A Honey of an Opening

The story that goes with that amazing bit of video is at The Rap Sheet today. J. Kingston Pierce continues his series of the best of television crime drama openers with an intimate look at a classic heroine of the page and the small screen, Forrest and Gloria Fickling’s deliciously dangerous Honey West.

Replete with humor and plenty of risqué innuendos, the novels made Honey out as “the nerviest, curviest P.I. in Los Angeles -- or anywhere else for that matter,” to repeat one description. She was also an important precursor to some of today’s best-known distaff dicks, including V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone. “Of course, these days nobody would dare call her a feminist icon,” wrote Kevin Burton Smith in a 2004 profile of Gloria Fickling for Mystery Scene magazine, “but in her time she was a rarity -- an independent woman calling her own shots. She may have been prone to frequent ‘wardrobe malfunctions,’ but she was out there knocking on doors, taking down names, and answering to nobody but herself.”

Pierce’s story on Honey West is here.