What I watched: An episode of Armchair Detective, a mystery-themed game show. It was hosted by John Milton Kennedy as the “Armchair Interrogator” and H. Allen Smith as the “Crime Authority” (what a title!) The two scenes were “The Hobo Millionaire (featuring Harry Martin, Frederick Tozere and Cy Kendall) and “The Warehouse Murder” (starring Kay Lee, Bert Davidson, Ken Harvey and Jerome Sheldon.) I haven’t been able to find a precise date for this episode, but Armchair Detective aired first on KTLA and was then re-broadcast on CBS from July 6 to September 28 in 1949. Video is available on the Internet Archive.
What happened: Kennedy welcomes us to the show and explains the premise: the viewer is challenged to solve the mystery before the in-studio “detectives” do. Smith, introduced as a former police detective and current politician, comes in to introduce the first case. We’re asked to figure out which clues Inspector Kane used to arrive at the crime scene.
The film segment takes us to a “hobo jungle”, where an old wino is wandering around. The wino, we quickly learn, is in fact a rich man named Mr. Barlow (Tozere) accompanied by his valet George (Martin). Barlow’s on the lam, wanted for killing his wife on a train. Some more expository dialogue tells us that he was heard threatening her before the train wrecked.
Barlow also tells us that he was carrying a suitcase full of money, and. George tries to get the location of the cash out of him. It turns out that the valet staged the crime to get the money. Fortunately, Inspector Kane (Kendall) is here to arrest the evil butler and expose the plan. George protests his innocence, and then holds his employer hostage. Ironically (because he’s a butler), he has hot tea thrown in his face, and is blinded.
Back in the studio, our hosts discuss the case, and explain Kane’s thinking: the police found a hobo wearing Barlow’s suit, with his initials on it. They also say that the wife wasn’t murdered after all. We then switch gears to our second case, a murder set at the waterfront. A man in a suit (Harvey) quietly investigates, then overhears a confrontation.
A Sam Spade type by the name of Jake (Davidson) shoves a woman into a backroom. The girl, Madge (Lee), was apparently a criminal’s girlfriend, but has dumped him after he was kicked out of the mob. She pretty quickly starts making out with this new guy, after figuring out he has his own crime thing going on. Some girls just have a type. The man in a suit comes in and stabs her in the back. So it goes for women in detective stories.
Inspector Harrison (Sheldon, who we last saw as St. Ives on the Lone Ranger) arrives, and the gangster tells us that he has nothing to do with the warehouse they’re in. He sees the dead dame, and blames Jake. The suited man also comes in, and we learn it’s the girl’s ex-boyfriend Harry. Both of the gangsters blame each other, with Harry claiming that he entered the warehouse after the killing. The armchair detectives explain how the police could show that Harry was in the warehouse during the murder: handprints on a crate and a splinter in his hand. We’re also told that Harry confessed after realizing how much evidence was against him. They finish off by introducing the cast.
What I thought: While early television was mostly just transplants from the radio or the stage, there was some experimentation in terms of form. This is one example of a format that didn’t quite take off, a kind of film-based game show without contestants. Armchair Detective attempts to interact with the audience by asking them to analyze short film stories — although, as television is an unidirectional medium, the actual interaction is all imaginary. Maybe a show like this would work better as a live program, whether it be call-in or with voting on social media.
What’s most interesting to me is what Armchair Detective says about the mystery genre. Typically, there’s at least a pretense of humanist drama around the mystery story — that is, the audience is expected to care about the characters, be immersed in the setting, and hopefully be surprised by the plot. This series, however, admits that the mystery is all about ludic and voyeuristic thrills. The characters and settings are completely incidental — what matters is being able to solve the puzzlebox that is the plot.
In doing so, Armchair Detective teaches its audience how to interpret its film segments to an unusual degree. We are taught to see how a policeman sees: to look for detail and to logically think out the information we have. We are pulled away from relating to these characters or their circumstances. Interestingly, neither of the segments in this surviving episode is precisely a whodunnit. Instead of who, we are asked how. Perhaps this is also a part of seeing like police: starting out with an idea of who did it and working backwards from there.
So, why didn’t Armchair Detective survive, or inspire similar shows? The one-sided interactivity may have been a dealbreaker for many audiences. Even I, someone who still yells out the answers at Jeopardy, saw no reason to try to solve these mysteries when some guy had already been given all the answers. And, in the context of game shows, it must have been more expensive than something like What’s My Line.
On an aesthetic level, the film segments are kind of a mess of details and expository dialogue. All of the aspects of the puzzle have to be hyper-condensed into ten minutes or less, leaving little room for naturalism. One gets the sense that these segments want to be Raymond Chandler, when in reality they more closely resemble Encyclopedia Brown, or one of those murder-mystery-in-a-box parties.
Despite this, I kind of like the campiness of Armchair Detective, and wish that more of it had survived. In particular, I enjoyed the way that the stories, for all their phoniness, used a very grounded Los Angeles setting. Certainly, these segments feel more tied to Los Angeles than Life of Riley ever has. While few shows would explicitly quiz the viewer the way this one did (maybe The Mole or Murder in Small Town X?) , series ranging from Dallas to Lost have profited from the viewer’s desire to solve mysteries. Armchair Detective was just a little too obvious about it.
Coming up next: Another early game show that survived for just a bit longer.
The Eternal Couch Potato 