Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher

Ancient history: Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher,
Tom Bosley's Sheriff Amos Tupper, and a pay telephone.

Last month I began watching Murder, She Wrote reruns on the Hallmark Mysteries Channel. The popular series ran from 1984 to 1996, and I managed to catch many of the episodes the first time around because it followed the Sunday NFL game on CBS.

I have always been a fan of the whodunit. Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher was squarely in the tradition of the amateur sleuth--Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple--who through keen observation, deductive reasoning, and photographic memory bested the professionals.

When Murder, She Wrote began, Jessica Fletcher was conceived as an unassuming Miss Marple who was ignored by police and criminals alike. As the series progressed, Jessica grew in fictional stature by writing numerous mystery best sellers and solving cases in cities toured by the increasingly famous author.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Jessica Fletcher helped to implant in the consciousness of late 20th-century America the idea that an older woman with character and smarts could be successful without being rich or beautiful or riding on her husband's coattails.

Though Jessica was initially conceived as a somewhat flighty character, Lansbury said she fought to portray her as a strong, successful single woman.

“In the first place, she was shown as a rather kooky character,” she told Australia’s Studio 10 in 2018. “That’s all right up to a certain point, but I thought, ‘No, let’s make her a smart woman.’ And by the time we were finished she got back her sense of purpose as a woman, she was attractive, she had boyfriends, she had a nice wardrobe. She became much more of an everywoman rather than a kook.”

After the turn of the century characters like Jessica Fletcher became passé. Detective shows spent more time on forensic science, violent action, and soap-opera-ish season-long character arcs. Those series are entertaining and stored on the videorecorder, too, but lately Murder, She Wrote has been at the top of your humble blogger's list.

Angela Lansbury, who died this Tuesday at the age of 96, had Tony and Grammy Awards, as well as three Academy Award nominations, but she will be most remembered for her portrayal of a schoolteacher-turned-writer from Cabot Cove, Maine. R.I.P.