Died: December 27, 2020. WILIAM Link, who has died aged 87, was the co-creator of one of the most iconic characters to ever shuffle on to a television screen. With Columbo, Link and his long-term collaborator, Richard Levinson, found that the shabby Los Angeles police lieutenant famously brought to life by actor Peter Falk had a mass appeal that made him a people’s hero. Link and Levinson based their cigar-chomping, blue-collar detective partly on Porfiry Petrovitch, the chief investigator in Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, and partly on G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Dressed in a dirty raincoat and in a seemingly permanent befuddled state, Columbo was a deceptively shrewd figure. Despite being patronised by the high-flying felons he brought to book, in a show that subverted the murder mystery genre by revealing the killer at the top of the show, Columbo’s forensic tenacity paid off.