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The case

The killer

Patrick McGoohan as Eric Prince

The victim

Rue McClanahan as Verity Chandler

Guest cast

Patrick McGoohan, Rue McClanahan, Richard Riehle, Spencer Garrett, Aubrey Morris, Edie McClurg

Columbo is an inverted mystery: the murder opens the film and the killer is known from the first minutes. What you are watching for is how he proves it — see how the character works.

6:04

The murder

Eric Prince runs the most fashionable funeral home in Los Angeles, where the deaths of famous people are stage-managed into events. Verity Chandler, a columnist, is about to publish something that would end him.

He kills her at his own premises and then does the thing only a man in his trade could do: he cremates her, immediately, in his own facility. No body, no cause of death, no forensic evidence of any kind.

It is the most complete disposal in the series, and the film's central question is what a detective does when the victim has literally ceased to exist.

Eric Prince's business is celebrity grief. His funeral home stages the deaths of famous people as events, with lighting, music and a guest list, and he presides over them as a kind of master of ceremonies. It is a good living built entirely on other people's worst days.

Verity Chandler is a columnist who has found something in his past — the sort of thing that would empty his chapel permanently — and she comes to the premises to tell him she is printing it.

He kills her there and then does what nobody else in the series could have done: he puts her into his own cremator. Within hours there is no body, no wound, no toxicology and no scene. The only trace left is the absence of a woman who was, until that afternoon, extremely visible.

How Columbo gets him

McGoohan plays Prince as unctuous rather than cold — a man who has spent his career being professionally sympathetic and has no idea how to stop. His scenes with Falk are the funniest of their four collaborations.

With no body, Columbo works the edges: the appointment book, the missing car, the staff rotas, the small physical traces that a cremation cannot reach. The absence of evidence becomes evidence in itself, because someone had to arrange it.

This is also the episode in which the lieutenant invents a cousin who drives a taxi, on the spot, to avoid explaining why he is somewhere — the clearest proof in the series that some of his enormous family is improvised.

The investigation is unusual because there is nothing to investigate. Columbo starts with an appointment diary and a car, and spends the first half of the film establishing that a person who existed on Tuesday did not exist on Wednesday.

Prince is oily where McGoohan's earlier villains were cold, and the two of them play the scenes almost as comedy — the funeral director offering condolences to a policeman who has not lost anyone, out of pure professional habit.

The turn comes from a fact of physics the murderer did not know: cremation does not destroy everything. Surgical implants survive, and they carry serial numbers that lead to hospital records.

3:26

Worth knowing

• McGoohan directed as well as starred, his fifth and final directing credit on the series.
• The invented taxi-driving cousin in this episode is frequently cited as evidence that Columbo's relatives are at least partly fictional.
• It was the last time McGoohan and Falk worked together; their friendship spanned twenty-four years of the series.
• McGoohan directed as well as starring; it is his fifth and final directing credit on the series and his fourth as murderer.
• The invented taxi-driving cousin appears here — Columbo makes him up on the spot to avoid explaining himself, the clearest evidence in the run that some of the family is fiction.
• Broadcast in October 1998, the penultimate McGoohan collaboration of a working relationship that spanned twenty-four years.

Verdict

A pleasure, mostly because of the two men at the centre. The mystery is thin and the solution depends on a piece of forensic trivia, but McGoohan is having so much fun that it hardly matters.

As the last of their four films together, it is also a fitting send-off — the only one where they seem to be playing rather than duelling.

The mystery rests on a piece of forensic trivia, and the film knows it — the pleasure here is entirely the company.

As a last outing for the McGoohan–Falk partnership it is oddly cheerful, which after Rumford, Brenner and Finch is a strange and rather nice place to finish.

Familiar faces

Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.

• Patrick McGoohan as Eric Prince4 episodesalso in By Dawn’s Early Light, Identity Crisis, Agenda for Murder
• Richard Riehle as Sergeant Degarmo2 episodesalso in Murder With Too Many Notes

Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →