Jessica Fletcher

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Jessica in the Murder, She Wrote episode 'The Cemetery Vote'

Jessica Beatrice Macgill Fletcher is a fictional character portrayed on the American television series Murder, She Wrote by veteran British Oscar-nominated actress Angela Lansbury.

This program was one of the most successful of the 1980s and 1990s on the CBS television network. Mrs. Fletcher was a retired teacher turned author of detective fiction under the name J. B. Fletcher, but was constantly finding that her work and personal lives overlapped. In every episode she was introduced into a situation where someone was killed shortly after her arrival. She was generally forced to solve every mystery herself in the style of one of the characters from her book, as the police proved to be incapable of doing so without her help. In fact, on at least one occasion a man of the law was actually unmasked as the killer, when cult TV actor John Astin appeared as the villainous Sheriff Harry Pierce.

1 Home and family life
2 Career and life as a best-selling author
3 Novels by J. B. Fletcher
4 Trivia

[edit] Home and family life

Mrs. Fletcher lived in the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine, which wags proclaim to have probably the highest murder rate of any small town in the civilized world (and as a not unnatural corollary in many parodies and satire she is arrested by law enforcement agencies as her very presence causes the commitment of murder^{[citation needed]}), but her travels as an author very frequently took her to places around much of the English-speaking world, which gave her writers a little more ability to stretch the character and her situations than rural New England alone would have provided. One of them took her to Hawaii, where she shared a case with private detective Thomas Magnum, star of Magnum PI.

Mrs. Fletcher was widowed from her beloved husband Frank, with no children but with an endless collection of nephews, nieces, cousins, in-laws and other relatives or friends who always needed her help. Especially prone to get into trouble was her giddy nephew Grady Fletcher, who always seemed to meet the wrong girl, until he finally married Donna several seasons into the show.

[edit] Career and life as a best-selling author

Angela Lansbury as Jessica

Mrs. Fletcher began her career writing on an old Underwood typewriter, but as her career progressed, she eventually purchased a 386 class computer running Windows 3.1 (suitably antiquated now, but the latest back then). Among her friends she can count both multi-millionares who own Beech Starships to down-on-their-luck homeless dudes, moving effortlessly between the social strata. Jessica always strived to solve mysteries within five minutes of the end of each program, unless the producers felt they could prolong the nail-biting suspense across two episodes. Perhaps her most notable experience was encountering a Mr. Potts who preferred to be called Mr. Bond - he did at least have an Aston Martin DB6, in which Jessica herself ended up racing to the rescue.

Jessica's relationship with law enforcement officials varied from place to place. Both the sheriffs of Cabot Cove were used to, or resigned themselves to having her meddle in their cases. However, most detectives and police officers didn't want her anywhere near their crime scenes, until her accurate deductions convinced them to listen to what she had to say. Others were fans of her books and glad to let her snoop. With time, she made friends in many police departments across the USA, as well as a British police officer attached to Scotland Yard.