Harper Newman Twins

Keith the Harper, live in Germany, March 1967

If I was Keith's twin, and N-Man/Enman stood for NEWman, and Keith was the Harper, then we had Newman and Harper as twins, in a sense.

First, being a long-time baseball fan, I scanned, in an offhand manner, the current rosters for 1988. I found exactly one HARPER and one NEWMAN: catcher Brian Harper and utility infielder Al Newman. Both on the same team that year: the Minnesota TWINS. 

Second, the movie called HARPER, released in that magical year 1966, was based on the Ross Macdonald detective novel The Moving Target, and Macdonald's detective was named Lew ARCHER. So why the name changes? As befits our curious narrative from a now long-distant past, let's consult a long-defunct website for the details:

No doubt the greatest shock came when actor Newman, apparently acting on a superstitious whim, insisted that they change the name of Macdonald's detective hero from Lew Archer to Lew Harper. Why spit in the eye of Macdonald's legion of readers? As legend has it, Newman had such success with his 1963 film Hud that he thought there was some kind of magic in having a single-word title that began with the letter H.

Result: The Moving Target became Harper and the name on Lew Archer's office door was repainted to say "Lew Harper."

(Archer remained Archer when television got around to him a few years later, but the actors who played him in separate projects—Peter Graves and Brian Keith—were as miscast as Newman was.)

                —Ron Miller, www.thecolumnists.com, Dark Corridor of Mystery 3:23

Are we surprised at this point that the names PETER  and KEITH appear in conjunction with this info?

In the film itself, released the same year as Blow-Up, of course, Shelley Winters amuses as a soused floozie in a bar scene wherein she persuades Lew Harper, in the interests of astrological "research,", to reveal his birthday, June 2, which, as she exclaims breathlessly, makes him a GEMINI. A twin, in other words.

Detective, new type

There's another bit of memorable dialogue early in the movie, when Harper first meets his rich, cynical client, played by Lauren Bacall:

"Drink, Mr. Harper?"

"No, not before lunch."

"But I thought you were a detective."

"New type."

So maybe that was me, too, in a way, as I hunted down these clues:

EN-MAN = N-MAN = NEWMAN = HARPER = DETECTIVE, NEW TYPE.