a 1978 episode that features one of the most ingeniously gruesome murder methods in the entire Columbo canon.
 
Nicol Williamson commands the screen as Dr. Eric Mason, a behavioral psychologist with iron self-control, a house full of movie memorabilia, and two very well-trained Dobermans named Laurel and Hardy. When he discovers that his late wife had been having an affair with his best friend Dr. Charles Hunter (Joel Fabiani), Mason devises a kill that's equal parts Pavlov and Orson Welles: dial home, ask a question about Citizen Kane, and let the dogs handle the rest.  

There's also the small matter of Columbo's complicated feelings about the dogs — and whether they deserve what the legal system has in store for them.

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