Crime drama has been a part of the Mod subculture since the late 1950s, when the scene was best known as the Modernist (or Cool, or Bebop) Jazz Set. MacInnes’ London novels involved elements of small-time petty criminal activity in City of Spades, a bit more in Absolute Beginners, and crime drama was a central theme of the trilogy’s finalé, Mr Love and Justice. Petty crimes and somewhat organised drug deals were reminiscences in the Quadrophenia film, and on the other side of the Atlantic, starting in 1958, was a television noire series featuring who is arguably the James Bond of private investigators, Peter Gunn.

Always cool, but not yet inhumanly so, working out of the back offices of his friend’s jazz club, and friendly with musicians who maybe dealt on the side and billiards hustlers, small time boardwalk scammers, and other relatively harmless sorts who served him as informants for small fees or favours and the implied promise that he has no interest in turning them in, cos they aren’t hurting anybody. He drove a slick car (after all, this was ostensibly set in the Los Angeles area, likely the Long Beach wharfs — scooters are just impractical) and at the club was often attached to a beautiful woman, of whom there were a few in rotation but he maintained a steady girlfriend. The soundtrack was cool jazz, and real life jazz players of all sorts, and various levels of then-current fame and continued influence had cameos in the club or in coffeehouse scenes.

While I do maintain that the Mod subculture formalised in the UK, and it didn’t really come over Stateside until the mid-1960s, when it was practically a synonym for the Youthquaker models, including American Edie Sedgwick, in , to deny the Mod appeal of Peter Gunn and his eponymous telly drama is to display a gross misunderstanding of the subculture — especially if one is going to feature Bond novels and films in one’s collection.

Now, while the characters are similar, I still find it hard to say that they’re the same man with superficial differences — Gunn the American PI, Bond the British espionage agent, both in Italian suits with pretty girls on their arms. While each actor brings his own ineffable qualities. To James Bond, the writing, based on the original Bond novels, retains certain defining characteristics, often borrowed from author Flemming, himself. Bond was part “cool jet-set” and part classic 20th Century English gentleman, he liked golf and gambling and he was handsome and somewhat emotionally cold. Gunn, in comparison, is arguably of equal sophistication, and with equally expensive tastes, but in contrast, Craig Stevens is easily argued to possess more of an “American ruggedness” than any of the composites that went into Bond, or any actor selected to portray Bond. Furthermore, Bond maintains a clear distance from those he interacts with, where Gunn’s cynical humour and wit make the character feel rather easy to relate to in spite of an otherwise detached demeanour. Gunn would be easily at home in MacInnes’ London novels, whereas Bond is almost a DC Comics character, remaining impossibly cool-headed in the face of situations that were intentionally designed to be more fantastic than the last, rendering Bond practically absurdist in contrast to a near-realism to Gunn. Bond is the idol, but Gunn is the man you want to befriend, even if, at first, he seemed intimidating.

And let’s not forget that theme tune:

I will post the Art of Noise version if I damn well feel like it; if it’s good enough for Soul Train, it’s good enough for this blog. And yes, that’s Rick “the People’s Poet” Mayall.

After the Peter Gunn television series ended in 1960, a series of pulp novelisations continued on, and expanded the world Peter Gunn lived in. Organised criminals and police were more explicitly threatened by Gunn’s competence, and these eventually gave way to the 1967 cinematic release, Gunn (also starring Stevens in the role of Gunn) and over twenty years later, in ’89, the television film, and pilot for a series that never was, also named Peter Gunn, and starring Peter Strauss. As best as I can tell, the potential reboot of the series played up the James Bond similarities a bit much, and it tried for humour a bit more and overall ended up far less memorable than the original run –sometimes, you just ought to realise there’s no need to try and make a franchise relatable to a younger generation, because the original wasn’t so much a product of its generation, but an influence on it and later ones and therefore doesn’t need to be remade, because it is timeless.

As proof of the influence of Peter Gunn, after its relative success in its first series, a rival network created the similar Johnny Staccato, which lasted only a single series. Johnny Staccato was set in Greenwich Village, NYC, and in this, it suffered poor casting choices because the musos the casting department got for cameos were all associated with the West Coast scene — because the show was filmed in Los Angeles, and so it was cheaper to get local musos. It was also given a time slot that directly competed with a popular Western, which certainly had more mainstream appeal. While there was certainly incentive to compete with Peter Gunn, the timing was wrong, and with the growing popularity of “the Rat Pack”, and cool jazz’s spotlight proving flash-in-the-pan compared to crooners and folk music, neither Peter Gunn, nor copycat Johnny Staccato were going to survive the small screen past 1960 — indeed, the next popular jazz aficionado of television was beatnik/protohippie Maynard G. Krebbs, the simple-minded but sweet natured friend of the dorky, poetry-loving, and quasi-philosophical Dobie Gillis, the lovable but hard-lucked American teen of Central City, USA, and star of his own eponymous sitcom that followed him from high school to junior college. Indeed, the jazz fan, by 1960 in the States, was a happy-go-lucky parody of Kerouac’s Beat Generation that couldn’t even articulate what that meant, in other words: dirty, smelly, not even aware of what one believed oneself to be rebelling against, sweet but stupid, and only cool in one’s own mind — not a debonair and witty private investigator. After a moment to shine, the jazz set was suddenly a likable punchline, though to be fair, Maynard has his moments that even the counterculture could love, and the fourth-wall-breaking Dobie Gillis sitcom remains wry and clever, even by modern standards, and Maynard often had a rather tongue-in-cheek awareness of his own parody status.

But I digress.

Peter Gunn’s noir cinematography and pacing has always been a television oddity, especially for a half-hour (with adverts) drama, which is odd in and of itself, and while the episodic writing was always consistent in quality, the show was only really a modest success, and Bond’s flash, even in the spoof Casino Royale, overshadowed the Gunn film from the same year –the latter of which sought to balance the original television run with the comparable British spy’s dazzle, and so the series certainly remains the best remembered and most recommended among fans. The copycat Johnny Staccato can hold his own, and is worth seeing, but Peter Gunn certainly owns the concept of the cool, sharp, witty detective of the Jazz set, and certainly remains the best of the television noirs, and in my own personal top ten crime-themed dramas.