I read a couple dozen of the Gardner novels when I was a teenager in the early 1980s, even though I had watched very little of the tv series at that point. They were interesting (especially the early novels from the 1930s), but the formula became numbing after a while. At first I didn't mind. Then one day I was reading Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and read a column where a critic called Gardner "the king of the time-killers" and realized he was right. I never read one of the books again.
My recollection from the books is that in one of the early novels there was a backstory: shortly after Perry hired her, he proposed marriage out of the blue, but she laughed him off, and the subject was never brought up again. As far as TV, the most interesting piece of evidence is one of the better telemovies, 1987's "The Case of the Lost Love," in which Perry's old flame (Jean Simmons) hires him when her husband (Gene Barry) gets arrested for murder. There's a scene about halfway through where Simmons visits Perry's office and has to wait with Della before he's available. "You never got married?" says Simmons; no, no, says Della with a smile, never did. Simmons says "What about you and Perry?" Della looks uncomfortable for a few seconds, says well, um... then Perry opens the door and interrupts them. The subject never gets brought up again. My concern about the new series is that the initial press releases make it sound like they're changing Perry from a lawyer to a private eye, thus changing the whole nature of the character. If that's what happens, I will be seriously disappointed. On Monday, April 20, 2020 at 11:28:25 AM UTC-4, MelissaP wrote: > > Do you know how the books treated their relationship? > > Also, wasn't Burr's (who also did Ironside) orientation "buried" until > after his death? > > On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 10:12 AM Tom Wolper <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> Perry's relationship with Della on the show is simple: they are an old >> married couple with no hint of marriage or sex. Code era movies had ways of >> letting mature viewers know that characters had sex while leaving the young >> or naive unaware and that's not present at all in the series. It's hard to >> relate to a modern context because it doesn't exist in a modern context. >> They are an exclusive couple with no physical touch. And I don't think it >> has anything to do with Burr's orientation. If that hadn't been completely >> buried during the run of the show the sponsors would have fled and the show >> would have been canceled. >> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/a33dfd3e-c61d-4f5d-9866-bf77c8ca359e%40googlegroups.com.
