Died: December 27, 2020. WILIAM Link, who has died aged 87, was the co-creator of one of the most iconic characters to ever shuffle on to a television screen. With Columbo, Link and his long-term collaborator, Richard Levinson, found that the shabby Los Angeles police lieutenant famously brought to life by actor Peter Falk had a mass appeal that made him a people’s hero. Link and Levinson based their cigar-chomping, blue-collar detective partly on Porfiry Petrovitch, the chief investigator in Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, and partly on G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Dressed in a dirty raincoat and in a seemingly permanent befuddled state, Columbo was a deceptively shrewd figure. Despite being patronised by the high-flying felons he brought to book, in a show that subverted the murder mystery genre by revealing the killer at the top of the show, Columbo’s forensic tenacity paid off.
Tenafly for the 1974-5 season of the Wednesday night edition of the mystery wheel series.
In the prime of
Columbo, they adapted a new version of
Ellery Queen, and in the years following they co-created with Peter S. Fischer both the popular series
Murder, She Wrote and the short-lived
Blacke s Magic. (After the death of Mr. Levinson, Mr. Link teamed up with David Black to create
The Cosby Mysteries.)
After the first season of
Columbo, Levinson and Link left the daily grind of the series. Though they continued to be involved through conversation with the new producers and with Falk sometimes supplying clues, story ideas, or other elements their break from the day-to-day of the series enabled the two collaborators to focus in particular on made-for-television movies.
William Link in 2003
Credit: Matthew Peyton/Getty Images
William Link, who has died aged 87, was the co-creator of the popular series Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, both of which defied most of the norms of television detective drama.
Throughout the seven-year run of Columbo, starring Peter Falk as the eponymous cigar-smoking detective, Falk came to share many of his alter ego’s traits. Bill Link and his co-creator and writer Dick Levinson originally wanted Bing Crosby for the part but later admitted that they based most of the shambling character on Falk himself.
“Let’s face it,” Link recalled, “Peter was scruffy and forgetful, but at the same time he was charming and had a very good brain.”