• January 2012 DVDs and Videos
• Man in a Suitcase: Set Two...Buy Set Two on DVD
  Years before Burn Notice, television audiences thrilled to the adventure of discredited CIA agent McGill, who wandered the highways and byways of the U.K. and Europe, working as a kind of itinerant private eye while seeking to clear his name.
  
  
• Mannix: Season Six)..Buy this DVD set
  Season six of your classic American hard-boiled private eye, television division. And I mean classic in every sense of the word. Accept no substitutes.
  
  
• November 2011 DVDs and Videos
• Republic of Doyle: Season Two...Buy the DVD
  What's this? No psychics? No burned spies? Arguably the only gimmick-free private eye TV currently airing in North America is only available in Canada, you say? Pity...
  
  
• October 2011 DVDs and Videos
• Bored to Death: The Complete Second Season...Buy this season on DVD...Buy it on Blu-Ray
  More nonsense from Jonathan Ames, possibly the most neurotic gumshoe in New York and his equally reality-challenged buddies.
  
  
• Lie to Me: The Final Season...Buy on DVD
  Prickly, squirrelly Tim Roth shines as human lie detector Cal Lightman who runs rampant over clients, suspects, his co-workers and his family.
  
  
• September 2011 DVDs and Videos
• Mickey Spillanes Mike Hammer: The Complete Series...Buy the DVD
  All 78 episodes of the groundbreaking syndicated TV series, featuring the cookin' original jazz theme and an unforgettable rogue's gallery scam artists, crooks, thugs, killers and femmes fatale. But best of all is the tongue-in-cheek charm and hard-boiled grit that Darren McGavin brought to the role of Spillane's lonely knight.
  
  
• July 2011 DVDs and Videos
• Dylan Dog: Dead of Night...Watch it now!...Buy the DVD...Buy the Blu-Ray
  Based on the long-running italian comic series by Tiziano Sclavi, this one follows the character of paranormal private eye/monster hunter Dylan Dog (Brandon Routh). There's some good stuff here: vampres, werewolves and zombies galore, and plenty of blood-splattered quirkiness and scenery chewing, but it doesn't always quite hit the mark.
  
  
• Mannix: Season 5)..Buy this DVD set
  Season five of the classic American P.I. show. This is how it used to be done, kids.
  
  
• June 2011 DVDs and Videos
  Burn Notice Season Four...Buy this DVD set
  What were once habits are now vices. What once seemed so fresh has settled into a sort of video comfort food -- let's resolve the neve-rending, ever-expanding back story, dump Jesse, and get back to solving cases.
  
  
• Kiss Me Deadly..Buy the DVD...Buy it on Blu-Ray
  Robert Aldrich's 1955 classic Cold War noir adaptation of Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer novel gets the Criterion and Blu-Ray treatment, and comes loaded with a suitcase full of extra features: new high-definition restoration, audio commentary by film noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini, tribute from director Alex Cox, excerpts from The Long Haul of A. I. Bezzerides, essays, and more. The super-deluxe, fancy pants Blu-Ray version probably also comes with a small nuclear device.
  
  
• Leverage: Season 3)..Buy the DVD
  Third season of popular show featuring Timothy Hutton as the leader of a gang of "reformed" criminals who make like latter-day Robin Hoods and rob the rich to give back to the poor. A little cartoonish at times, but it's occasionally great fun.
  
  
• Marlowe...Buy the DVD
  Another lost child finally gets released. This 1969 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, starring James Garner as Philip Marlowe, is being released as a made-to-order DVD through WBShop.com, and it's well worth a look, even if Garner at times seems caught between the hard-boiled dicks of 40s detective films and his future incarnation as easy-going Jim Rockford. Along for the ride are Carroll O'Connor, Rita Moreno, William Daniels, Sharon Farrell, Jackie Coogan and, oh yeah, Bruce Lee. not essential, maybe, and too groovy for its own good, but fun nonetheless.
  
  May 2011 DVDs and Videos
• The Big Bang...Buy the DVD...Buy it on Blu-Ray
  Antonio Banderas plays Ned Cruz, a Los Angeles P.I. hired to find a missing stripper in a "two-fisted" detective in this last-minute straight-to-DVD release directed by Tony Krantz. Richard Rionda Del Castro, Krantz and Erik Jendresen are the producers of the film, based on a script by Jendresen, the man who penned Band of Brothers. The gumshoe's quest leads to the New Mexico desert, where he finds a trail of bodies and contends with a brutal Russian boxer, meth heads, three LAPD detectives and an aging billionaire obsessed with discovering The God Particle - the theoretical source of all matter in the universe.
  
  
• Smile, Jenny, You're Dead...Buy the DVD
  Harry O finally makes it to DVD. Or at least, one of its pilots does. The 197 TV flick "Smile, Jenny, You're Dead," starring David Janssen as the cranky, wry SoCal P.I. who many say was the best TV private eye ever, gets its first legit DVD release as a Warner Home Video "made on demand" (MOD) disk. The film also stars Andrea Marcovicci and a young Jodie Foster.Marlowe...Buy the DVD
  Another lost child finally gets released. This 1969 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, starring James Garner as Philip Marlowe, is being released as a made-to-order DVD through WBShop.com, and it's well worth a look, even if Garner at times seems caught between the hard-boiled dicks of 40s detective films and his future incarnation as easy-going Jim Rockford. Along for the ride are Carroll O'Connor, Rita Moreno, William Daniels, Sharon Farrell, Jackie Coogan and, oh yeah, Bruce Lee. not essential, maybe, and too groovy for its own good, but fun nonetheless.
  
  
• January 2011 DVDs and Videos
• Man in a Suitcase: Set One...Buy Set One on DVD
  Years before Burn Notice, television audiences thrilled to the adventure of discredited CIA agent McGill, who wandered the highways and byways of the U.K. and Europe, working as a kind of itinerant private eye while seeking to clear his name.
  
  
• The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest...Buy the DVD...Buy it on Blu-Ray
  Noomi Rapace returns in full Libeth drag to bring the series home. Not quite as riveting as the first two filoms, perhaps, but essential viewing nonetheless.
  
  
• Justified....Buy this season on DVD....Buy this season on Blu-Ray
  Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshall who's been known to pull a trigger or two, is brought to the small screen with a surprising amount of wit, grit and backwoods sass, as the troubled lawman (Deadwood's Timothy Oliphant) is dispatched back home to Kentucky.
  
  
• Mannix: Season 4)..Buy this DVD set
  Season four of the classic American P.I. show. If there was a Mount Rushmore for TV eyes, Joe Mannix would be front and center.
  
  
• December 2010 DVDs and Videos
• COronado 9...Buy the complete series on DVD
  The complete run of the 1960-61 syndicated series about P.I. Dan Adams, played by studly Rod Cameron, who worked for the movers and shakers in a wealthy San Diego suburb.
  
  
• November 2010 DVDs and Videos
• Lie to Me: Second Season...Buy on DVD.
  Everyone's favourite human lie detector returns to berate, insult and piss off suspects... as well as his clients., his co-workers and his family.
  
  
• Republic of Doyle: Season One...Buy the DVD
  For lovers of classic, character-driven 70s P.I. fare who are finding little retro-solace in the current TV schedule, this Canadian import just might be the ticket. Although wind-blown , rock-bound St. John’s, Newfoundland is about as far from the sunny southern California stomping grounds of Rockford and Harry O as you can get without leaving the continent, there’s a definite and deliberate seventies vibe to the semi-comic doings of the mismatched father-and-son private eye team of Jake and Malachy Doyle, and their extended family of ex-wives, runaway nieces, long lost brothers and law enforcement girlfriends. Less concerned with its hipness factor than plain old storytelling, this CBC production concentrates on – get this – detectives solving cases. No psychics, no former mentalists, no burned spies, no OC cases, no human lie detectors – just two human beings who get hired to solve cases. I told you it was retro.
  
  
• October 2010 DVDs and Videos
• The Girl Who Played with Fire...Buy the DVD
  Lisbeth is back. Don't get her pissed!
  
  
• Johnny Staccato...Buy the DVD
  John Cassavetes starred as a ivory-tinkling New York eye and jazz musician in this edgy, innovative, intense and stylish cult fave that warbled between high art and laughably overwrought pretension, in this three disc set that collects all 27 episodes.
  
  
• The Complete Rumpole of the Bailey Megaset...Buy the DVD
  
• Adapted by John Mortimer from his own Edgar Award-winning novels and short stories and starring the formidable Leo McKern, these 14-discs includes all 42 episodes from all seven seasons of the show, plus the feature-length Rumpole's Return, and a slew of extras, including an interview with the author and individual episode introductions by Mortimer.
  
  
• July 2010 DVDs and Videos
• Chandler....Buy thisDVD
  Sleepy, sloppy 1971 flick starring cult fave Warren Oates as gumshoe named Chandler ("as in Raymond," he explains for those who are hard of thinking), finally available. For fans only.
  
  
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...Buy the DVD
  The original Swedish film, based on the first book of the international smasheroo. One of the best adaptations of a novel I've seen in years.
  
  
• Prime Time Crime: The Stephen J. Cannell Collection...Buy the DVD
  Sure, plenty of it's cheese, but even Stephen J. Cannell at his cheesiest is better than some of the processed cheese food we're currently being force-fed under the guise of TV crime these days. And when he's on his game, there were few that can touch him. This bargain-priced 10-disc set includes complete runs of Missing Persons, Broken Badges, Palace Guard and UNSUB, and a dozen episodes selected from other shows Cannell was involved in, including Wiseguy, The Commish, Hunter, Tenspeed & Brown Shoe, Silk Stalkings, 21 Jump Street and Booker.
  
  
• June 2010 DVDs and Videos
• Burn Notice: Season Three...Buy this DVD set
  Fluff, but fun fluff. Michael Weston is a spy who's been burned by the CIA, and he wants to know why. But until then, he's working as a P.I. in Miami...
  
  
• Private Investigator Varg Veum.. Buy this DVD set
  If the Millenium trilogy has you hungry for more dark, gritty Scandinavian noir, check out this series starring Trond Espen Seim as long wolf Norwegian P.I. Varg Veum, based on the bestselling stories by author Gunnar Staalesen. English subtitles.
  
  
• Shutter Island...Buy this DVD...Buy it on Blu-Ray
  Martin Scorsese's pulpy, overblown adaptation of Dennis Lehane's pulpy novel about a U.S. marshall (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) investigating the disappearance of a patient from a locked room in the Ashecliff Hospital for the criminally insane on the barren, wind-swept Shutter Island located in Boston Harbor. I generally like Scorsese, but his heavy-handed approach was overkill for such a relatively straightforward (despite its acclaimed "twists") story.
  
  
• May 2010 DVDs and Videos
  
• Leverage: Season 2)..Buy the DVD
  Second season of popular show featuring Timothy Hutton as the leader of a gang of "reformed" criminals who make like latter-day Robin Hoods and rob the rich to give back to the poor.
  
  
• The Torchy Blane Complete Movie Collection.. Buy this DVD set
  Finally! Includes all nine B-flicks on five disks, featuring the original motormouth newshawk and her long-suffering meathead cop boyfriend. Glenda Farrell shines as Torchy and Barton MacLane holds up his end, and the film's are far more fun than they have any right to be. Loosely based on Frederick Nebel's Kennedy and MacBride stories in Black Mask.
  
  
• March 2010 DVDs and Videos
• Matt Houston: The First Season)..Buy the DVD
  If you found the cheese of Magnum, P.I. to be an acquired taste, this isn't even cheese -- it's processed cheese food. It's like the producers of Matt Houston looked to The Rockford Files, and never realized that Lance White was supposed to be a joke. This ain't art; it's Kraft.
  
  
• Monk: Season Eight. ..Buy the DVD
  The final season, including the two-part series finale. Break out the sanitizer!
  
  
• Tenspeed and Brown Shoe)..Buy the DVD
  The fondly remembered but short-lived show from the Cannell factory finally makes it to DVD, minus the acclaimed pilot that one TV executive once called the best pilot he'd ever seen. Still, the comic friction between stick-up-his-butt accountant/wannabe P.I. Jeff Goldblum and mile-a-minute motormouth scam artist Ben Vereen stands up.

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List respectfully compiled by film editor Chris Baldemor and site editor: Kevin Burton Smith. Special thanks to our man in the field, Bob Huggins, for the heads up.

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