The fictional character Dixon Hill was a 20th century detective who was the lead character in the Dixon Hill series of novels as well as their later film and holonovel adaptations.
Dixon Hill was a childhood hero of Jean-Luc Picard, and continued to be one after Picard became captain of the USS Enterprise-D. Fascinated by the two-fisted gumshoe, he programmed a holodeck simulation of the character. He was able to explore his fascination with Dixon Hill following the upgrade of the Enterprise-D holodecks in 2364. The adventures were set in San Francisco, California, 1941, where the user played the character of private investigator Dixon Hill. (TNG: "The Big Goodbye", TNG: "Manhunt", TNG: "Clues", First Contact)
According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, 2nd ed., p. 45, Dixon Hill was originally dubbed "Dixon Steele" by writer Tracy Tormé. The producers, who were worried about the similarity the name bore to Remington Steele, insisted that it be changed, and eventually settled on the name Dixon Hill. Tormé had patterned Hill/Steele after the Humphrey Bogart character in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place. The character was a joint creation of Patrick Stewart and Maurice Hurley after the two discovered their shared love of mystery fiction by Raymond Chandler, though Stewart would have liked him to have been a little more like Chandler's Philip Marlowe character. (TNG Season 4 DVD, bonus disc – "Inside the Star Trek Archives")
External link[]
- Dixon Hill at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works