Stuck in Realtime With Peter Falk

Historical novels (even one as tongue-in-cheek as The Wrong Sword) rely on telling details to convey a sense of time and place. The best source of these details are primary sources - documents and other items from then and there. For my friends obsessed with mid-20th century America, here is my favorite visual primary source for the 1970s (besides having lived through it): Columbo.

Columbo was a long-running detective TV series in which the wonderful character actor Peter Falk played a disheveled schlemiel of a police lieutenant who put (usually) wealthy and arrogant malefactors behind bars, after passive-aggressively nudzhing them for 45 minutes. It may also be the most 70's-looking show ever.

So if you're looking for visual cues between 1970 and 1980...

Dig it.

Dig that high tech office!

Classy

Murder, 70s style
Los Angeles
What Shatners looked like in 1973