User Reviews

A retired major is living in a boarding house where he spends his time tending to his aquariums and boasting about a hidden box, that can only be unlocked by a key he carries on his body When he's found shot in the head and with the window glass shattered, boarding house owner Una O'Connor turns to old friend William 'Martin Kane' Gargan. Police captain Walter Greaza thinks he found a lead when a shotgun is found, pointing towards the boarding house. But Gargan doesn't think it's that easy when he finds a shard of glass underneath the major's sofa. He decides to create a ruse to smoke out the real killer.

This one's not too bad, it's a decent episode that has a bit of a 30s mystery movie feel to it. Kane has to be a bit more of a sleuth here, which fits Gargan pretty well (this episode would feel silly had my favorite Kane, the more energetic and rough-and-tumble Mark Stevens, tried to solve it). Gargan ('Night Editor') had already played Kane on the radio show, and was a decent B-actor, so he was an easy pick as the first TV Kane. His Kane always seemed more interested in his tobacco than in his cases tho, hah... Not too surprising, this show was heavily sponsored by a tobacco firm, and in almost every episode there is a ton of product placement, and a visit to the local tobacco shop, owned by Walter Kinsella. If you manage to look past it tho, this series is often entertaining and each Kane actor brought a little variation to the character.

A retired major who likes to bore people with his tales of safaris and his fortune in emeralds is shot to death in his room in his boarding house. An old friend of Kane, Molly Griffith (Una O'Connor), who is a housekeeper in the boarding house and one of only two people known to be in the boarding house when the major was killed, is a suspect in the murder, so Martin Kane, P. I. is on the case.

Normally an object of derision, this time Harvard educated Sergeant Ross is actually a help in this case, using his knowledge of mathematics and physics to prove a theory that Kane has about the shooting that will, in the process, clear Molly.

The one thing that did not make much sense in this case was that the major's emeralds were assumed to be a motive for his murder. But what would you do with a bunch of emeralds that may or may not exist? It's not like you can buy groceries with them, and what if they are just one of the major's many exaggerations that he was given to in order to seem important in his old age?

There is an odd departure from the normal formula in that the normally very happy Happy McMann, owner of the tobacco store that everybody in the cast ends up visiting, is not happy at all here. In fact he behaves quite grumpily for no reason.

Since this episode is accenting character Sgt. Ross, let me say a word about the actor who played him, Nicholas Saunders. Saunders was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1914 and lived to be 92. I think it is not a stretch to say that if he had stayed in Ukraine he would not have lived to be 92.