Authors and Creators
Roy Huggins
(AKA John Thomas James)
(1914-2002)

Crime fiction lost an important pioneer when Roy Huggins died on April 3, 2002 in Santa Monica, California, at age 87. Although best known for having created such popular TV series as Maverick, The Fugitive, 77 Sunset Strip and The Rockford Files, Huggins started out as a novelist, producing a trio of books and several short stories that later became sources for his broadcast dramas.

Huggins was born in Litelle, Washington, according to a biography available at the Museum of Broadcast Communications Web site. After graduating from the University of California and then working for the U.S. Civil Service during World War II, "he taught himself to write gripping and literate drama by copying in longhand Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely," The New York Times reported in its Huggins obituary. His first novel, The Double Take (1946)--serialized in The Saturday Evening Post--was a Chandleresque yarn that featured Los Angeles private eye Stuart Bailey, whose client is being blackmailed in regard to his wife's past; Bailey must investigate the woman's history in order to end the extortion. (Bailey subsequently made three short-story appearances, and after some modification, became the chief protagonist--played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.--in the Huggins TV series 77 Sunset Strip). Huggins went on to compose two more novels: a suspenser called Too Late for Tears (1947) and a James M. Cain-ish work called Lovely Lady, Pity Me (1949).

However, the purchase of film rights to The Double Take convinced Huggins that steadier employment could be had writing screenplays than novels. He went on to compose several movie scripts, including those for The Fuller Brush Man (1948) and The Good Humor Man (1950), before writing and directing the 1952 Randolph Scott/Donna Reed western, Hangman's Knot. In September of that same year, Huggins was summoned before the infamous U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to answer questions about his brief membership in the Communist Party, which he'd joined because of his dislike of fascism. "I ended up agreeing that people who had already been mentioned many times were indeed known to me as Communists," he recalled many years afterward.

Huggins moved into television in 1955. He joined Warner Brothers and later Universal Television, creating such memorable series as Maverick (1957-62), 77 Sunset Strip (1958-64), The Fugitive (1963-67), Run for Your Life (1965-68), The Outsider (1968-69), The Rockford Files (1974-80) and City of Angels (1976). He also served as executive producer on shows ranging from Alias Smith and Jones and the short-lived James Farentino mystery, Cool Million, to Baretta and Hunter. In addition to his episodic works, Huggins was behind several made-for-TV movies and miniseries, such as the Bill Bixby western, The Invasion of Johnson County (1976), and the small-screen adaptation of Taylor Caldwell's big-canvas novel Captains and the Kings (1976).

Author Max Allan Collins, who was instrumental in giving Huggins the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991, calls him "a fine crime writer, and he may have become one of the giants of the genre had he not gone Hollywood. On the other hand, had he not gone Hollywood, we would not have 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, The Fugitive and The Rockford Files--merely major popular culture touchstones of the second half of the 20th century." Collins says that "Maverick was my childhood obsession, and Huggins (with Stephen J. Cannell) put together what I consider to be the best P.I. show of all time: City of Angels," a drama that was set in Los Angeles during the 1930s and starred M*A*S*H alum Wayne Rogers.

"One of the charming things about Huggins," Collins remarks, "was his propensity for recycling his one Stuart Bailey novel, The Double Take, as TV scripts. The Double Take is undoubtedly the most filmed private eye novel ever--there was a Hollywood movie [I Love Trouble, 1948], and it was done (I think) on every series Huggins produced. It was on Rockford (twice I believe), City of Angels and even Maverick! The three [Bailey] short stories were also the subject of many Huggins TV adaptations, probably just so Huggins could double dip: get paid for the screen story and for the script."

Of course, contriving scripts for his own TV series as well as for other network shows (which Huggins did under both his own moniker and as "John Thomas James," combining the names of his three sons) demanded more inspiration than recycling. Director Fielder Cook, who'd worked with Huggins over the years, recently explained the producer/writer's creative methodology as part of a Salon magazine tribute: "What a guy. Know what [Huggins] did? He had this magnificent car--a Cadillac or a Lincoln--and he would take off, alone in the car, and he would drive out into the desert and he had a tape recorder with him and he would drive and drive and just talk these stories into the tape recorder, and come back, give them to a secretary and there was a season!"

"The scripts Huggins wrote for the series he created are among the finest writing in television," opines Stuart M. Kaminsky, who in addition to penning novels based on his own characters, has to his credit two fine books (The Green Bottle and Devil on My Doorstep) based on the character of Jim Rockford, the charming and perpetually exasperated gumshoe Huggins created for former Maverick star James Garner. "Maverick and Gunsmoke were, in my opinion, the finest Westerns ever on television and both still play as well as they did when Huggins created Maverick. The Fugitive may be the finest dramatic series ever created and, in my mind, I find it impossible to believe that anyone can create a better private eye series than Rockford."

Kaminsky recalls once meeting Huggins, "back at Universal in the early 1970s. He was a gracious, quiet man, with a dancing quality in his eyes that made it clear that the world around him was fresh material for a new direction. If he had one particular strength," says Kaminsky, "it was in creating original characters who were always just ahead of the genre in which they existed."

It's hard to imagine a better epitaph than that.

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

SHORT STORIES

COLLECTIONS

NON-FICTION

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Bio by J. Kingston Pierce, crime editor for January Magazine and head honcho at The Rap Sheet.

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