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GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY SHERLOCK HOLMES   Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859 at No. 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland.  The Doyle's were an old aristocratic Irish family.  In 1879, while at school and attempting to help pay for it, Conan Doyle wrote his first story (not Sherlock Holmes related) and to his surprise he sold it to a magazine.  Later that year he sold a second story.  He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a medical degree in 1885.  He spent seven months as a ship's doctor on a whaler in the Arctic and four months as a medical officer on an African steamer.  Impressed by Edgar Allan Poe's character C. Auguste Dupin, Conan Doyle decided to try his hand at a detective novel.  The result was "A Study in Scarlet", the first Sherlock Holmes story, which he had to virtually give away in order to get it published in 1887.  The book-length story received scant critical attention.  The Holmes saga might have ended

  GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY#2 NICK CARTER Street & Smith were latecomers to the dime novel trade.  They were a family firm founded by Francis Scott Street and Francis S. Smith when the two men took over a weekly New York paper where they had been employed.  By the late 1880s they were publishing weekly and monthly story papers as well as a host of dime novels.  Story weeklies were 32-page newspapers printed on cheap paper and an entire issue would contain a single story devoted to the exploits of, back then, cowboys and outlaws.  These papers sold for a nickel.  Ormond G. Smith, son of founder Francis, came up with the idea of Nick Carter, a detective.  He provided the outline of the first story to writer John Russell Coryell who actually wrote the first Nick Carter story and subsequent sequels.  Nick made his debut in the September 18, 1886 issue of the New York Weekly  in the story "The Old Detective's Pupil; or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square"

  GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY #1 C. AUGUSTE DUPIN Auguste Dupin was the first fictional detective of importance and the model for virtually every cerebral crime solver who followed.  Dupin was created by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in 1841 before the term "detective" was even used.  The Chevalier Dupin was presented without physical description so he seemed less human than his successors.  Poe wanted to stress the supreme importance of the intellect, unencumbered with emotional considerations.  Dupin bears the title Chevalier meaning that he is a knight in the Legion d'honneur.  Dupin detested daylight and preferred to stay behind closed shutters in a room lit only by "a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghostliest and feeblest of rays".  He frequently remained in his room, a small library at the rear of an old manor at No. 33 Rue Dunot in the Faubourg Saint-Germain district of Paris, for a month or more without allowing

  LEGENDARY HEROES #55 MATT DILLON - GUNSMOKE In the late 1940s CBS chairman William S. Paley, a fan of the "Philip Marlowe" radio series, asked his programming chief Hubell Robinson to develop a hardboiled Western series, sort of a Philip Marlowe in the Old West.  Robinson instructed CBS' West Coast Vice-President Harry Ackerman, who had developed the Marlowe radio show, to take on the task.  Ackerman and writers Mort Fine and David Friedkin created an audition script titled "Mark Dillon Goes to Gouge Eye", based on one of their Michael Shayne radio scripts.  Two versions of the play were recorded.  The first, in June 1949, was very much like a hardboiled detective series with Michael Rye as Dillon.  The second version, from July 1949, was a more traditional western with Howard Culver as Dillon.  CBS execs liked the Culver version best and told Ackerman to proceed.  The problem was that Culver was already doing a juvenile western show called "Straight Shoo

  LEGENDARY HEROES #54 TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET "Space Academy, USA, in the world beyond tomorrow", the TV announcer would say each week, introducing the show.  "Here the Space Cadets train for duty on distant planets.  In roaring rockets they blast through millions of miles from Earth to far-flung stars and brave the dangers of cosmic frontiers protecting the liberties of the planets, safeguarding the cause of universal peace in the age of the conquest of space!"  Space Cadets were students at Space Academy, the interplanetary West Point of the future, 2351 A.D., training to become Solar Guards whose job was to protect the peace of the universe in a future where war and the use of destructive weapons had long since been outlawed.  The stories centered around Tom Corbett, Roger Manning, and Astro, a cadet from Venus.  The cadets led by Corbett were second-year men of the Academy and the action took place in the classrooms and aboard their training ship, the rocket c

  LEGENDARY HEROES #53 SPACE PATROL "Space Patrol" was about the 30th Century adventures of Commander-in-Chief Buzz Corry of the United Planets Space Patrol and his young sidekick Cadet Happy Osborn.  The original concept of the series was "a cop show in outer space" so "Space Patrol" became an intergalactic paramilitary space police force.  Corry and his allies were outfitted with ray guns, miniature "space-o-phones" and atomic lights to face their interplanetary villains.  "Space Patrol" was created by Mike Moser, a WWII vet and Navy flier who came up with the idea while fighting in the Pacific.  He wanted to create a show that kids would enjoy today just like he did years earlier when he read "Buck Rogers" and "Flash Gordon" in his youth. Moser pitched the idea to KECA-TV (now KABC) and they loved the idea.  The show debuted on March 9, 1950 as a live 15-minute show and was aired Monday through Friday, televised f