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"I'm a law-abiding person. I pay my taxes," says Cannell, creator and producer of more than 35 TV series about criminals and those who catch them.
The closest he says he's come to walking on the wild side was years ago when he was offered an obviously stolen VCR by an actor.
"I'm on my way home and I think, 'Gosh, here I am always complaining about cars getting ripped off and my house had been robbed earlier that year and here I am actually participating in this criminal enterprise. I'm now becoming the buyer of these stolen goods, and that's bullshit.' "
So he gave it back.
But if he ever gets the notion, claims the mind behind The Rockford Files, Baretta, Wiseguy, The A-Team and The Commish, he's got the know-how.
"I would make a great criminal. I would make a great mastermind," Cannell says with a smile.
"I can look at any situation and I can usually, with my creative mind, find some way to subvert it."
While researching the casino business in Las Vegas, he found a flaw in the credit-approval system that he wove into the plot of his new novel, King Con, the playful, purple-tinged noir story of Beano Bates, a scam artist so accomplished he really has sold the Brooklyn Bridge.
In King Con, the morgue is "a depressing parking lot full of metal gurneys and stalled karmas." A handsome mobster "had the polished manners of a crown prince, but the sleazy demeanor of a Telemundo game show host."
Film rights to the book, Cannell's third, sold to MGM for $1 million U.S., and John Travolta is set to do the title role.
Despite Cannell's knack for creating convincing cons on the printed page, readers would be wise not to consider his book a how-to.
"I've had a couple of guys try stuff that I wrote and get caught," he admits.
One channel-cruising crook tried out a Rockford Files scheme about planting a sound-activated tape recorder inside a safe. In the episode, Rockford replayed the clicking of its tumblers and deciphered the combination. In real life, the thief set off the alarm and was nabbed.
Cannell laughs.
"I'm in the fiction business. I'm not writing documentaries."
Since he sold his company two years ago and closed his Vancouver studio, he's writing a lot less television to concentrate on his career as an author. His three current shows, Two, Renegade and Silk Stalkings, air on cable or in syndication. Profit, a sophisticated drama about a psychopathic businessman quickly cancelled by Fox last year, was his most recent network series.
"I haven't been pursuing TV with the same ferocity," Cannell says. "Now I'm doing what I want to do."
What he wants to do next is write a fourth novel, one as different from King Con as his previous books, the cyberspace thriller Final Victim and the politically-plotted The Plan.
"Tonally, I think they're similar," he says. "The characters from all these books could sit down at a cocktail party somewhere. It wouldn't be like Batman having drinks with Beano Bates."