User Reviews

London-based private detective Jerry Crown is handsome, intelligent, and a wow with the ladies. About the only thing he is not is rich.

Joyce, his present girlfriend, works as secretary to a fabulously wealthy American widow by the name of Leona Gillings, a devout believer in the supernatural. Leona wishes to communicate with her late husband Howard, but is fearful of being taken for a ride by the numerous fakes and fraudsters purporting to be mediums.

Jerry accompanies her to a séance, and exposes a carefully worked-out scam. Leona is impressed with his shrewdness, and soon the couple grow very close.

But Jerry is a bit of a fraud himself, seeing Leona as his meal ticket. Even Joyce is disgusted by his deceit.

Then Jerry meets his match in the shape of Miss Sarah Prinn, a genuine spiritualist...

The name 'Robert Bloch' has become ( for obvious reasons ) synonymous with that of his most famous novel 'Psycho'. He also penned a number of original screenplays and television scripts ( including the 'Catspaw' episode of 'Star Trek' ), of which this is one. It was directed by Roy Ward Baker, one of Hammer's best directors. Two years later, they worked together again on the Amicus multi-storey horror picture 'Asylum'.

Tom Adams, future star of 'The Enigma Files', plays Jerry Crown, a private eye bent on fleecing his rich client. Adams brings to the character the same laconic style he brought to the role of secret agent 'Charles Vine'. I could have cheerfully watched him all day exposing fraudulent spiritualists. A series starring Adams as 'Jerry Crown' would definitely have been welcomed by me. Of course, the conclusion of this story made such a notion impossible.

Julie Harris, who plays 'Leona', was no stranger to tales of the supernatural, having appeared in Robert Wise's classic 'The Haunting' in 1963. Catherine Lacey, a.k.a. 'Miss Sarah Prinn', starred opposite Boris Karloff in Michael Reeves' cult classic 'The Sorcerers' two years earlier.

Jerry Crown is a private investigator hired by a rich American woman to find her husband . The problem is her husband is dead which leads Jerry to realise there's a lot of money he can acquire

I didn't recall seeing this episode when it was repeated on ITV in the early 1980s but considering it's written by Robert Bloch of PSYCHO fame it has a reputation to live up to and it certainly doesn't disappoint. Tom Adams is well cast as dark , handsome PI Jerry Crown whose motives for working for a rich widow are completely ulterior and it's a joy to watch as he unravels one fake medium after another . In fact you might just burst out laughing at the line " You're no lady "

As enjoyable as the episode is undoubtedly is there is a one small spanner in the works which stops it being a masterwork from the series and that is the ending - you just know Crown will bump in to a real medium who can contact the spiritual world and this is what predictably happens and when it does so it happens in a rather silly and abrupt way . Regardless of this The Indian Spirit Guide is a very entertaining blackly comical tale