Perfect Mystery Episode

One of my favorite Murder, She Wrote episodes is "Keep the Homefires Burning."

For one, it takes place in Cabot Cove, so the viewer gets Tom Bosley and William Windom as Sheriff Amos Tupper and Dr. Seth Hazlitt respectively. They argue good-naturedly over the Peabody Inn--did the supposed colonial hero of Cabot Cove, Joshua Peabody, exist or not? (The plethora of "historical" sites in New England is only matched by "historical" sites in Jerusalem. This is the tree that George Washington leaned against. And here's the rock that John Adams doodled on.)

The plot is also fairly classic.

*Spoilers.*

Murder motives famously include money and sex with self-protection and chivalry as occasional outliers.

"Keep the Homefires Burning" has the classic triangle: husband is sleeping with best friend of wife; wife kills best friend in revenge to get husband back.

Unlike many times when Jessica is called in to solve a murder, she doesn't know these particular people, which means that the viewer is spared the family melodrama that accompanies many Murder She Wrote episode (Jessica is always the commonsense, objective observer who rises above the mess). At the same time, the characters are given enough traits to make them more than cardboard cut-outs. The husband is truly distraught by the news. The dead friend/girlfriend is less physically coifed than the poised wife but more warm. The wife is clueless about how crushed her husband will be at the death of his mistress.

Thanks to Murder, She Blogged

Most importantly, the clues are actual clues.

Far too many Hargrove creations rest on the murderer making a slip of the tongue. Columbo or Jessica Fletcher or Matlock say, "Ah-ha! I know you are guilty because you mentioned something two days ago that you couldn't have known unless you were the murderer."

I hate these kinds of clues. First of all--hearsay isn't evidence. And why wouldn't the murderer simply say, "I deduced it" or "I heard it on the news" or "You remember wrong."

Take Kojak's reaction to a slip of the tongue: why shouldn't a fellow officer make an educated guess about the weapon?

In "Keep the Homefires Burning," Jessica remembers a slip of the tongue but she follows up by finding an actual clue--a receipt with a tip--followed by finding traces of the actual poison. She uses her usual strengths of ordering the sequence of events but doesn't settle for a verbal confrontation.

Jessica goes all Sherlock Holmes/CSI on the case and that I appreciate!