Jessica Fletcher
Encyclopedia
Jessica Fletcher is a fictional character
portrayed by veteran Tony-winning actress Angela Lansbury
on the American
television series Murder, She Wrote
. Fletcher is a best-selling author of mystery novels as well as an amateur detective.
and Martin. Before she met and married Frank Fletcher, Jessica was studying at Harrison College in Green Falls, New Hampshire
to become a journalist.
03041. While teaching criminology at Manhattan University, she stayed in Manhattan at the Penfield House Apartments, 941 West 61st St. Cabot Cove is a 3,560 inhabitants town near the ocean. Based on the number of murders that occur in a given season of the show, the town seems to have probably one of the highest murder ratio of any town or city. This has even been remarked in the show by the town Sheriff Mort Metzger. He noted in Season 5, Episode 21 (Mirror Mirror On the Wall Part 1) that this was his fifth murder in one year. Given the population of the town to be about 3000 this is a fairly high murder rate. Given the murder rate in this town, it has about the same murder rate of a town 20 times its size. This trend was noted and parodied many times.
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 a seemingly 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 nephew
Grady Fletcher, who was raised for a period of time by Jessica and Frank. Grady always seemed to meet the wrong girl, until he finally married Donna several seasons into the show.
Nieces
Nephews
Cousins
Other Relatives
class computer running Windows 3.1 (at the time a popular operating system). Among her friends she can count both multi-millionaires who own Beech Starships to down-on-their-luck homeless people, moving effortlessly between the social strata. The format of the show usually has Jessica solving the mysteries within five minutes of the end of each program, unless the producers felt they could prolong the 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 gave her free rein. With time, she made friends in many police departments across the USA, as well as a British police officer attached to Scotland Yard
.
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 law officer was actually unmasked as the killer, when cult TV actor John Astin
appeared as the villainous Sheriff Harry Pierce.
Episodes usually follow a formula. The episode opens as Jessica Fletcher arrives, either in her fictitious town of residence (Cabot Cove, Maine), or visiting elsewhere (typically in New York City
or Boston
) and meets several characters. These characters are usually Mrs. Fletcher's friends, family, or business associates (in connection with her role as a successful author). Several of these characters are shown to have motive with respect to the potential demise of one their number (typically an unlikeable individual). Often at least one of them is heard to make a threat against this individual, and therefore will become the principal suspect. About half way through the episode, the likely victim is found dead. After a brief investigation, the authorities arrest the most obvious suspect, but Jessica believes that the arrested suspect (who is an amiable person, often a friend, or relative of Jessica) is innocent, and sets out to prove it.
An unrelated conversation often will suggest to Jessica the solution to the mystery, at which point she will rush off to confirm her suspicion (without telling the viewers what she has in mind). The next scene will present Jessica at the place where the crime was committed. Jessica will there find one of the characters, usually alone. She enters into a conversation with this character and, in a few minutes accuses him or her of being the murderer, explaining how and why this person did it. The killer first denies guilt, but Jessica describes a few clues which she observed but which the episode viewers may or may not have had an opportunity to see. Sometimes Mrs. Fletcher will make up evidence which wasn't actually found, but the discovery of which will seem plausible to the killer. At this point, the murderer admits guilt and confesses. Sometimes the murderer will draw a weapon and attempt to kill Jessica but will be thwarted by timely police appearance from a hiding place to arrest the true killer.
The episode concludes with a final scene in which the innocent former suspects say goodbye to Jessica and thank her for the happy ending. Almost every episode then ends with a freeze frame shot of Jessica laughing/smiling.
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
portrayed by veteran Tony-winning actress Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury
Angela Brigid Lansbury CBE is an English actress and singer in theatre, television and motion pictures, whose career has spanned eight decades and earned her more performance Tony Awards than any other individual , with five wins...
on the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
television series Murder, She Wrote
Murder, She Wrote
Murder, She Wrote is an American television mystery series starring Angela Lansbury as mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher. The series aired for 12 seasons from 1984 to 1996 on the CBS network, with 264 episodes transmitted. It was followed by four TV films and a spin-off series,...
. Fletcher is a best-selling author of mystery novels as well as an amateur detective.
Background
Jessica's ancestors hail from Kilcleer, County Cork, Ireland. She has two brothers and two sisters. Her brothers are Marshall, a doctorPhysician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
and Martin. Before she met and married Frank Fletcher, Jessica was studying at Harrison College in Green Falls, New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...
to become a journalist.
Jessica's Birthday
While the show never mentions the exact date of her birth, it is alluded to several times. In the episode "Dead Heat" (Season 2, Episode 8, originally broadcast Sunday, November 24, 1985), Jessica is asked what her astrological sign is, to which she answers that she is a "Pisces, the last time I looked", which means that she had to be born sometime between February 19 and the vernal equinox around March 20. In the episode "To The Last Will I Grapple With Thee" (Season 8, Episode 17, originally broadcast Sunday, March 15, 1992), Jessica receives a birthday cake from her friend, Sean Cullane, earlier in the day, and celebrates her birthday with him that evening at Fenian's Chase Irish Pub, where Jessica has the Tuesday Special for dinner. Tuesday, March 17, 1992 is St Patrick's Day, and St. Patrick's Day is in the astrological sign of Pisces. However, there is some difficulty with this conclusion as no one in the episode wishes anyone a Happy St. Patrick's Day, something that would surely have happened at an Irish pub.Home and family life
Mrs. Fletcher lived at 698 Candlewood Lane in the fictional town of Cabot Cove, MaineMaine
Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...
03041. While teaching criminology at Manhattan University, she stayed in Manhattan at the Penfield House Apartments, 941 West 61st St. Cabot Cove is a 3,560 inhabitants town near the ocean. Based on the number of murders that occur in a given season of the show, the town seems to have probably one of the highest murder ratio of any town or city. This has even been remarked in the show by the town Sheriff Mort Metzger. He noted in Season 5, Episode 21 (Mirror Mirror On the Wall Part 1) that this was his fifth murder in one year. Given the population of the town to be about 3000 this is a fairly high murder rate. Given the murder rate in this town, it has about the same murder rate of a town 20 times its size. This trend was noted and parodied many times.
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
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
alone would have provided. One of them took her to Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
, where she shared a case with private detective Thomas Magnum
Thomas Magnum
Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV was the main character and namesake of the popular American television series, Magnum, P.I.. Magnum was portrayed by Tom Selleck.-Early life:...
, star of Magnum PI.
Mrs. Fletcher was widowed from her beloved husband Frank, with no children but with a seemingly 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 nephew
Nephew
Nephew is a son of one's sibling or sibling-in-law, and niece is a daughter of one's sibling or a sibling-in-law. Sons and daughters of siblings-in-law are also informally referred to as nephews and nieces respectively, even though there is no blood relation...
Grady Fletcher, who was raised for a period of time by Jessica and Frank. Grady always seemed to meet the wrong girl, until he finally married Donna several seasons into the show.
Relatives
Siblings- Marshall MacGill (brother)
- Martin MacGill (brother)
- Neil Fletcher (brother-in-law)
- Constance Fletcher (sister-in-law)
- Louise Morton (sister or sister-in-law)
Nieces
- Victoria Brandon (married to Howard Griffin)
- Carol Donovan
- Pamela MacGill-Crane (via her brother, Marshall)
- Nita Cochran
- Tracy MacGill (via her brother)
- Jill Morton
- Audrey Fletcher-Bannister
- Carol Bannister (great-niece)
- Carrie Palmer
Nephews
- Grady Fletcher
- Johnny Eaton
- Frankie Fletcher (great-nephew, Grady's son)
Cousins
- Abby Benton Freestone (Lynn RedgraveLynn RedgraveLynn Rachel Redgrave, OBE was an English actress.A member of the well-known British family of actors, Redgrave trained in London before making her theatrical debut in 1962...
) - Emma MacGill (Angela LansburyAngela LansburyAngela Brigid Lansbury CBE is an English actress and singer in theatre, television and motion pictures, whose career has spanned eight decades and earned her more performance Tony Awards than any other individual , with five wins...
) - Ann Owens Lawton (Shirley JonesShirley JonesShirley Mae Jones is an American singer and actress of stage, film and television. In her six decades of television, she starred as wholesome characters in a number of well-known musical films, such as Oklahoma! , Carousel , and The Music Man...
) - Helen Owens (Doris RobertsDoris RobertsDoris Roberts is an American character actress of film, stage and television. She has received five Emmy Awards. She began her career in 1952, and may be best-known as Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996–2005....
) - George Owens (Robert Walker Jr.Robert Walker Jr.Robert Hudson Walker, Jr. is an American actor.He was born in Queens, New York and is the elder son of actors Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones. A younger brother, Michael Walker, died in 2007 ....
) - Calhoun "Cal" Fletcher (second cousin once removed through marriage)
Other Relatives
- Mildred (aunt by marriage)
- Amanda (great-aunt through marriage)
- Walter (uncle; deceased)
- Sarah (great-aunt; deceased)
- Henry (great-uncle; deceased)
- Cyrus (uncle; deceased)
Career and life as a best-selling author
Mrs. Fletcher began her career writing on an old Royal typewriter (Magic Margin with glass keys), but as her career progressed, she eventually purchased an Intel 80386Intel 80386
The Intel 80386, also known as the i386, or just 386, was a 32-bit microprocessor introduced by Intel in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors and were used as the central processing unit of many workstations and high-end personal computers of the time...
class computer running Windows 3.1 (at the time a popular operating system). Among her friends she can count both multi-millionaires who own Beech Starships to down-on-their-luck homeless people, moving effortlessly between the social strata. The format of the show usually has Jessica solving the mysteries within five minutes of the end of each program, unless the producers felt they could prolong the 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
Aston Martin DB6
The Aston Martin DB6 is a grand tourer made by British car manufacturer Aston Martin. Produced from September 1965 to January 1971, the DB6 had the longest production run up to that date of any Aston Martin model...
, 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 gave her free rein. With time, she made friends in many police departments across the USA, as well as a British police officer attached to Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
.
Jessica solving crimes
Jessica Fletcher was a retired teacher-turned-author of detective fictionDetective fiction
Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
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 law officer was actually unmasked as the killer, when cult TV actor John Astin
John Astin
John Allen Astin is an American actor who has appeared in numerous films and television shows, and is best known for the role of Gomez Addams on The Addams Family, and other similarly eccentric comedic characters.-Early years:...
appeared as the villainous Sheriff Harry Pierce.
Episodes usually follow a formula. The episode opens as Jessica Fletcher arrives, either in her fictitious town of residence (Cabot Cove, Maine), or visiting elsewhere (typically in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
or Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
) and meets several characters. These characters are usually Mrs. Fletcher's friends, family, or business associates (in connection with her role as a successful author). Several of these characters are shown to have motive with respect to the potential demise of one their number (typically an unlikeable individual). Often at least one of them is heard to make a threat against this individual, and therefore will become the principal suspect. About half way through the episode, the likely victim is found dead. After a brief investigation, the authorities arrest the most obvious suspect, but Jessica believes that the arrested suspect (who is an amiable person, often a friend, or relative of Jessica) is innocent, and sets out to prove it.
An unrelated conversation often will suggest to Jessica the solution to the mystery, at which point she will rush off to confirm her suspicion (without telling the viewers what she has in mind). The next scene will present Jessica at the place where the crime was committed. Jessica will there find one of the characters, usually alone. She enters into a conversation with this character and, in a few minutes accuses him or her of being the murderer, explaining how and why this person did it. The killer first denies guilt, but Jessica describes a few clues which she observed but which the episode viewers may or may not have had an opportunity to see. Sometimes Mrs. Fletcher will make up evidence which wasn't actually found, but the discovery of which will seem plausible to the killer. At this point, the murderer admits guilt and confesses. Sometimes the murderer will draw a weapon and attempt to kill Jessica but will be thwarted by timely police appearance from a hiding place to arrest the true killer.
The episode concludes with a final scene in which the innocent former suspects say goodbye to Jessica and thank her for the happy ending. Almost every episode then ends with a freeze frame shot of Jessica laughing/smiling.
Novels by J. B. Fletcher
Novels J. B. Fletcher wrote that were mentioned during the series:- The Corpse Danced at Midnight
- DirgeDirgeA dirge is a somber song expressing mourning or grief, such as would be appropriate for performance at a funeral. A lament. The English word "dirge" is derived from the Latin Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam , the first words of the first antiphon in the Matins of the Office...
for a Dead DachshundDachshundThe dachshund is a short-legged, long-bodied dog breed belonging to the hound family. The standard size dachshund was bred to scent, chase, and flush out badgers and other burrow-dwelling animals, while the miniature dachshund was developed to hunt smaller prey such as rabbits... - A Faded Rose Beside Her
- Murder on the Amazon
- Lover's Revenge
- The Umbrella Murders
- Murder at the Inn
- Murder at the Digs
- Murder in a Minor KeyMinor scaleA minor scale in Western music theory includes any scale that contains, in its tonic triad, at least three essential scale degrees: 1) the tonic , 2) a minor-third, or an interval of a minor third above the tonic, and 3) a perfect-fifth, or an interval of a perfect fifth above the tonic, altogether...
- The Stain on the Stairs
- The Mystery of the Mutilated Minion
- The BelgradeBelgradeBelgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...
Murders - Sanitarium of Death
- Calvin Canterbury's Revenge
- Murder at the Asylum
- Murder Comes to Maine
- Good-bye, Charlie
- The Corpse That Wasn't There
- Ashes, Ashes, Fall Down Dead
- The Messengers of Midnight
- The Poison in My Heart
- All the Murderers
- Murder at the Ridge Top
- The Corpse at VespersVespersVespers is the evening prayer service in the Western Catholic, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran liturgies of the canonical hours...
- The Triple Crown Murders
- The Crypt of Death
- A Killing at Hastings Rock
- The Uncaught
- Murder in White
- The Dead Must Sing
- The Killer Called Collect
- Stone Cold Dead
- Endangered
- The Launch Pad Murders
- Runway to Murder
- The Venomous Valentine
- A Case of a Half of Murder
- Yours Truly, Damian Sinclair
- The Dead Man Sang
- The Corpse Swam by Moonlight
- The Zero Aspect