As I’ve been re-watching episodes of Murder, She Wrote, I’ve begun to notice that in most episodes, while it would be quite accurate to call them murder mysteries, they’re usually not detective fiction. That is to say, while Jessica does solve the mystery of who committed the murder, she doesn’t do it by detection. She does it by remembering.

(Please note that I’m not trying to get on a soapbox and lay down rules for how murder mysteries should be written, I’m only try to describe a difference of approach which I think is interesting to think about.)

As I’m using the term here, a detective is somebody who detects things, that is, who enters an environment and learns what’s there. By contrast, a rememberer is somebody who was in the environment when the crime happened and simply didn’t attach importance to the right things at the time. Detectives need to do things like interview people and examine crime scenes, while rememberers need to experience things and then think them through. The main difference is that the story of a rememberer is more internally oriented, while the detective is more relational. And, I mean, you can see this in the way the rememberer reveals things. “But do you remember what he said next?” “Ah, but do you remember what he did then?” Then they go on to explain why the wrong significance had been attached to the things. This is not purely introspective, but it is at least largely introspective.

The detective is more relational in two ways, I think. The first is that he talks to people more. Since he didn’t experience the crime or the events leading up to it, he needs to talk to the people who did. And since he’s an outsider in the liminal space created by an unresolved murder, this gives him the opportunity to probe aspects of human life which are normally hidden. The detective can be told things one wouldn’t normally tell a person because one doesn’t have a relationship with him to be affected by these disclosures. The detective also has no obligation to anyone else, either, so telling him things doesn’t change his relationship to anyone else in the group. This allows a very interesting perspective into human relationships.

The detective is also more relational because detection lends itself to being collaborative. It is natural for a detective to have a Watson that he discusses the case with. It’s hard for a rememberer to have a Watson because the Watson would have to be friends with the same people the detective is. Further, if the Watson is also friends with these same people, then the discussions become complicated because they affect the pre-existing relationships which the Watson has with the people. They can even affect the relationship the rememberer has with the Watson. When the detective and the Watson are both outsiders, discussion between them becomes much freer.

The major advantage which remembering has over detection is that it is far more compact. Murder, She Wrote was usually very pressed for time; making Jessica primarily a rememberer rather than a detective saved time.