Don Webb, who has died aged 89 after suffering from prostate cancer, was an avid reader of crime novels as a child, particularly enamoured of Philip Marlowe, the private eye created by Raymond Chandler. So it was no surprise that he was enthusiastic about writing scripts for the 1980s TV police dramas Juliet Bravo and Rockliffe’s Babies.
“The basics never really change,” he wrote in the Daily Mirror in 1995. “A crime is committed, someone solves it and the baddie is locked away.” But Webb also enjoyed writing about the lives of the people behind the crimebusters, explaining: “You have the good cops and bad cops, cops who fall in love with their female colleagues.”
