Angela Lansbury: a Criminal Mastermind
David Suchet may well be the world’s most famous embodiment of a fictional detective, but few women outside Agatha Christie’s canonical group of sleuths can rival Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher. Zoe Wannamaker’s apple-munching and slightly neurotic Ariadne Oliver is a satirized self-portrait of of Christie. She’s stylish, drives a posh car and enjoys a level of literary fame that connects her to Fletcher. With the difference that the latter’s vehicle of preference is a bicycle. Instead of Oliver’s metropolitan chic her wardrobe is more suited to the cutesy coastal town of Cabot Cove, with an abundance of cozy knitwear, blazers and even jeans. Her trove of brooches could fill a walk-in closet. Oliver is the ultimate empowered single lady while this one is a retired widow who discovered she’s good at writing and turned it into a successful career.
Fletcher is Cabot Cove’s most famous woman and everyone’s favorite neighbor. Instead of a sleek London pad, she lives in an old-fashioned Victorian house where a typewriter reigns supremely on the table in her kitchen which doubles as a studio too. It’s delightful to inspect the countless details on the walls, art and that deliciously kitschy wallpaper. Her friends include the widowed doctor Seth Hazlitt who wears a bow tie to work and isn’t afraid of aprons at home either. Jessica’s home, that is. The two local sheriffs usually end up needing her help to catch the culprit. You don’t really want the woman anywhere near you because if she’s there, a body is never too far away. But as long as it’s not yours, it’s all fine. You’ll never find cyanide in her cocoa because it’s usually in someone else’s.
While Christie’s Poirot is a triumph of period production design with its locations, fashion and lifestyle, her world is firmly grounded in the 1980s and looks just like that. Women are wearing big hair, statement jewelry and towering shoulder pads. Men are in power suits or bright pastel colors, like Don Johnson in the equally famous tv show Miami Vice. Just like Miss Marple, Jessica has no children but what seems an endless number of nephews, nieces and friends. You might say, the ultimate fairy godmother. In almost every episode one of them plays a role, and speaking of those, the names they come up with are hilarious: How to Make a Killing Without Trying. There might be some who’ll treat this as some sort of a guilty pleasure but if you’ve got a taste for whodunnits in a time before streaming platforms and Scandi Noir, it might fit the bill. Cabot Cove is also much more relaxed since you’ll never see a fascinator at the Sunday service.
The absence of vulgarity, sex or gore makes this a relatively family-friendly experience without pearl-clutching. Though it has to be said that there’s obviously an abundance of pearls in Jessica’s jewelry box should you be tempted to do it. This makes episodes where our heroine goes full-glam in true Alexis Colby style even more entertaining. Suddenly, the slightly dainty smalltown celebrity turns into a society figure with a wardrobe to match. Usually in a luxury hotel or in a big cahuna’s mansion with whom she’s connected in some rather unconvincing way but that’s beside the point anyway. A little bit like Miss Marple, seemingly bullet-proof to depression or unlikability. Could you possibly imagine a situation where you’d hold bitter grudge against this human equivalent of a tea cozy?
Watching it makes me pull out my dad’s old Olympia out of retirement into which she was forced when my first computer moved in back in high school. The sound of the keys hitting the paper, words spelled out in Courier New font, it’s not just work, it’s a multisensory experience. Typing this on a laptop is easy: you make a mistake, you go back and correct it. With old-fashioned typewriters that’s a bit more challenging. Then came electric typewriters before PC’s took over. Since the Cabot Cove sleuth is always in tune with the times, her trusty typewriter is eventually replaced by a chunky computer too. But the clumsy keyboard makes a writer look like a cashier. Looking back, compared to the sleek machines we use today those were indeed ugly as fuck. While her tools changed, Jessica never strayed too far from her trademark fashion or her deadlines.
When I was a kid, my parents dressed me like a child-size version of Seth Hazlitt. There were velvet bow ties, suits, ties and patent leather shoes. Later came the hats, the statement rings and ostentatious patterns. Admittedly, my choice of haberdashery is by far superior to the one of the fictional doctor, especially his tweed hats on the thin line between a Trilby and the Bucket. A great sign of the times are also the big tortoise frames sitting on his nose, which are kind of coming back right now like every other trend sooner or later. The best thing about him is that he’s a harmless guy dedicated to his friends instead of looking for a trophy wife. Then again, Wolfgang Priklopil looked harmless as well, though there was a girl locked up in his basement for many years. The show is like a getaway car from one’s grim reality: Cabot Cove, in spite of the body count, is still a better place to be than big cities with their tiresome drama.
Fictional writers can teach us something about the real deal too. The importance of process and the solitary duel with the keyboard after coming up with a basic draft. Ariadne Oliver is hilariously lamentatious about her fictional detective Sven Hjerson. This brilliantly illustrates an author’s feeling of captivity in the comfort zone of a surefire bestseller. When she’s asked why she still sticks with him, she answers you keep going with it because your readers like it. That’s as close to the truth as it gets. I have one or two colleagues who all wrote bestsellers sharing certain traits with their breakthrough book. We rarely see Christie’s heroine actually writing, while Jessica Fletcher is always at it. The plots of her books sound silly at best but her irresistible charm makes you forget about it. Looking at the serene coast, tea shops and streets of her home town will also make you forget the local body count on average is higher than the one in real-life Honduras.
This wasn’t the end of Lansbury’s love affair with crime. She dipped her acting toe into Agatha Christie’s work too: in “Death on the Nile” she plays a melodramatic writer with a taste for booze and fashion that would humble a peacock. When she gets bumped off before revealing the killer, Sidney Lumet’s Poirot pulls up his sleeves to play catch. The cast of this 1978 movie also includes David Niven, Jane Birkin, Bette Davis and Mia Farrow, so it’s understandably superior to those that came afterwards, with Suchet and Branagh in the leading role. This was by no means her only brush with the Queen of the crime. In 1980, she played Miss Marple in another iconic film, “The Mirror Crack’d” along with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and Kim Novak. Maybe you’d call it typecasting but damn, it fit her like a glove.
Sidney Lumet gave Poirot a playful and humorous side that Suchet didn’t really emphasize too much. Just like with his own show, in Jessica Fletcher’s adventures we see a whole host of other famous actors, like Tom Selleck in denim shorts so short the hem was closer to his balls than his knees. Then there was Courtney Cox which would later get her big break with the show Friends, Bryan Cranston before Breaking Bad and Bruce Jenner before, well, you know what. Unlike Midsomer Murders, people don’t get killed with scones or over trivial things like cricket and apple cider. Maine isn’t Cornwall and it shouldn’t be. If you want a piece of cyanide-laced apple pie, you’re better suited for Marple’s St Mary Mead after all. The upside of living in Cabot Cove is that you’re unlikely to die of a disease and a lack of sex doesn’t seem to affect people of a certain age.
“Murder, She Wrote” does hide less attractive aspects of an author’s life: existential struggles, an unflattering bank balance and the proverbial writer’s block. Jessica never seems to suffer from either so I’d gladly jump into her shoes even if they’re fictional to begin with. A deeper dive into her widowhood and related emotions like loneliness would have benefited the character arc. There’s a common myth that people in this particular profession tend to socialize with people who are the perfect fodder for their next book. Which is definitely true. But it would be not very nice to admit you only hang out with me to squeeze out your next idea before the deadline comes knocking on your door. What the show excels at is the depiction of the dynamics of chosen family, which we all have in one way or the other. When an African American sheriff is threatened by a lynch mob in “Powder Keg”, people stand up for him because he’s one of them.
In the end, just like Poirot, this is a wonderful piece of criminal escapism which won’t leave you traumatized or insult your intelligence like Barb Wire. Since Angela Lansbury also starred in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, it’s fair to say that in Barb Wire, Pamela Anderson succeeds in embodying both of those at the same time. There will be new amateur sleuths in the future, many of them must be hiding on the streaming assembly line right now, but Jessica Fletcher stays a heartwarming heroine destined for a rewatch. At the end of each case, she wraps up with a smile, as if to say, life is short so try to find a silver lining. As long as there’s a sky, it will be there as well. In Death on the Nile, the tipsy writer said “this crocodile has lost its croc”. This, fortunately, couldn’t be further from the truth when we’re talking about Cabot Cove’s own criminal mastermind. The show ended in 1996, but its legacy endures due to a unique blend of all the right ingredients. Time to go back and watch Selleck in that palm shirt again.
