Martin Kane
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Television's first private eye, and it time's it must have also seemed like the first infomercial. A tough Big Apple eye, MARTIN KANE was immensely popular both on radio and television where, as was Mike Barnett, the private eye hero of Man Against Crime,which made its debut a few weeks later. Together they became the first of what would become a long stream of video eyes.

Sponsored on both radio and television by U.S. Tobacco, Kane hung out at, and alwayys found a reason to pass though Happy McMann's Tobacco Shop, all the better to plug the sponsor's products. Played by actor William Gargan in both media, Kane was a easy-going, affable man, sporting a bowtie and smoking a pipe, and looked for all the world like somebody's uncle, but under the veneer, he was hard and determined, and nobody's patsy. He may have been cooperative with the cops, and he may have tried to avoid violence, but he was the real deal, from all accounts, even if the medium wasn't.

The early days of live television are rife with stories of botched cues, falling scenery and hilarious fuck-ups, and Martin Kane was no exception. Yet the show gradually improved, eventually shaking free of flat stereotypes, and by 1950, it had reached 12th spot in the ratings, and in two subsequent seasons, reached the top ten. It also spawned a short-lived comic book series, thus becoming the first TV/comic tie-in.

The radio show premiered a mere three weeks before the television show. Both were done live, and both proved popular, despite the fact that casting of Kane changed several times. In 1951, Lloyd Nolan (film's Mike Shayne) took over and in 1952, Lee Tracy stepped in to fill Kane's gumshoes. In 1953, Mark Stevens had a whack.Each brought a different spin to the character: Gargan was the world-weary shamus, Nolan the wise-cracking private dick, and Tracy the "hardboiled cynic with a thick streak of sentimentality." Mark Stevens brought a name change (to Martin Kane, Detective) and a supposedly more realistic approach. According to Ric Meyer's TV Detectives, the show had good writing and an authentic feel to it, and was, all in all, a quality production.

A later attempt to revive the show, the British-produced, syndicated The New Adventures of Martin Kane, bringing Gargan back as Kane, recast as a globe-trotting P.I. working out of London, never really caught on.

William Gargan on Martin Kane

From his 1969 autobiography, Why Me, Gargan gives us his perspective of his character, the series, and early TV:

"...Very soon in the game, I realized our stories were nothing to rave about. How much well plotted story line and genuine character development can you accomplish in a half-hour? So I made the program a showcase for me. After all, that was what we were selling - Martin Kane. I developed a tongue-in-cheek style, a spoof of the hard-boiled detective, a way of silently saying, 'Don't blame me for the lousy stories, I didn't write them. And anyway, what's the difference? Relax'

It was nothing staggering, my decision. It only made sense. Bogart's movie version of Sam Spade applied the same ground rules. We gave the audience a good time, and if all the threads were not tightly tied in a half-hour, we swept them under the bed. Have fun. And the show, for whatever reason, took hold.... The show had charm, and its charm held together the lunacy, the feeble character development, the limited camera work.

It also had a producer I could not abide.... He used the show for a flesh parade. The result was we had pretty, empty-headed girls on the show. blowing lines all over the lot.

The show began to slide downhill. In desperation, I began to mug a little more, to cover up the new holes, and the script writers began to write more blatantly. You get into a terrible rut this way. Everybody works harder to undo the damage, and the result is more screeching, more overacting, overwriting, which starts to drive the viewers away and to get them back you come up with more and more desperate gimmickery...." (Sounds like this aspect of TV hasn't changed much since the early days.).

Sidebar by Stewart Wright. For more on Gargan...

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Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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