The TV mystery series Murder, She Wrote, which premiered in 1984, has its fair share of your typical despicable murderer. Sometimes, though, the killer turns out to be a sympathetic figure—a person caught in a bad moment, yielding to an understandable weakness, or unfairly beset by circumstances.
“Poor devil,” you might think. Murder, you feel, like almost all human action, is nuanced. Yet its protagonist, Jessica Fletcher, is never in doubt about the act, no matter how much sympathy she might feel for the perpetrator. She lives in the small Maine town of Cabot Cove, and her morals are as solid and unpretentious as the bedrock she stands on.
The series ran for 12 seasons. At roughly 22 episodes a season, you get a lot of murders happening in Jessica’s vicinity. Sometimes the deed is done in Cabot Cove, her own back yard, so to speak, and she naturally enough becomes involved in solving it. For the murders that occur in the larger world, where she, a renowned mystery writer, sometimes finds herself, either a police friend or someone close to either the victim or the suspect will ask for Jessica’s help. Looking perplexed and reluctant, she agrees to do what she can. In the the nine seasons I’ve watched thus far, Jessica has never failed to solve the mystery. She is not only sympathetic and morally certain, she’s astute.
Besides highlighting Jessica’s unfailing sense and her sensibility, these episodes have something else in common—a moment when something that Jessica sees or hears, or even something she says herself, triggers a new understanding and reveals the answer. More than the discovery of a missing piece of the puzzle, the crucial insight gives new meaning to a piece she already holds. “I think I know who the murderer is,” she says, in surprise and then relief. It’s an oft-repeated moment, like the virtually compulsory one in which Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, when asked how she solved the mystery, might murmur that the murderer reminded her of someone she once knew.
People are people—now, 10 years ago, or at any time. We are not individuals; we are copies.
Now that Jessica knows who the murderer is, she focuses on proving it. With almost no word of explanation to whoever is with her, she hurries off to prepare the grand finale and the murderer’s self-reveal. When finally she has pulled it off, she shakes her head—not quite in sadness but in rueful acceptance of foibles and ineptitudes and the people embodying them. And yes—there is also a bit of humor, a flash of fun when the work is over. It is as if the terrible chapter just concluded of someone’s life were in a book such as she might write—fiction. Challenging, fun, exciting, with a lesson on caprice or greed thrown in.
I began watching the show during the pandemic, after seeing it on a list of available programs and recalling that my Tennessee grandmother had watched it with her friend Donna back when it first appeared in the mid-‘80s. My grandmother? Murder? I corresponded with my grandmother during those years, and I made several visits, but all I really knew was that my uncle had left home to get married and that my grandmother, widowed and from Upstate New York, and her friend, a spinster from the Bible Belt, watched this show about a childless widow from New England solving crimes up and down the country. What would the show be like? I watched an episode. Then another. I was hooked. And then distressed when it was removed from the platform where I watched it.
Last year, to my surprise, it returned.
I am older, Jessica keeps getting older, and Donna, who was around 50 when the show aired, 25 years younger than my grandmother—making her my father’s contemporary in age—would surely have gotten much older as well. Time passes for all of us, but it doesn’t pass at the same speed. For some, time is a breeze, and you push into it and wrap your sweater tighter. For others, it’s a whirlwind that twists your hair and dries your skin and knocks out your balance. When my grandmother died in 2008, my father was still strong, robust, completely capable. Ten years later, in the clutch of Parkinson’s, he no longer was. It was during the period of his steady decline that I watched Jessica solve the mysteries. I drank English tea. My dad read Maigret mysteries, perhaps with a glass of burgundy. Those mysteries were a different kettle of fish, with the murder on a few occasions committed even before the story opens. I don’t remember ever mentioning to him that I was watching the same show my grandmother had watched.
I did tell a friend. She encouraged me to write to Donna, and using the very few details I remembered, she helped me track Donna down. Soon I had an address, and to send off a letter was all I needed to do to give Donna a warm greeting from the past. “Funny,” I would write, “how connections last and how much I think of you.”
I never took that step. Seven years have passed. My father has died. I imagine Donna has, too. My friend is out of the picture as well—not the big picture of life but my little corner of it. These disappearing acts that keep occurring—they used to be events. Deaths and broken hearts in my youth were breath-stopping, startling developments in the story of my life. I knew they were inevitable, and yet I thought they might be side-stepped. Now is different. Leavings—they occur as frequently and easily as somebody rising from the chair and wandering away from the dinner table. You feel a waft of air, as if from a door left ajar, and someone you know has drifted away. People do this all the time—they move on while you are deep in conversation with someone across the table. Or just when you are distracted by new arrivals who squeeze in. Where will we all fit? You make room. Everyone does.
The room grows crowded, though here and there a table opens up. It seems someone shifting to provide a space has shifted right out of the scene, out of the room, out of life. It’s that easy, this disappearing act, and it requires no great drama—no announcement and no drum roll. No trick or magic in the leaving.
In “Just Beyond the Moon,” a song from 1967, the narrator tells the story of his parents, married for 50 years. When his father died, everyone wondered why the mother didn’t cry. Whenever the family asked her, she’d just shake her head and go outside and stare at the moon. But on her deathbed, she finally answered. Her husband, when he was dying, had reminded her of their promise to each other to never leave. He was asking her now not to leave. He said, “I’ll walk just beyond the moon, then I’ll stop and wait for you.”
Better to wait out there, with a good view and a fresh breeze, than just beside the table over close to the door, where the occupants would note the chill from beyond. They are not yet accustomed to that chill air, and might be uncomfortable as they hunched a little closer to each other at the table.
