Robert E. Swanson

Robert E. Swanson was a go-to writer of mystery and crime-themed television in the 1970s and '80s. Swanson started out writing the episode "The Trade-Off" for the crime series "Kojak" in 1975, and that same year he wrote the story for "Count the Days I'm Gone," an episode of the detective show "Baretta," starring Robert Blake. In 1978, Swanson wrote seven episodes for "Starsky and Hutch," the cheesy cop show starring David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser, and he did single episodes for the shows "Barnaby Jones" and "Hart to Hart." Swanson landed his big gig in 1984 on the long-running mystery program "Murder, She Wrote," starring Angela Lansbury. Swanson wrote 25 episodes for that cozy show about Jessica Fletcher, a mystery author who always seems to be at the scene of the crime. In 1988, Swanson joined the whodunit as a producer and later worked as a supervising producer.