First watched : January 1976
Here's an interesting entry. Ellery Queen was the creation of two American crime writers Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, a writer and amateur detective who helps solve the crimes which are confounding his father, a New York City police inspector. In the States it became a massively successful franchise ; this was the fourth separate TV series to feature him over there.
However it meant curiously little over here where this was the only one of the adaptations to be broadcast. It was made by the team behind Columbo and followed a similar format of an unconventional detective solving a complicated crime then announcing his deduction to the assembled suspects. The unique feature of the series was the eponymous hero played by Jim Hutton turning to the camera with ten minutes to go and breaking the fourth wall by asking the viewer "Do you know who it was ?" ( which I invariably didn't ).
I thought it was OK but it failed to live up to expectations in its Tuesday early evening slot and was pulled after only 12 episodes had been broadcast. Three more were used to fill a gap in the Monday schedule in August then it disappeared for good with no repeats and seven of the episodes never broadcast here.
Jim Hutton died of liver cancer in 1979 and didn't live to see his son Timothy's Oscar triumph the following year. Both Dannay and Lee are long since dead although the publication they founded in 1941, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is still published monthly and is only on to its third editor.
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