![]() ![]() Miss Fletcher was presented as a prolific novelist whose output was studded with intriguingly parodic titles, from her first, "The Corpse Danced at Midnight" to "Dirge for a Dead Dachshund" to "The Stain on the Stairs." All of these familiar elements, present throughout the series, both created and fulfilled audience expectations, with each facet contributing to the show's success and longevity. In addition, her literary career was not an afterthought, but added substance to her character, and provided a springboard for many of the plots. Murder, She Wrote allowed the viewer to play detective along with Jessica Fletcher. Although the scripts were designed to draw on many of the conventions of cozy, "golden age" detective fiction-the closed circle of suspects often gathered together at the end for the final revelation, and the use of flashbacks to review key moments of action and major clues-its creators tried to avoid some of the mistakes made in shows like The Adventures of Ellery Queen, whose bumbling hero, 1940s setting, and complex plots were too outmoded to appeal to latter-day audiences. The writers furnished her with the curiosity and the will necessary to ask uncomfortable questions, as well as the tenacity to get the answers. ![]() The character of Jessica Fletcher, a widowed ex-high school teacher and successful mystery novelist who hails from Maine but lives in Manhattan where she teaches criminology at Manhattan University, was conceived as a contemporary, energetic, self-sufficient woman rather than a dowdy spinster. The latter two, who had been responsible for a number of television programs, including Mannix, Columbo, and The Adventures of Ellery Queen, served only as consultants after the pilot episode. Fischer and his longtime collaborators Richard Levinson and William Link. ![]() Murder, She Wrote was created by Peter S. Despite the literary success of amateur detection stories in which crimes are solved by deduction rather than covenient coincidence or violent physical confrontation, few attempts had been made to adapt such material to television. The show did, however, tap into a vast reading audience who enjoyed traditional detective fiction by writers such as Agatha Christie. Suspense dramas with female stars had involved glamorous young women-Angie Dickinson in Police Woman, for example. As James Parish observed in The Unofficial Murder, She Wrote Casebook, the series broke a number of television rules, not least in having a middle-aged female lead where previous crime or The longest-running detective drama series in television history, Murder, She Wrote premiered in September 1984 and ended in May 1996 after 261 episodes, becoming a feature of popular American cultural life in the process, and the highest-rated drama series for nine of its 12 seasons. ![]()
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