Affair of the Heart

When Rock Hudson was married to Susan St.James we never heard of the weekly poker game. But now in this final season Commissioner McMillan is a widower he gets together with some buddies for a weekly game. The only problem is that after one game, Jed Allan one of the participants is found dead of a heart attack in his car after the game broke up. Allan was also having an affair with one of the wives of one of the other participants.

The who is obvious from the beginning mainly because the episode focused on the domestic problems of one of the couples. Still the husband was not present at the game, only showed up later after Allan died.

It was Sergeant DiMaggio's cold and Lloyd Nolan's friendly advice about the type of medicine to use is what gave Rock Hudson the idea of how the man died and nails the identity of his killer. Sharp movie fans will recall as I did the Errol Flynn/Brenda Marshall classic from Warner Brothers Footsteps In The Dark and know who did it.

A nice story, but Hudson as widower was never accepted by fans who remember the banter between him and Susan St.James.

The mystery in this one is as old as dirt. It goes further back than the Erroll Flynn movie, Footsteps in the Fog. It shows up also in Madame Sara, a story first published in 1902. The author of the teleplay for this, Steve Boccho, could have read it as it was published in the popular anthology, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, in 1971. A British one season TV series followed, but I can't recall if this particular story appeared in it.