I also believe we love to see sleuths who aren’t our usual ideas of detectives. Sure, we love our cops and our Sherlocks. But we also love our amateur sleuths, the ones who fall into it for other reasons. For my most reason example, I cite the new CW show iZombie. Liv Moore (Rose McIver) just wants to be a renowned heart surgeon and marry her fiancé Major. But when she gets turned into a zombie at a party, her plans change. She takes a job in the medical examiner’s office, which gives her a constant supply of brains to eat. It comes with the side effect of her absorbing the dead person’s memories and traits until she’s done digesting the brain. She teams up with a detective and claims to be psychic to explain how she knows the things she does. Together, they solve crimes.
One of my favorite sleuths though is Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote. So beware murders and SPOILERS!
Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) is a widowed English teacher from the small town of Cabot Cove in Maine. She shows off a knack for solving mysteries early on when she’s able to guess the ending of a new play being put on in her town. Jessica also is an amateur author but is never confident enough to try and publish her work. So her nephew Grady (Michael Horton) decides to send in a manuscript without her knowledge. It gets accepted and published. In one dissolve screen, she becomes a sensation.
She then is launched into a murder mystery. Using her abilities to find clues and make connections, she’s able to solve it. And it’s only the first of many.
For a tiny town, Cabot Cove had a high murder rate. Someone always died each week. Eventually, they had to send her out of town to find more murders!
But in Cabot Cove, she had two main friends and helpers. The first was Dr. Seth Hazlet (William Windom), a grumpy country doctor who was Jessica’s reluctant assistant. He was also Cabot Cove’s medical examiner as well. So they worked with the sheriff, Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley), to solve the mysteries. (Later Sheriff Tupper retired and Sheriff Mort Metzger, played by Ron Masak, took over). There were usually one or two red herrings that ended up in prison or under questioning before something small would trigger Jessica. She would then piece everything together and put on a ruse that would force the real culprit to confess. The police would be waiting and hear everything. So they’d rush in and arrest the person, sometimes stopping them from hurting Jessica. Then there’d be a little quip and a freeze frame to credits.
Sometimes, Jessica would leave Cabot Cove. The reasons usually fell into three categories: Jessica was going somewhere regarding her books, someone she knew as a famous author needed help; or she was visiting family and friends for some reasons (including emergencies). Honestly, Jessica was very well traveled. And everywhere she went, she ended up involved in a murder mystery. There was one time she ended up in jail the moment she ended up in town! (It was a plot to protect her put together by Grady and a friend of hers who knew she was in danger).
As the seasons wore on, they did shake it up a bit. Sometimes there would be episodes that only featured Lansbury at the beginning and the end. These episodes would focus on other people: some of them were friends of Jessica’s and some were characters in her books. These included such recurring guest stars as Jerry Orbach, Len Cariou, Keith Mitchell and more.
There was an episode where they revisited an old movie Strange Bargain. It even used clips from the movie for flashbacks and the movie’s cast reprised their roles. Jessica solved the mystery and revealed that one of the characters had wrongly spent time in jail. It was quite an ingenious episode.
Toward the end, the network began to interfere. They moved Jessica to New York, essentially relegating Windom and Masak to guest-starring status, and started to bring in younger guest stars. It also seemed like they may have been trying to kill Murder, She Wrote as well. But Lansbury and others managed to wrestle control back and the last season did return to what the show had been before. After the show ended, several made for TV movies were made with Lansbury reprising her role as Jessica Fletcher.
So why do I love it? For many reasons. Starting with Angela Lansbury. She’s a great actress and makes Jessica a real character. Jessica proves it’s not just the young who can go on adventures. Or experience romance. She didn’t have a long term romantic relationship and seemed happy to be single. Jessica also didn’t have children of her own, though she and her late husband did raise Grady after his parents died. She also had many other nieces and nephews who often needed her help as well. All in all, she seemed to have a good life.
“Murder, She Wrote” also shows a good glimpse into the life of a writer. Most people think writers just sit and out pops a book. But this shows that’s not true. Jessica talks about doing a lot of research and there are several episodes where we see her doing just that—either by getting books or talking to people who are experts in that field. It’s her research that often helps her solve crimes. We also see her fight deadlines, doing edits and trying to get past blocks. All things writers deal with in their careers.
There was talk last year about rebooting “Murder, She Wrote.” Octavia Spencer was slated to star but the network decided not to go forward with it. Some people were relieved but I was disappointed. I was really interested in seeing where they would go with it.
Thankfully, there’s still reruns of the original.
Next month: Pebble and the Penguin
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