I was a big fan of Magnum P.I. as a young adult, and an even bigger fan of Blue Bloods as an old adult. I was also big into the TV treatments of Louis L’Amour’s Sacketts and Travens. I’m absolutely crazy about the Jesse Stone movies, which are based on books by my favorite author, Robert B. Parker. Finally, as a Friends aficionado, one of my favorite character arcs is that of Dr. Richard Burke, Monica’s much older inamorato before she fell in love with Chandler If you don’t already know, the person all those things have in common is Tom Selleck. I’ve always found Selleck to be a compelling, magnetic personality, and I’m hard pressed to think of anything I’ve seen him in that I didn’t at least enjoy him, if not the piece as a whole. So, when my sweet Sarah got me a copy of his memoir, You Never Know, I was excited to read it. And I’m glad I did.

First of all, it’s a memoir of a celebrity. Mr. Selleck is the first to admit he’s not someone truly important in the grand scheme. So, if you’re expecting to hear about him rubbing elbows with truly powerful people, well, there’s a little of that, I guess. He did meet and dance with Princess Di, and he was friends, or at least friendly, with the Reagans. Most importantly, though, is that Frank Sinatra was a big fan. That’s saying something.

But most of this book is about his formative years and his time on Magnum. One thing I learned is he, and almost everyone else associated with the show, hated the P.I. on the end of the title, so they all agreed never to call it that. To them, it was just Magnum. At any rate, the bulk of the book is about that time in his life. It does give a good taste of how he got there, but I would say half the book is built around that show. And with good reasons. First of all, it’s what rocketed him to stardom, and is probably the role with which most people, especially those old enough to have seen the show in first run, identify him. The second reason is one I learned from the book. I loved the show when it first came out, but was not aware of the true cultural importance it had. It was a pioneer in that it cast Viet Nam vets in in a more positive light, almost for the first time in American media, and was celebrated by commentators as a show that helped foster healing between veterans of that war and the country as a whole.

This was an enjoyable book, and nothing in it told me anything about Mr. Selleck that made me wish I hadn’t read it. He’s a class act who works hard to do the right thing, even when it’s hard. I will say that, despite his having a co-author in Ellis Henican, sounds like a book written by a non-writer, and that’s okay. It’s well enough written but the narrative is simple and straightforward. The one thing I did find a little off-putting was his constant need to add things like “my good friend” or “my lifelong friend” before almost every famous person he talks about. It got a little cloying. But if that’s the worst thing you can say about a Hollywood memoir, I’d say it did pretty well.

I take what I just said back. My biggest objection, or at least sadness, is that he doesn’t spend almost any time on Blue Bloods, which, ironically, had a much longer run than Magnum. To be fair, he was still in the tail end of his run as Frank Reagan when the book came out, so he was probably too close to the material to be ready to write about it. Let’s hope he’s working on volume two.

You Never Know: A Memoir, is available pretty much anywhere you can buy books.