Only One Murder

The treacherous criminal stole up behind Lee Tracy and knocked him out with the butt of a revolver. But moments later, 54-year-old Actor Tracy leaped nimbly to his feet, disarmed the gunman, wrung a confession from a stubborn young woman, and breezily captured two gangsters for the grateful, bumbling police department. As he does regularly on Martin Kane, Private Eye (Thurs. 10 p.m., NBC), Tracy last week triumphed once again over television's singularly inept underworld. What's more, he had time and breath left over to plug the products of his sponsor, United States Tobacco Co.

There is a strange television affinity between crime shows and tobacco. Tracy's good friend, Ralph Bellamy, stars in Man Against Crime for Camel cigarettes; The Adventures of Ellery Queen (starring Lee Bowman) touts Phillies cigars; Dragnet (with Jack Webb) hawks Fatimas, and The Plainclothesman (Ken Lynch) works for Edgeworth tobacco. Like many things about TV, this fact puzzles Tracy: "I guess there must be some tie-up between smoking and tension."

Tracy got interested in TV 2 1/2 years ago when he was playing in Jed Harris' Broadway production of The Traitor: "I went into '21' one night and here were all these people standing around, not even drinking, just watching Milton Berle. I decided right away that this was for me." Last May the leading role in Martin Kane, which had been successively filled by William Gargan and Lloyd Nolan, fell vacant. Says Tracy: "They opened negotiations with me and I jumped at the chance." He almost regrets that he has made a rule never to tell his salary, because "the people I'm working for are terrifically liberal--simply terrific."

One of the reasons Tracy left Hollywood after more than 20 years was that he was tired of being typecast as a newspaperman: he was the original Reporter Hildy Johnson in Front Page. But so far, the role of TV sleuth still interests him. He can even see fine distinctions between his TV Martin Kane and the Martin Kane he plays on radio (Sun. 4:30 p.m., NBC). "On radio I usually pack a gun, and my relation with the cops is snarling and antagonistic. On TV, to get a gun, I usually have to take it away by force from some crook, and I'm such a pal of the cops I play pinochle with them."

He thinks TV is being run with "good taste and common sense," and is indignant at what he considers loose charges that crime shows encourage juvenile delinquency: "We used to have maybe two or three murders on a single show, but now there's generally just one. And we don't have anyone killed with an ax or have his throat cut with a butcher knife --they just get shot."

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