A rumpled raincoat. Awkward questions. And not one detail left to chance.
Every Columbo episode, one page each
The murder opens the film and the murderer is named in the first minutes. What follows is ninety minutes of a badly dressed lieutenant being underestimated by a very rich man.
The best of the run
Our ratings, highest first.
Any Old Port in a Storm
Donald Pleasence as Adrian Carsini
10Murder by the Book
Jack Cassidy as Ken Franklin
9.5A Friend in Deed
Richard Kiley as Mark Halperin and Michael McGuire as Hugh Caldwell
9.5Negative Reaction
Dick Van Dyke as Paul Galesko
9.5By Dawn’s Early Light
Patrick McGoohan as Lyle Rumford
9.5Death Lends a Hand
Robert Culp as Investigator Brimmer
9Seasons
Pilots on their own. The late TV movies sit in season ten.
Twenty-six books
The 1962 stage play the show grew out of, the drugstore novelisations of the seventies, six novels in which the lieutenant investigates the Kennedy assassination, and a shelf of books about the making of it.
Covers found for eleven of them.
See all the booksCommon questions
The short answers.
How many Columbo episodes are there?
69 in total, counting the two pilot films — 45 in the original NBC run from 1968 to 1978, and 24 more on ABC between 1989 and 2003.
Do I have to watch them in order?
No. Every film is standalone, with its own killer and its own case, and nothing carries over between them. Order only matters if you want to watch the character age.
Why is the killer shown at the start?
That is the format. Columbo is an inverted mystery — a howcatchem rather than a whodunit — so the tension comes from watching him prove it, not from guessing.
What is Columbo’s first name?
He has none. The creators deliberately never gave him one. The badge glimpsed on screen reads “Frank”, but that was the prop department, not the script.
Where do I start?
Murder by the Book (1971), directed by a 24-year-old Steven Spielberg, is the usual answer. Our full list of starting points is on the where to start page.