Anna Stolley Persky is a lawyer, journalist, and essayist who recently turned fiction writer. Her first published fiction, “The Jews on Elm Street,” will appear in EQMM’s September/October 2024 issue (on sale August 13 ), in the Department of First Stories. Her story came to us through Art Taylor, a longtime, award-winning EQMM contributor who was Anna’s teacher when she was working toward an MFA in creative writing at George Mason University. In this post, Anna discusses some of the things that lay behind the enormous popularity of the iconic TV character Columbo and considers what kind of appeal he would have for a modern audience. She shares an EQMM connection with the creators of Columbo, Richard Levinson and William Link: They too got their start in our Department of First Stories.   —Janet Hutchings

Before we had Instagram and Internet accessibility, we had books to distract and teach us. Like many of my Gen X peers, I grew to love mysteries by seeing the world through the eyes of fictional sleuths, from Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown to, eventually, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

But I mostly credit my lifelong obsession with the mystery genre not to books, but to television. I credit one actor, Peter Falk, and one 1970s show beloved by so many of us: Columbo.

I’m far from alone. I have already read probably a dozen essays and blogs about why this one show—with this one character created by the imitable team of Richard Levinson and William Link—is stamped into our collective memory, at least for those of us of a certain age. Lieutenant Columbo, in his wrinkled raincoat, stood out as the antithesis of the hero cop. He didn’t carry a gun. He wasn’t macho. He was awkward, clumsy, and constantly broke. He ate smelly eggs or dipped into a dead man’s caviar and then complained it was too salty. Yet, he was deceptively clever. The villains always underestimated him. We rooted for Columbo as he appeared to stumble his way into solving each murder.

And of course, there was the brilliance of the show’s structure, showing the audience the identity of the killer at the beginning. We weren’t trying to solve the mystery. We were invested in watching for that moment Columbo realized who the murderer was and then, what Columbo did next.

Certainly, Columbo was a character-driven show. But threaded throughout was the looming approach of the computer era and Columbo’s attempts to understand it.

Columbo wasn’t a Luddite—it was more that he was often charmingly ignorant and flummoxed by technology. He generally expressed curiosity, especially if the murderer’s alibi was dependent on a new development, like the latest in DVD recording need for “Fade into Murder.” But on a day-to-day basis, Columbo didn’t use the advancements available to him, even in the 1970s.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Columbo’s love/hate relationship with technology and how he would leverage modern gadgets, electronics, AI, and other innovation were he to return for a new season of sleuthing.

Columbo lived in an era of change, yet he never seemed to catch up to it, and that was okay then. Would it be okay now? Would we respond to a shabby detective who fumbled with modern developments or is that no longer a likeable trait in the mystery genre?

There’s always talk about recreating Columbo for a new generation. Certainly, Natasha Lyonne did a fantastic take on the old mystery show in her recent first season of Poker Face. But still, there are those of us old fans who fantasize about Mark Ruffalo, who may already be too old or too controversial, or Tom Holland as potential Columbo reincarnations.

Would modern developments be woven into the plots? Would the new Columbo fall down a Twitter rabbit hole? Would he solve a mystery by pursuing a social media influencer on TikTok?

The old writers did an expert job in showing how Columbo lagged behind modern times yet needed to catch up. Here’s a perfect example from the 1991 episode “Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health” episode. Columbo is tracking a murderer who deleted from his victim’s computer an article the victim wrote about the murderer’s porn star past. Columbo looks for clues in the computer, but he’s clearly hesitant. He peers at the computer, anguish on his face.

 “Anybody know how to work these things?” Columbo says. “These machines . . . they baffle me.”

Eventually, Columbo uses the computer to help solve the murder, but it’s not without resistance and confusion. In a Season 9 episode that aired in 1990, Columbo is equally mystified by a fax machine.

Columbo’s constant bewilderment when it came to technology was, at the time the shows aired, both frustrating and recognizable because, like his concerns about money, he reflected his audience. Even if we had mastered the fax machine by 1990, we were probably already struggling with another new device.

At 55, I’m always stumbling around new technology. Would a new Columbo trail behind me, discovering with awe this thing called “the cloud” or marveling at a smart watch before using it to somehow track down a killer?

And what about cell phones? Would Columbo hover over his phone, checking the Internet instead of peering into people’s faces and watching their reactions? Columbo could drop his phone on the ground, cracking it, or let it get soaked in the rain and try to frantically rescue it by thrusting it into a bowl of rice. Or would he forget his cell phone like he did his gun, proving to the world that the old skills of reading people still matter, and would the modern audience appreciate him for that?

Any discussion of Columbo, a television show, is to me also a reminder of what makes a better mystery novel or short story. My favorite mystery novels are also character driven. I’ve already preordered the next Louise Penny so I can know what’s going on with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his friendships with the quirky residents of Three Pines. And don’t even get me started on my love of the complicated and secretive Elizabeth Best, ex-spy and main sleuth in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series.

The writers of Columbo deeply understood character.

One my favorite examples of Columbo’s priorities comes in “Try and Catch Me,” which aired in 1977. The murderer is Abigail Mitchell, a mystery writer played by the phenomenal Ruth Gordon. Abigail is irresistibly feisty and can’t stop herself from playing with Columbo. While at a women’s club, she surprises Columbo by announcing that he will be giving a speech about his “special field”: “hyper modern chemical techniques and their application to advanced criminology.” She throws a lob at him where he is weakest.

Of course, Columbo has no idea what she is talking about, so he pivots, speaking to the crowd of women about what he knows, which is people.

He says he likes the people he meets, even some of the murderers.

“I like ’em and even respect ’em, not for what they did, certainly not for that, but for that part of them which is intelligent, or funny, or just nice, because there’s niceness in everyone, a little bit anyhow,” he says.

Do the next generations understand the importance of character? I just spent the last three years in an MFA program for creative writing with mostly Gen Z writers, with maybe a sprinkling of Millennials. I think they mostly understood character development, but I’m not sure how much patience they had for it, and they are the writers of the next generations. Can Millennials and Gen Z, not to mention Gen Alpha, be lured from their Insta reels by a new Columbo character?

Don’t they still need to understand each other’s motives to get through their lives?

Do we still relish in the more subtle art of sleuthing by talking? I hope so.

And yet, technology exists, as it did then, and continues moving forward. And, since this is an essay about the possible modernization of Columbo, I thought it might be best to embrace the latest developments myself. With this goal in mind, I grudgingly asked Chat GPT to write a storyline for a Columbo episode set in 2024.

I’ll start with a brief aside. Chat GPT may be good at writing thank you notes (not that I would know, of course), but it’s a hot mess when it comes to fiction, which I suppose will keep human writers employed, at least for a little while longer. The storyline it came up with was a convoluted jumble in which Columbo finds the body of a tech mogul with a VR headset. The mystery itself made little sense, but Chat GPT got a few details right, including Columbo referencing his wife and fiddling with equipment he should never touch. And it landed the ending.

Columbo: “I gotta say, the world’s getting too advanced for an old cop like me. But you know, in the end, it’s still about understanding people. Technology changes, but human nature stays the same.”

Then it had Columbo driving off into the sunset, although it failed to mention that he was at the wheel of his crappy 1959 Peugeot, on the verge of a breakdown and in need of a good wash.