The Oddball Genius of Lieutenant Columbo

The murderer in the all-white lounge suit strolls out onto his angular parterre overlooking the west hills of LA and settles into his newly won reality. He rattles his scotch glass, and he sighs while looking at his watch, which gives you the idea that, while nothing yet is certain, he’s all but pulled it off. He has finally rid himself of the Problem. The coroner will say suicide, he’s got his alibi, and now, it (the money, or the winery, or the influence, or the justice) is finally his.

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When the LAPD comes to ask questions, maybe he is a bit jittery. But when he sees the lieutenant who walks through the door, he can breathe again. The precinct must have left their white charger at home, for this one, the guy who got the call, was their certifiable donkey. A rumpled brown rain jacket in a midcentury palace. A man with no gun, a glass eye, and all the authority of Mr. Magoo.

So begins nearly every episode in the Columbo oeuvre. It is a formula that worked and works; the show ran from the late 60s into the 90s with tremendous success, and in the last few years we’ve witnessed a resurgence of interest from a new generation of fans. It has been the inspiration for a number of later shows. Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad is a huge fan of Columbo. So, too, is Rian Johnson, whose new series, Poker Face, is as an overt homage to the show.

Unlike most crime dramas of the day, Columbo made famous the “inverted mystery” plot. The show lays its cards on the table from the start. Every episode opens cold with the murder, and within the first five minutes we know who did it, how they did it, even why they did it. The rest of the 90 minutes is a psychological cat-and-mouse game between good guy and bad guy. But “cat,” all things considered, would be a generous attribution. Columbo is more like his slow-moving, poor-mannered basset hound (aptly named “Dog”). Columbo is no chaser. He stalls out his car, mumbles to himself, eats chili, chews his cigar, stares confusedly at the ceiling, rubs his head, pulls out a grocery list from his wife, walks away while the murderer is talking, asks the same question, fumbles over his notepad, and asks if he can come back later.

As far as procedurals go, it’s a horrible procedure. Part of what we love about cop shows is how impressive the cop is. And sure enough, before the show aired there was significant doubt in the studio whether such a storytelling strategy could keep the viewer’s attention. The reason the show succeeded, and the only reason it is still so compelling, is Peter Falk’s strange and enduring character.

Still, a whodunit requires a Sherlock, and you’d think a howcatchem would require one, too. A detective genius, whose aloof superpower is his photographic memory or ability to decipher codes. If not a genius, then perhaps a hardboiled Sam Spade, a grab-’em-by-the-collar tough guy. Someone with violence and pathos, a brute who metes out justice from their own dark anger. These characters are legendary. They can match the strength of the suspect with strength of their own.

While it would be unfair to say that Columbo doesn’t have his own kind of genius, his character represents an inversion of these tropes. In all the ways that homicide detectives are good, Columbo is decidedly bad. This is why we love him. And this is also, somehow, what makes him good at his job.

One of Peter Falk’s personal favorites, “Forgotten Lady,” from the third season of the show, provides a good picture of this. A long-retired dancer and movie star (played by the legendary Janet Leigh) seeks to make the return to the big stage, and when her husband refuses to fund the misguided endeavor, she doubles his sleeping medication, and orchestrates his suicide. Columbo arrives on the scene late that night, and you would think he’d been the one drugged. He falls asleep against the wall waiting for coffee from the maid of the house. He’s forgotten his badge, his gun, his notepad and pencil. When he finally gets the chance to meet the murderer, he’s too flabbergasted by her fame to play hardball. His wife, apparently, is a huge fan, and they’ve seen all her films.

Hollywood Sign, Los Angeles, United States. Photo by Kayle Kaupanger on Unsplash.

The Columbo Method is primarily predicated on the deceptive power of ordinariness. He is so ordinary as to be forgettable. To his suspects, to the power brokers in the room, he is a nobody. He isn’t a threat. There’s nothing to fear. The show intentionally amplifies the contrast between the world in which the crime was committed — the rarefied, ostentatious world of glamor and power, all the more garish with all the 70s decor — and the anachronistic man who enters the scene. The disheveled tan raincoat, the over-friendly, wide-eyed way he takes in the crime scene; it all challenges the assumed expectations of authority, competence, and seriousness you get from a police officer. He is like a kid detective on a field trip.

Throughout the series, his superiors as well as his subordinates frequently remind him of protocol, after which he shrugs and playfully rubs his forehead — silly me! In the same Janet Leigh episode there’s a subplot in which the precinct is chasing Columbo down to get him down to the station for a handgun proficiency test — one he’s ten years late on. (He eventually dodges the test by paying a colleague to take the test in his name.) Part of the Columbo schtick is this lack of deference to traditional modes of police work. He is never at the police station, he doesn’t drive a cop car, and he never shoots a gun.

He’s got a right-foot, left-shoe sensibility, a real and sometimes affected ignorance about the way things work, and rather than hide this, he accentuates it. It’s really the only arrow in his quiver. Suspects ask him why he’s on the scene when the death at hand was so obviously not a homicide; Columbo shrugs, “I just go where they tell me, ma’am.” By playing the fool, by becoming smaller than everyone else in the room, he becomes a non-threat, an annoying fly in the house. When he is no longer a threat, the real work begins.

Feigned ignorance is the classic Columbo move. When you see memes from the show, it’s usually the “One more thing…” move. He finally asks a question that tells the suspect he’s onto something, but it usually comes ages after a tedious litany of nothing questions. He lets the suspect go, shrugs, points the finger back at himself, says something like, “I’m sorry — you know, it’s funny, a light goes on in my head and I just can’t for the life of me turn it off.” He asks the question two or three more times until finally some kind of inconsistency surfaces. Within the “safety” of your interactions with this nice-but-foolish cop, frustration seeps in, and then you make your mistakes.

It’s not just ignorance, though. Columbo has a knack for noticing insignificant things no one else sees. He hardly seems to listen for the alibi, but he’s looking at a dog-eared book by the bedside. He bypasses the smoking gun, and he fixates on how clean the bottom of a man’s bedroom slippers are. This is the primary quality of any good detective, but the show highlights how this curiosity stems from his lowliness. While the murderous movie stars and business executives are vying to keep or get something significant, Columbo is preternaturally un-possessive. He doesn’t want or need anything beyond what he has, and this freedom — the first-fruit of being ordinary — leaves his eyes wide open to see what’s really there.

This unhappiness fuels the lives of Columbo’s killers. They are only who they have failed to be. Images of success have blinded their vision. Impressive though they may be, they cannot see or remember vividly, because much of their life stands outside the focus of some elusive ideal.

Columbo, to the contrary, seems happy with his lot. He may be distractible, but he is not abstracted from this life. And because of this, he is open to the ordinary details that more serious people miss.

Which leads to his real distinguishing feature: his kindness. With Columbo, evidence doesn’t just stop at the scene of the crime; it unfolds predominantly in the suspects, in the way they say things, the way they see the world, in the things they omit. This is why, in most of the shows, the central component of the plot deals with Columbo’s interaction with the suspects. He’s not dusting for prints, waiting on lab results, or finding the one lost earring. He’s conversing with the killer.

The capacity for delight is an odd trait to emphasize in a detective, but we see it in Columbo. In several episodes the lieutenant can’t help but be pulled into the world of the killer’s interest — sports, opera, boatmaking, military history. All the way to the final reveal, he lends his suspects the benefit of the doubt. He is benevolent to the end.

In one of the greatest scenes in the whole Columbo canon, from “Try and Catch Me,” Ruth Gordon’s character is, yes, a famous murder mystery novelist who utilizes the plot of one of her stories to kill her own nephew. The “gotcha” moment for this episode happens in a public reading, where the murderer talks a bit about the genre itself, but then notices mid-presentation that Columbo is in attendance. She brings him up on stage, with the introduction that this man deals with murder as a fact of life, a “real, frightening, dark probability from which he must defend us.”

Columbo lopes up on stage, waves to the room full of people, and says, trying to light a cigar,

As for dark and scary, I don’t know about that. I like my job; I like it a lot. And I’m not depressed by it. And I don’t think the world is full of criminals and murderers because it isn’t… and I’ll tell you something else: even with some of the murderers that I meet, I even like them, too. Sometimes I like them, and I even respect them. Not for what they did, but for that part of them which is intelligent, funny, or just nice. Because there’s niceness in everyone — a little bit anyhow.

It’s a very Columbo way of publicly telling Ruth Gordon’s character that he’s got her. This is why nearly every episode ends with the bad guy going quietly. They are understood, not just caught. Someone kind knows them, knows what they did and why they did it, and that’s maybe enough to make them follow him to the police car, without a shot fired. It had been at first irritating, then perhaps somehow consoling to have been found out by someone so kind.

The detective genre is really a vehicle for questions of cosmic justice. The stories take on, in various shades and with varying success, themes of human corruption, the power (and the limits) of the law, and the eternal chase for the “true story.” There’s an implicit philosophy of sin and righteousness at work in every crime series — that’s partially why we watch. We want to know: how does justice ultimately get served?

The theologian Robert Capon, in the preface to his classic work on the parables, The Parables of the Kingdom, outlines that the stories Jesus tells are often about a mysterious power meting out cosmic justice. Capon describes how justice is typically exercised by force, by “right-handed power” as he puts it, borrowing from Martin Luther. The stronger animal kills the weaker animal. Force is utilized to achieve the result you want. But oddly enough, Jesus invites us to take a contradictory approach to justice. It’s not built on force of will, but on humility and openness, on “left-handed power.” He writes that this left-handed, paradoxical power

looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention. More than that, it is guaranteed to stop no determined evildoers whatsoever. It might, of course, touch and soften their hearts…But when you come to think of it, it is power — so much power, in fact, that it is the only thing in the world that evil can’t touch.

Capon might as well be describing a one-eyed, cigar-smoking guy in a beat-up Peugeot, feeding ice cream to his dog, the unlikely sleuth who may have lost his badge and can’t shoot a gun, but who never stops coming and always gets his guy. He has a way about him. A way of leaving all the bad guys scratching their heads, surprised, but also shrugging in good-natured perplexity — the same way Columbo himself shrugs — and saying out loud, all together, “You know, Lieutenant, I think I underestimated you.”