Why Jessica Fletcher is a Great Way to Write a Detective

One of the problems with any detective is How do they encounter the mystery? Truth is, most of us don't encounter dead murdered bodies on a regular basis--if at all. Encountering one is usually more than enough. 

One solution, of course, is to make the person a police officer. Another is to make the person a doctor. Another is to make the person a lawyer. 

All of those professions, however, come with a shelf-life. In fact, as Sheriff Metzger points out to Jessica, police do not encounter murder as often as television suggests. Neither do doctors. A lawyer like Matlock might encounter it more but not, of course, as often as once every week. (Boston Legal, for all its flaws, makes the correct point that many lawyers don't go to court and those cases that do go to court and involve murder are high profile.)

What makes Jessica Fletcher so workable is that she is so mobile. She is going to lots and lots of places: literary conventions, family weddings, radio shows, college campuses. Her age also gives her contact with numerous people from her past as well as her extended family, her husband's extended family, neighbors (people who lived in Cabot Cove and then moved away), and so on. Her status gives her cache, even in the United States Senate!

She also has multiple reasons for getting involved. She rarely investigates just for the fun of investigating--she is willing to let the police operate if she believes they are competent--but she finds a reason if a family member is in trouble, a neighbor asks for help, a strange event occurs that puts someone she cares about in jeopardy, someone hands her information, she is a witness, she overhears a plan...

Granted, Jessica Fletcher's contact with so many dead bodies has led to the tongue-in-cheek suggestion by fans that she is actually a serial killer. 

But her wide-ranging experiences and contacts means that she isn't spending every episode defending, say, her nephew Brady from a false accusation. She has multiple reasons to be in multiple places.

It's very, very smart writing--and one reason, I suggest, that Murder She Wrote was such a hit.