Home → Episodes → Death Lends a Hand

The case

The killer

Robert Culp as Investigator Brimmer

The victim

Patricia Crowley as Lenore Kennicut

Guest cast

Robert Culp, Ray Milland, Eric James, Len Wayland, Lieux Dressler, Barbara Baldavin

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.

5:12

The murder

Brimmer runs an expensive security firm and is used to knowing things about powerful people. Hired by the newspaper magnate Arthur Kennicut to look into his wife's movements, he finds the affair he was paid to find — and then, instead of reporting it, offers Mrs Kennicut a different arrangement: her silence in exchange for his, with her husband's editorial decisions as the price.

She refuses, and refuses badly — with contempt rather than fear. Brimmer strikes her once, and once is enough. This is the crucial fact of the episode: unlike almost every other Columbo killer, he did not intend to do it. Everything that follows is improvisation by a man whose profession is planning.

He loads the body into her car, drives it away from the house, and stages a robbery: jewellery scattered, handbag emptied, the scene of a mugging that went wrong. Then he goes back to work and waits, secure in the knowledge that he knows exactly how a police investigation proceeds, because he used to run them.

Brimmer runs an expensive security firm and is accustomed to knowing things about powerful people. Hired by the newspaper magnate Arthur Kennicut to look into his wife's movements, he finds the affair he was paid to find.

Instead of reporting it he offers Mrs Kennicut a different arrangement: her silence for his, with her husband's editorial decisions as the price. She refuses, and refuses with contempt rather than fear.

He strikes her once, and once is enough. Unlike almost every other Columbo killer, he did not intend to do it — everything that follows is improvisation by a man whose profession is planning.

How Columbo gets him

The pairing is the point. Brimmer is a former policeman turned private operator, so he and Columbo speak the same language — and the film keeps them in the same rooms, comparing methods. Brimmer offers advice, and means it. Columbo takes it, and means that too. It is the friendliest hostility in the series.

Where Brimmer goes wrong is in over-reading the scene he made. A robbery leaves a mess; a professional's idea of a robbery leaves a tableau. Columbo keeps circling the same discomfort — that the disorder is too even, too complete, too much like what a man would produce if he sat down and thought about what a robbery looks like.

The medical detail closes it. The injuries do not match a beating in an alley, and one of them tells Columbo the woman was struck while wearing contact lenses. If a lens came out at the moment of the blow, it is somewhere — and it is not at the place where the body was found.

The pairing is the point. Brimmer is a former policeman turned private operator, so he and Columbo speak the same language, and the film keeps them in the same rooms comparing methods. He offers advice and means it; the lieutenant takes it and means that too.

Where he goes wrong is in over-reading the scene he made. A robbery leaves a mess; a professional's idea of a robbery leaves a tableau, and the disorder is too even, too complete.

The medical detail closes it. The injuries do not match a beating in an alley, and one of them tells Columbo the woman was struck while wearing contact lenses.

6:45

Worth knowing

• The first of Robert Culp's three turns as a Columbo murderer; he would also appear a fourth time, in Columbo Goes to College, as the father of the killers rather than the killer.
• The murder is one of very few in the series that is genuinely unplanned, which is why Brimmer behaves less like a suspect and more like a colleague throughout.
• The episode's split-screen sequences — Brimmer's face reflected over the scene of his own crime — are the most stylistically ambitious thing in the first season.
• The first of Robert Culp's three turns as a Columbo murderer; he appeared a fourth time, in Columbo Goes to College, as the killers' father.
• The murder is one of very few in the series that is genuinely unplanned, which is why Brimmer behaves less like a suspect than like a colleague.
• The split-screen sequences are the most stylistically ambitious thing in the first season; broadcast October 1971.

Verdict

The best of Culp's three, and the one that shows what the format can do with a killer who is competent rather than vain. Their scenes together are two professionals circling each other with real respect, which makes the ending land harder than usual.

It also contains one of the finest small Columbo moments: the lieutenant explaining, with total sincerity, that he is not a very good detective and mostly just keeps at things until they make sense.

The best of Culp's three and a demonstration of what the format can do with a killer who is competent rather than vain. Two professionals circling each other with real respect makes the ending land harder than usual.

It also contains one of the finest small Columbo moments: the lieutenant explaining, with total sincerity, that he is not a very good detective and mostly just keeps at things until they make sense.

What the people who made it said

Quotes are in the speaker’s own words — from a transcript of the recording, or from the printed source. Players open at the right minute. Everything is shortened; the full version is in the source.

Familiar faces

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

• Robert Culp as Investigator Brimmer4 episodesalso in The Most Crucial Game, Double Exposure, Columbo Goes to College
• Ray Milland as Arthur Kennicutt2 episodesalso in The Greenhouse Jungle
• Don Keefer as Medical Examiner2 episodesalso in The Most Crucial Game

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