At the speed of Murder, She Wrote

On good old-fashioned footwork and being on the scene of the crime

When I was a kid, Murder, She Wrote was the show that was always on instead of whatever I wanted to watch. The vigorous piano theme, Angela Lansbury’s dandelion-puff hair and clip-on earrings—these were cues to me to click away from the channel toward Darkwing Duck or MTV. But when I came across the show again recently, I decided to give it another chance and found, to my surprise, that I loved it.

Now I watch it on the nights when my husband has plans, and it’s become a forty-five minute interlude during which I allow myself to do nothing but make art (linocut, probably, or watercolor) and follow along with widowed mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher as she travels the world, solving mysteries and righting relationship troubles and somehow—her timing is impeccable!—being on site, again and again, when a murder is committed. So I consider it a kind of guilty pleasure, the sort of TV that isn’t necessarily challenging or edifying or sobering—it’s just pleasant and, apart from the murder, pretty mild.

As I’ve made my way into the fifth season, I’ve found all sorts of things to enjoy about the show, but there’s the one that continues to rise to the surface, the one that makes the show feel surprisingly restful, despite the mortal peril so many of the characters find themselves in: this is a show written and aired before smartphones or even household computers were commonplace, so every mystery solved is done with good old-fashioned, physically-moving-through-time-and-space footwork.

When Jessica suspects that her brother-in-law did not in fact die in that boating accident years ago but is alive and well and possibly working in a circus in Arkansas, she has no search engine at her disposal, no social media—to uncover the truth, she has to travel to Arkansas and find him. When a former student is framed for the murder of a small-town tycoon, Jessica doesn’t just Venmo money for bail—she delivers the check in person, then sticks around to find the true killer.

This is true of the Father Brown series, sure, and of Foyle’s War, but something about the fact that Murder, She Wrote takes place in a time that I can personally remember makes its pace feel especially significant. It just wasn’t that long ago that everything relied on good old-fashioned footwork: teachers weren’t available after school hours, so if you had a problem, you had to figure it out. If you loved a song but didn’t have it on cassette, you wouldn’t hear it until it came on the radio again; if your friend wasn’t home when you called, well. You’d just have to call again later and hope to catch her then. As I watch my way through Murder, She Wrote, I find myself thinking more and more about these limits and about how, maybe, they weren’t always such a bad thing.

Sometimes the fact that you can do a thing carries this twin weight: the feeling that you should do it. I have so many options available to me now, so much knowledge. If I’m presented with a problem—let’s say my hops vine, the one I just planted last summer, is looking sickly and brown. I want it to lounge luxuriantly over our pergola by the end of this summer, so I’m deeply invested in making sure it stays lush and green. The number of avenues available to me as I search for a solution are staggering: I can snap photos of the brown leaves and load them into my plant ID app; I can google “hops vine brown leaves help” and see what the internet tosses back to me; I can text my master gardener friend an SOS and hope she has an answer; I can submerge myself in the “Q&A” section of a gardening website, and on and on and on.

Or.

I can think like Jessica Fletcher. Normally, yes, I do all the searching and texting and photographing, and I try to solve the problem right from my backyard, phone in hand. But this time, I wondered: how did people solve these problems before plant ID apps? What would Jessica Fletcher have done? What would my mom have done just a few decades ago?

So I drove to a local nursery and struck up a conversation with one of the employees, who looked at my photos, asked follow-up questions, didn’t sell me anything (I’d like to see the internet try that!), and sent me home heartened and equipped to nurse my hops back to health.

Good old-fashioned footwork.

These days, when my attention feels fragmented, as though I’m needed in several places at once, some of which I can’t occupy physically at all, I find it restful to watch Mrs. Fletcher move from one location to the next, occasionally making a phone call or writing a letter but otherwise moving her body through space to find the answers she needs. For forty-five minutes, I get to move at the speed of Murder, She Wrote, and I find that settling. I don’t need to be everywhere at once, I remember—just there, at the dining table, carving out that curl of a poppy’s stem, watching Jessica pat her nephew on the back as she laughs at his hopelessly romantic antics.

Hear me: I’m not saying the eighties were perfect (the number of things I wouldn’t bring back from that decade are legion), and I’m not saying nostalgia is the answer to life’s problems. But I am enjoying the world of Murder, She Wrote because it slows me down; it reminds me that life before the internet’s endless stream of quick fixes was inconvenient, maybe, but also that not all inconveniences are bad. Not all limits are worth kicking against.

Jessica composes her bestselling mystery novels on an old typewriter at her dining room table, and to me, a writer busy with Drive and Scrivener and Obsidian and Substack, the limitations involved in writing solely on a typewriter sound daunting. And yet—when an acquaintance suggests that she trade out her typewriter for one of those new-fangled word processors, Jessica throws up her hands as though to shield herself from the idea and laughs. “Oh no,” she says, “I’d be terrified I’d accidentally delete something important.” Which makes me wonder if we haven’t already—deleted something important, that is.