Quinn Martin was born on May 22, 1922 in New York City as Irwin Martin Cohn, the second of two children. His father Martin Goodman Cohn was a film editor and producer at MGM; his mother was Anna Messing Cohn. From age four he was raised in Los Angeles. He graduated from Fairfax High School. He served five years in the United States Army during World War II, enlisting in the Signal Corps at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California on September 10, 1940. He achieved the rank of sergeant. He changed his name to Quinn Martin (the Quinn came from the pronunciation his friends gave of Cohn, as “Co-Inn”). While attending the University of California, Berkeley, Quinn Martin majored in English, but did not graduate. Martin started his career in television as a film editor at MGM and also worked as manager of post production for various organizations, including Universal Studios (1950–1954), but by the mid-1950s had become an executive producer for Desilu Studios. His first wife, Madelyn Pugh Davis, was one half of the writing team behind Desilu’s classic I Love Lucy. In 1959 he produced for Desilu Productions a two part special that appeared in season 1 of Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse that became a weekly television show: The Untouchables, which would go on to win Emmy Awards. In 1960, Martin established his own production company, QM Productions. He sold it in 1978 and worked as an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego’s Warren College, where he also endowed a chair in drama. He also established a scholarship for theater arts and communications students at Santa Clara University.

QM Productions produced a string of successful television series during the 1960s and 1970s, including The Fugitive, Twelve O’Clock High, The F.B.I., The Invaders, The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, and Barnaby Jones. Besides producing sixteen one-hour television network series, he also produced twenty TV movies, including Attack on Terror, Brinks: The Great Robbery, Face of Fear, House on Greenapple Road, and Murder or Mercy. His only feature for the big screen was The Mephisto Waltz, released by Twentieth Century-Fox. In 1979, a group of investors purchased his wholly self-owned QM Productions and subsequently sold it to Taft Broadcasting. Later in that year, the company was reincorporated into Taft Entertainment Television, though the QM name and logo continued to be used on-screen and for copyright purposes until the last official production was broadcast in 1983. After selling QM Productions he moved to Rancho Santa Fe, California where he became president of the La Jolla Playhouse and the Del Mar Fair Board. He was also involved with business activities developing motion pictures for Warner Bros. with a new company, QM Communications. Quinn Martin died of heart failure on September 5, 1987 in his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California.