Columbo is an American crime fiction TV series starring Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. The show popularized the inverted detective story format; each episode began by showing the commission of the crime and the perpetrator.
Columbo creators Levinson and Link claimed that Columbo was partially inspired by the Crime and Punishment character, Porfiry Petrovich, as well as G.K. Chesterton's humble clerical detective Father Brown. Other sources claim Columbo's character is based on Inspector Fichet from the classic French suspense-thriller Les Diaboliques (1955). He is a shabby, apparently slow-witted police detective; although, as criminals eventually learn, appearances can be deceiving. Columbo uses his deferential and absent-minded persona to lull criminal suspects into a false sense of security; meanwhile, he solves his cases by paying close attention to tiny inconsistencies in a suspect's story and by hounding the suspect until he or she confesses. Columbo's signature technique is to exit the scene of an interview, invariably stopping in the doorway or returning a moment later to ask "just one more thing" of a suspect. The "one more thing" always brings to light the key inconsistency.