Death of a good cop - and a great actor.

Dressed in his trademark scruffy raincoat he would stumble out of his battered old car and arrive on the doorsteps of the rich and powerful. Safe in their certainty that such an obviously blue collar Jewish incompetent as Lieutenant Columbo could never discover their guilt, the posh murderers would look at the detective as if he was something to be wiped of one's shoe. He always got them in the end. Some say that Columbo was based on a character in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, others that actor Peter Falk simply played himself. One thing is for sure, The character was wonderful and will take it's place alongside the other greats of detective fiction. Peter Falk died yesterday after a sad decline into dementia.