Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of my time watching the detectives. Only on the telly, of course. I’ve always been a fan of detective stories, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales on the page to the many British and American crime-solvers that have appeared on the small screen over the years. In particular, I quite enjoyed a number of American sleuths who possessed such exotic names as Kojak, Mannix, Cannon and Colombo. My favourite of these shows, however, was The Rockford Files, which starred James Garner as the eponymous sleuth. Over the last few years, I watched a good few episodes of that show as well as Colombo and it wasn’t difficult to see why I liked them. The stories weren’t bad, but the performances of Peter Falk as Columbo and Garner as Rockford were the real selling points for me
