In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world—the joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat—we shall yet find that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be in a purely American manner. For example, there was a case of an orator in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he could think of, did sit down on his hat. An Irishman immediately rose, full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, “Should I be in order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?” Here is a glorious example of Irish humour—the bull not unconscious, not entirely conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman’s humour would have been logical: he would have said, “The orator denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a good example!” What the Scotchman’s humour would have said I am not so certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability of making such speeches on top of someone else’s hat. But American humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.
This is from Chesterton’s essay on Bret Harte, in Varied Types.
There are a great many young men who feel lost and hopeless in the modern world and many of them spend a lot of time on the internet complaining about it. This tends to rub older, moderately successful men wrong—very, very wrong. (Very roughly: men in their mid-thirties or older who have a wife and at least one child.) I’ve wondered about this for a while because I find this reaction in myself—I start out sympathetic but I verge on angry most times I try to interact with such men. I think I’ve finally figured it out: it has to do with the traditional role of adult men in raising other people’s young men into manhood.
Good parents love their children unconditionally and this is incredibly important to children and their healthy development. However, as children make their way to being adults, they are going to have to face other environments than the environment of home; they will have to face indifferent and even adverse environments. For most of human history (and much of the present, outside of some atypical but decreasingly atypical situations), this was especially true of boys. Somebody had to fight the wild animals who wanted to eat one’s children; somebody had to fight the other human beings who wanted to kill one and take one’s things. Defending against these and many other threats were usually best done in groups, often of people near in age, and that means working with people who were not one’s parents and who love one only conditionally. Preparing a boy for these environments is usually best done not by the boy’s father, but by friends of the boy’s father, or at least other adults males of good will. These are mentors.
Mentors do not love the boy unconditionally, as his father does (in the ideal, at least), but are willing to be more generous to the boy than the boy is yet capable of deserving. This mentorship forms a bridge for the boy to become a man. When a mentor demands more independence of the boy, this does not prevent the boy going to his father for unconditional love; by giving the role of being generously and patiently harsh to another man, the father can be a source of support for his son when that is too difficult, restoring the son’s strength, and enabling the son to go back to his difficult work of becoming a man.
This role of mentor is a bit tricky, since it does involve carefully gauging what the boy is currently capable of and only asking of him what he can do—as opposed to asking of the boy what would most benefit the mentor, as one does with, for example, a plumber1. But it does involve challenging the boy and pushing him to be able to deal with circumstances in which he has no support right now, to get him to use his “emotional muscles” to self-regulate and be able to deal with difficult circumstances, so that those “emotional muscles” grow. Because the time is coming when it will not matter how the now-boy feels, it only matters how he will fight in a battle and protect his fellow soldiers, or chase away the wolves, or do the unpleasant work before bad things happen because the work is not done.
Older men who are at least moderately successful (I mean in absolute terms, not as a euphemism for being rich) have the instinct that they should look for older boys and young men who need this kind of mentorship to transition into being fully independent men, and to provide this kind of supportive-challenging environment to help them to grow.
But the thing is, this relationship is very much a mutual one. The boy has to enter into it wanting to become a man. He has to want to be challenged. He has to want to rise to that challenge. All students must, in the end, learn for themselves; a teacher can only give the student what he needs in order to learn.
When you put all this together, I believe this explains why young men complaining about how unfair society is in its current configuration rubs us older men so wrong. This may all be true, but it’s not helpful in learning how to become a man. And a boy is better off becoming a man even in a bad society—there is no society where boys are better off staying permanently childish. Coming to us rubs us so wrong because we’re not the ones that young men should come to for this kind of sympathy. In fact, it would (often) be actively harmful to them to if we gave it to them, because it would discourage them from finishing growing up.
We all have our roles in society according to our station in life. For older men, our role is to act as mentors like this to young men. When young men come to us for sympathy, it feels a bit like coming to us for what they’re supposed to—mentorship—but then they reject attempts at mentorship, which confuses and frustrates us. Young men aren’t supposed to look to mentors for sympathy—they’re supposed to look elsewhere for that. It may be entirely legitimate that they are looking for sympathy everywhere because they can’t find it anywhere, but it’s a problem that this actively gets in the way of us fulfilling our proper role of mentor.
I don’t know what the solution to this is. I doubt it’s for us older men to just to give up on mentorship and become surrogate fathers to younger men, because that would still leave them stunted in their development and unable to fulfill their potential. God knows the answer; I don’t. At least, not yet. But identifying a problem is the first step towards solving it, and I think that this is, at least, a correct identification of the problem.
This is perfectly fair with tradesmen because the tradesman is a full adult who trades what is best for the customer in exchange for money, which the tradesman needs more than whatever minor comfort he gives up in doing the work he is skilled at. ↩︎
Through a series of coincidences, some of which I will discuss soon because they come from beginning to read the compilation Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, which contains a number of detective stories from, roughly, 1892 through 1910, I discovered the existence of the novel Disappeared From Her Home by C.L. Pirkis. Published in 1877, it has been called a detective story, and though it is not a detective story in the modern sense of the term, it is not unreasonable that it is described that way. I find that very interesting.
If I had to summarize the plot to Disappeared From her Home in a sentence despite having only skimmed a half dozen chapters from it, I would say (spoilers ahead): a young woman out for her morning walk disappears and later seems to turn up dead while one of her two suitors figures out what actually happened to her, including finding her alive in France.
This makes it sound more like a modern mystery than it really is; it’s roughly equal parts melodrama and adventure story, at least as far as I can tell from the bits I’ve read. Unfortunately, I’m not really very interested in reading the whole thing because the style is so overwrought. (A metaphor I take from wrought iron that has been wrought far beyond what is necessary for beauty.) I’m far from an expert, or even knowledgeable, about Victorian melodrama, but as far as I can tell from various bits of it that I’ve read, it seems like some time after the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne of England, English people developed a great passion for huge emotions described in complicated and somewhat understated language. This certainly wasn’t the case in the early 1800s, at the time of Jane Austen. (Pride & Prejudice was written around 1796 and published in 1813.)
It also doesn’t seem to have been an overly long-lasting style; Conan Doyle didn’t write in it, for example, so it was on the wane in the final decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. (I should note that R. Austin Freeman, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, did write in a Victorian melodramatic style, so it didn’t entirely disappear by this time.) Another data point is that Father Brown, written in 1910, was not written in this style at all. That said, it occurs to me that the Father Brown stories were all short stories, and perhaps Victorian Melodrama was more a style of novels than of short stories. The short stories that C.L. Pirkis wrote, starting in 1893, about “Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective,” were not in a melodramatic style, or at least nowhere near to the degree that Disappeared From Her Home was.
Anyway, it’s very interesting to find a mystery story almost midway between Poe’s Murder on the Rue Morgue and Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, but while it does certainly center on a mystery, it’s not a detective story, and I have my doubts that it was part of the development of the detective story as we know it today.
An interesting feature of it, by the way, is that it did, in fact, have a detective in it. The father of the missing girl hired a detective who interviewed people and tracked down clues. This makes sense, historically, since the famous Pinkerton detective agency was founded in 1850, and though it was American, it would make sense if there were people doing similar work in England. The detective is not very important to the story, though. It is not the detective to finds the girl; in the parts I skimmed it’s not even necessarily the case that the information he found was all that useful to the suitor who actually found the girl.
The other thing that really distinguishes it from a proper detective story, in my view, is that it doesn’t seem to have anyone who is really trying to deceive the world. The daughter is convinced to go to France, but this simple, and there is a mystery about it primarily because she is convinced to not tell her father so that he doesn’t stop her. There is no effort at concealment past not bothering to send him a telegram or a letter, so far as I saw, and the suitor who solved the case did not match wits with anyone who was trying to prevent its solution. (To be fair, plenty of golden age mysteries were investigating accidents or other mysteries where there was no attempt at concealment, but these were, in general, not the best of the golden age stories.)
I do not know if I will look into Disappeared From Her Home or other such Victorian mystery stories. (It seems to be the case that a person going missing leading to the revelation of dark family secrets was a popular kind of story for a while.) Mostly, because I doubt that they actually are in the lineage of detective stories. But it is very interesting to have learned that they exist.
On the twenty first day of April in the year of our Lord 1985, the twenty first episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Also the last episode of the first season in was set in Wyoming and titled Funeral at Fifty Mile. (Last week’s episode was Murder At the Oasis.)
As the title screen establishes, Wyoming is a beautiful place. This helps to establish a bit of a golden-age mystery feel, since the beauty of the land will contrast with the ugliness of murder.
Right after the first establishing shot we we get another:
On the left we have an ancient Chevy truck driving by, which gives us the sense of a land where things move more slowly. On the right we have a sign that tells us we’re in a small town in Wyoming. A town so small, in fact, that they publish the population down to the individual. Not only are there not that many people, but the number doesn’t change so often that it’s expensive to change it when it does. (Though sometimes such signs simply reflect the population at the last census.)
After this we fade to a funeral where the preacher gives some useful introductions in his closing remarks. First is the deceased’s beloved daughter, Mary Carver:
Standing next to her is her fiance, Art Merrick.
Also is the deceased’s younger brother:
His name is Timothy Carver.
Also mentioned are Jack’s close and inseparable friends.
Doc Wallace:
Sam Breen:
and Bill Carmody:
(If you recognize William Windom, the actor playing Sam Breen, you probably know him as Jessica’s friend Doc Hazlett. That starts in the second season of Murder, She Wrote. Right now her close friend is Captain Ethan Craig, though we haven’t seen him in a while.)
After these closing remarks we find out that the deceased’s name is John Carver, and he was apparently in the military because his coffin has an American flag draped on it. There’s a brief prayer mentioning ashes to ashes and dust to dust, then a bugle plays a mournful tune.
As the bugle plays, a strange couple drives up in a large RV. They get out and walk up to be relatively near the casket:
We get a little bit of military ceremony—a five gun salute and the flag gets folded and given to Mary—then people begin to disband. The strange man asks Carmody if he’s coming after him with that gun and Carmody replies, sourly, that it would be futile since it’s loaded with blanks. We find out that the man’s name is Carl Mestin and the woman, whose name is Sally, is Carl’s wife.
Shortly after, Jessica is walking with Mary and Art and Mary remarks that it’s strange for Carl Mestin to show up since her father never did business with him and no one around these parts can stand him.
During the conversation it comes up that Jessica is, apparently, an old friend, since she can remember when Mary was born. Well, not the actual birth, but having heard that her mother died in childbirth. “We” were so worried, she says, wondering how jack was going to manage all alone, but he did just fine. In addition to this being awkward exposition, it leaves out the really important part—how was a school teacher in Maine friends with a woman who died in childbirth in Wyoming in the 1950s (or perhaps the early 1960s)?
The scene then fades to the Carver ranch, which we can tell by the establishing shot:
A storm is moving in—we hear the sound of thunder and it forms the subject of conversation inside.
We then meet “Marshall” (actually Sheriff) Ed Potts:
He’s read one of her books: it’s not up there with Mickey Spillane, but darn good for a woman.
I’ve never enjoyed Murder, She Wrote‘s attempts at making fun of sexist police officers and this one makes particularly little sense. While it’s true that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (basically) created the genre of detective story with Sherlock Holmes, many of the biggest figures in the genre were women. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh were known as the “Queens of Crime.” Recent reprints of Agatha Christie’s novels often mention that she’s only been outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. Detective fiction is, as fiction goes, probably the most 50/50 genre you can find. The only way to think that the best detective fiction is all written by males is by knowing nothing about detective fiction. (I suppose if you only like American hard-boiled detective fiction—a genre I dislike and am not sure should even count as detective fiction—this would be more defensible. And he did cite a hard-boiled detective writer. But even so. This is just annoying and dumb.)
In case you’re not familiar with Mickey Spillane—as I wasn’t until I looked him up—he wrote a series of hard-boiled detective novels featuring the detective Mike Hammer. From reading the plot synopsis of his first novel, I, The Jury, the name Mike Hammer is a bit on-the-nose as far as the kind of story it was, so just imagine the kind of story featuring a hard-boiled detective named “Mike Hammer” and you’re probably close enough, especially if you consider the various things “hammer” can be a euphemism for and go with all of them.
Jessica smiles and replies, “Yes, we all struggle under Mickey’s shadow, I suppose.”
The contrast is there for the joke they’re making, but it is very confusing with regard to the character of Marshall Potts. How on earth is a Sheriff who prefers to be called Marshall a fan of Mike Hammer stories? That said, he does immediately afterwards say that he doesn’t really read detective fiction, it’s westerns that have his heart. Like “Coop” in High Noon. (This would be a reference to the actor Gary Cooper in the movie High Noon, where Cooper plays a sheriff who stands alone against a gang of criminals.)
Jessica then says she notices that he wears his holster tied down and asks if this is for quickly drawing his gun. He replies that it is, and that he practices for half an hour every day. There’s a bit more banter where he says that he’s ready for someone to “make my day,” which is a line from the Clint Eastwood movie Sudden Impact, which came out in 1983, only two years before this episode. It’s a strange line to quote for someone who loves westerns, but I guess the point is to portray him as trigger-happy.
There’s also a minor point that Tim (Mary’s uncle) calls his own ranch, which neighbors this one, to make sure that everything is OK—that the ranch hands have everything battened down for the storm, which seems to be there already. That done, Tim brings up to Mary and Sam that he had promised to buy the ranch from Mary after John died, to make her comfortable for the rest of her life. Sam says that he doesn’t doubt that they discussed it, but the fact of the matter is that there is no will. Mary, being his only child, will inherit, but it will take longer to run it through probate than it would have been if there was a will.
This discussion is cut short by a loud honking from outside. Looking out the window, it turns out to be Carl Mestin and his wife. Mary tries to throw him out, but he produces what he claims is a copy of John Carver’s will, leaving everything to him except for a little money for Mary. This does not make Mestin’s reception any friendlier and he antagonizes people until Art Merrick has to be held back from punching him.
Mary asks Jessica why her uncle Tim and the others seem to be afraid of Mestin. Jessica doesn’t have an answer, then the Marshall comes over, warns Art that starting a fight isn’t going to help anything, then gives his condolences to Mary and takes his leave. (This is a very strange thing to do without apology, since an incendiary situation would benefit from his presence to keep things from getting out of hand.)
Jessica then talks to Mestin and remarks that Wyoming is very different than Maine. Back in Maine, she couldn’t imagine a father disinheriting his only daughter. Mestin replies that it probably has something to do with having saved John’s life back in Korea at the Inchon landing. Jessica is surprised at this and asks if he knows her husband, Tom Fletcher. He was Jack’s commanding officer. (She clearly doesn’t believe him and is testing him, since her husband’s name was Frank.)
Mestin thinks and remarks, “Oh yeah, Lt. Fetcher. He’s quite a guy. He’s a good guy.”
He then excuses himself. (In addition to not flinching at the name, Frank Fletcher was a captain, though we won’t learn that for a few more seasons.)
I should note, since I complained about it before, that we do, finally, have an explanation for how Jessica knows any of these people who never seem to have left Wyoming—Jessica’s husband and the deceased had served together in the Air Force.
Later in the afternoon, though it looks like night, after Mary is asleep courtesy of a sedative the doc gave her, her father’s friends are putting on rain coats to help batten the place down in the storm. Carl and his wife are arguing over drinking, with her calling him a lightweight and him saying that he’s not getting into a drinking contest with her. She then brags about having beaten him at an arm wrestling contest and he claims that he let her win. She bets him $500 ($1,505.46 in 2025 dollars) that she can beat him right now. She goads him into the match by accusing him of being too cheap or too chicken to do it, and he accepts. The people who were getting ready to help with tying things down in the storm stop their preparations and watch.
She beats him easily.
I don’t know if this will come up later, but it’s curious that they are arm wrestling left handed. It may come to nothing, of course, but it’s hard to not notice left-handed people in murder mysteries.
It should also be noted that this is very strange behavior of a woman who is supposedly his wife. It seems likely that her being is wife is another of Mestin’s lies. Anyway, he pays up, then goes and joins the people getting things prepared for the storm. As he joins them he asks whether a particular door still needs to be tied down in the wind, suggesting he knows the place.
Later in the day, after the storm has passed, Art comes back to the house having been given a ride by one of the employees named Jesús. Art greets the people inside—everyone from the funeral is still here. They ask where he was and he says that he got the pickup truck stuck in the mud on the way back. After two hours of trying to dig it out he gave up and started walking back. Jesús passed him on the road and picked him up. As Art goes to check on Mary, Jesús finds something that scares him in the barn. In a panic fetches the people from the house and they come. Then we see that the thing that terrified him was the body of Carl Mestin, hanged.
We then fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we get back, the Marshall shows up. He doesn’t much know what he’s doing with a murder investigation and Jessica “subtly” helps him out. She points out that a hay bale was dragged near the body, as if to suggest suicide, but the killer seems to have changed his mind or been scared off.
Jessica also mentions that there looks to be a blood smear above his left ear, as if he was hit by something before he was hanged. (Doc checks out the body and confirms this, saying that Jessica has sharp eyes.) Jessica also notes that the rope on the beam had been splintered, suggesting that it was holding Mestin’s weight when it was pulled over.
Jessica asks Doc how long the body had been dead for and he answers 4-5 hours. Which is rather odd precision to give, even apart from not having taken the temperature of the corpse and run the relevant calculations. Anyway, the Sheriff does the math and says that it was around 3pm, when everyone has battening down the ranch.
That evening, Jessica talks with Mary. She asks Mary what she meant by Mestin shortening her father’s life. Mary explains that she was there on her daily visit and saw Mestin coming out of her father’s room. Mestin didn’t say anything to her and just looked smug. Her father was so upset he couldn’t even talk. He was never the same after that and two days later he died.
Jessica points out that the witnesses on the will were nurses. She suggests that Mestin arrived with the will prepared and pressured her father into signing it. Jessica mentions Mestin’s story about having saved her father’s life during the war, but that’s nonsense. She tripped him up with asking about knowing her husband, which he clearly didn’t. Whatever made Mary’s father sign the will, it wasn’t gratitude.
Bill Carmody then comes out and says that the Sheriff wants them assembled for questioning. Mary asks if Mestin might have been holding something over her father and Bill says he doesn’t know and didn’t know Mestin well. Mary asks about a business venture that they were in together and Carmody explains that Mestin talked into buying grain in order to open up a feed store. Bill bought the grain, then Mestin pulled out and left Bill holding the bag, causing bill to lose a lot of money.
Mary then asks why Bill did business with Mestin, since everyone she knew seemed to hate him. Bill replies that he didn’t have much choice, then says that they had better get inside.
Inside the Sheriff asks everyone where they were at the time that Mestin was killed. Doc, Uncle Tim, Sam Breen, and Bill Carmody were all working around the barn and saw each other. Mary was sleeping after Doc gave her some sleeping pills. This woman, who I presume is an employee, never left the house:
Carl’s wife was in her RV “sleeping it off.” Jessica was in her room “getting rid of jet lag.”
Jessica notes that the women are the only ones who can’t corroborate their alibis, but that don’t make no nevermind to this here Sheriff, as he doesn’t think a woman could have done Mestin in the way he was done did in. In his mind, the only possible suspect not accounted for is Art Merrick, which is good enough for him—he concludes with certainty that Art did it. Jessica shakes her head at him, and he replies, “I thought that you were smarter than that, Ma’am. There ain’t anybody else. Process of elimination.”
And on that we fade to black and go to commercial.
The Sheriff then goes over to where Art is getting his truck out of the mud. He points out that there was solid ground on either side of the mud hole, so Art clearly got himself stuck on purpose (Art says that it was raining so hard he didn’t see the hole until he was in it). The Sheriff then accuses him of the murder and arrests him.
The next day, in the morning, Mary drives Jessica over to the Sheriff’s station:
I find the interior quite interesting:
The most interesting part to me is that while the matte painting behind the set is quite good—it is appropriately out of focus for the foreground, for example, and thus looks fairly convincing—it’s entirely wrong for the environment and the external shot. (We can see based on how Jessica and Mary walk in that the door behind Jessica, here, is between the building and the hill in the exterior shot. But look more closely at what we can see through the window:
(I upped the exposure and size a bit to make the background clearer)
The hill is missing. Also, that looks like a fairly populous town across an empty plain.
Anyway, Jessica tries to talk some sense into the Sheriff. Mestin was struck from behind on the left side of the head, suggesting a left-handed killer, while Art is right-handed. Also, he didn’t have a motive. The only one who benefited from Mestin’s death is Sally Mestin.
The Sheriff then storms out and Sam Breen tells Jessica that bail is already in the works up at the county seat. Also, he and the boys talked and figure that they should stay close to Mary until things are settled.
He leaves and Jessica goes to Mary and Art, where Art relays what he overheard from a call that the Sheriff got from the coroner. This was more substantive than you might expect because it shook the Sheriff up enough he repeated everything the coroner said. The important part of which is that Mestin died of hanging and the blow to the head came afterward. Jessica wonders why Doc was so sure that it was the other way around, and Mary suggests Jessica ask him since his place is just down the street.
Doc’s house is interesting, partially because the shot is so close-cropped. I wonder where this really was.
Anyway, Doc isn’t in, but his nurse/receptionist/housekeeper is in.
She recognizes Jessica because she’s also the local phone operator and nothing goes on in Fifty-Mile that she doesn’t know about. Doc’s on a house call and will be back in about an hour. Jessica can’t wait and wonders if Doc made any notes about the examination he made the night before and wonders if Doc would mind if Jessica peeked in his files to see. The nurse replies that he’d skin her alive if she let Jessica look through his files—the only time Doc ever lost his temper was when he caught someone poking his nose in the Doc’s files. He threw the man out, using words that would “shame Lucifer himself,” and told him that if he ever breathed a word of what he found out it would be the last words he ever spoke.
Jessica asks if the man was a stranger, but it turns out to be Carl Mestin.
The nurse then says that, in her opinion, a man like Carl Mestin was born to hang. Jessica doesn’t agree, but also doesn’t demur.
Back at the house Jessica and Mary run into the housekeeper, who says that Mrs. Mestin requested a lot of coffee and has been on the phone all morning making calls, mostly long distance. Mary then confronts Sally and demands that she leave. Sally refuses and suggests that Mary leave, instead. Mary asks what Carl had on her dad that got him to sign the will and Sally replies that Carl never told her, but whatever it was it must have been very “juicy” because it was very profitable.
A little while later the Sheriff arrives with Art Merrick. He’s dropped the murder charge after he had a chance to think about Jessica’s arguments. Jessica tells him that it takes a strong man to admit his mistakes. The Sheriff replies that Art is still his best suspect… so if he didn’t do it, who did?
Jessica suggests that the Sheriff challenge Sally Mestin to an arm wrestling contest. He might find it illuminating.
Interestingly, he does.
In the preparation for the match, Jessica drops in and says that she wants to observe Sally’s technique. Sally replies that it’s all in the timing and body English. The women’s North American champion is just a little bitty thing, much smaller than Sally. (Sally is significantly overstating this; while technique does certainly matter in arm wrestling, as in all kinds of wrestling, there are significant limits to the strength difference it can overcome.)
They begin and at first not much happens except for the Sheriff grunting. But right before Sally wins, we get a closeup of her hand:
and then her arm:
They did this pretty quickly in the episode, so I’m not sure that it’s reasonable for them to have expected us to notice, but you can see that Sally has a tan line from her bracelet but not from her wedding ring (she’s wrestling with her left arm, so this is her left hand). So she clearly hasn’t been wearing the ring long.
Anyway, after Sally wins, the Sheriff remarks to Jessica that he never thought a woman would be strong enough to do in Mestin, but Sally is sure strong enough and she’s left-handed to boot.
Sally doesn’t take kindly to this and storms off.
That night, while Jessica is in bed, she hears some tapping on her window. She goes over and looks out the window and sees a noose hanging outside.
Jessica looks thoughtful and says, out loud, “I do believe I’m making someone nervous.”
And on that we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial, Sally leaves her trailer and barges in on everyone having breakfast. She’s brash and provocative, and comes on pretty strong to Art Merrick, clearly to antagonize Mary.
Right after she’s served breakfast, though, Sheriff Potts comes in and informs Sally that he has a warrant for her arrest for the murder of her husband. She complains a bunch, then when Sheriff Potts holds up a pair of handcuffs Jessica asks Sally if now isn’t the time to play her trump card, before she winds up on trial for murder.
Sally says that she doesn’t know what Jessica is talking about, but Jessica replies that she does. Her supposed motive for killing Carl is to get ownership of the ranch as his widow, but she’s not, in fact, his widow. She and Carl were never married. Jessica checked on all of the long distance phone calls and they were to quickie wedding chapels in Nevada. She figures that Sally was looking for one that would sell her a forged wedding certificate, and since Sally got so much bolder after those phone calls, she probably found one that would. Jessica suggests that the proof is that the skin under her wedding ring is as tan as everywhere else; only the skin under her bracelet has a tan line. Clearly, the wedding ring was a prop.
Sally sinks down in her chair. She sighs and says that Carl said that people around here are old-fashioned. If they pretended to be married, it wouldn’t make waves. She then gets up and says that if she’s not under arrest she’d like to leave. The Sheriff replies that there are some nice places on the edge of town where she can park the RV, but he recommends not going any further than that from town.
After she leaves, Potts sits down and expresses his frustration. Now he’s back to the beginning.
Jessica says that she can give a description of the murderer. He’s a tall, strong, ambidextrous man who had number of reasons to hate Carl Mestin but only one reason strong enough to kill him.
The Sheriff replies that there ain’t anybody like that around here, and Jessica sadly nods her head and says, “Yes. I know.”
A few minutes later Art, Mary, and Jessica are standing on the porch as Sally drives off. Art says that he can’t say that he’s sorry to wave goodbye to her and Mary replies that in a funny kind of way she feels sorry for Sally. Art then points out that now is a good time to get his truck and Mary volunteers to drive him over. She invites Jessica to come with her for some reason but Jessica declines.
When Jessica comes in, only Doc is at the table, peeling an apple. Jessica notes that he’s left-handed. He replies that he’s very left handed, but not ambidextrous. He asks her why she says the killer is ambidextrous and she replies that Mestin was struck from behind on the left, but the hangman’s noose outside her window was tied by a right-handed person. Hence, ambidextrous.
He asks Jessica if she really knows what she’s saying and Jessica replies that, unfortunately, she does. She then says that she’s going to take a walk, perhaps go down to the barn and look around.
The Doc follows her and asks her to not meddle in things she doesn’t understand. Someone could get hurt. Jessica replies that he’s not talking about her, he’s talking about Mary, isn’t he? It seems to her that Carl Mestin was killed to protect Mary from some terrible secret that’s worse than the loss of her birthright. Could any secret be worse than that?
Doc replies that one could and asks her to drop it.
When she gets to the barn Uncle Tim, Sam Breen, and Bill Carmody are waiting there.
Jessica then says that they’re four men who added up to one tall, strong, ambidextrous killer. After revealing a bunch of what she knows, she then asks about what she doesn’t. Who was Carl Mestin? He knew about the haymow door needing bracing in the wind, so he seems to have worked here in the past, but a long time ago since it was before Mary was old enough remember.
It’s Uncle Tim who finally speaks. Carl—which wasn’t actually his real name—was a randy young ranch hand at Carver ranch. He tried every way he knew to seduce Jack’s wife, but it didn’t work. One day he found her alone and raped her. Then he ran and the five of them—including John Carver—chased him down and caught him. They strung him up and were going to hang him but John said no and talked them out of it. Because he asked it, they instead turned him over to the law. Only Carl escaped and got clean away. And Ruth—John’s wife—turned out to be pregnant with Mary. She seemed to believe that the child was John’s and Doc let her believe it. After Ruth died in childbirth, John raised Mary as if she was his own. He loved her and doted on her, and his one great fear was that she would find out the truth about her parentage.
Jessica asks how Carl figured it out. Sam Breen replies that as near as they can figure out, he changed his name, stayed around near Fifty-Mile but out of their sight, and read about the birth in the paper and did the math. But he needed a clincher, so he broke into Doc’s files. Not Mary’s, but John’s. John was sterile and could never father a child of his own.
The night of the funeral, they saw the horse run into the barn where Carl was and the idea seemed to hit them all at once. They put a noose around his neck and put him up on the horse in order to scare him, but he was cocky and mocked them, saying that they didn’t have the guts. Then there was an enormous lighting flash and the horse spooked and bolted. The fall off the horse broke Carl’s neck when he finally fell to the end of the slack in the rope. It felt like divine providence. After that they knew that one man couldn’t have lynched him, so they took him down, Doc hit him because he knew where and how hard, then they strung him back up, so it could look like the work of one man. It never occurred to them that Art would be blamed. They’d had stepped in if Jessica hadn’t cleared him.
Jessica then asks, “So what happens next?”
Sam stands up and says, “Alright. We’ll go to the Sheriff. Tell him what happened. Stand trial. I don’t know what a jury will say. We’ll even go to jail if it comes to that. But there’s no way on God’s green earth Mary will ever know the reason why. Not from any of us.”
Jessica replies, “Nor from me, Sam. She’s been hurt enough already.”
Sam then takes off his hat, offers Jessica his arm, and they all walk back to the house.
I have very mixed feelings about this episode. On the one hand, parts of it are well done. We get a good sense of the loneliness of the Carver ranch and the close-knit nature of the sort of community which is necessary to thrive where there are so few people. On the other hand, I really don’t like the ending.
The ending violates the ideal structure of a murder mystery. In an ideal murder mystery, the murder—that is, the intentional, unjustified killing—causes a disorder in the community through the misuse of reason. The detective then enters the world, temporarily becoming a part of it, and through the right use of reason restores order to the community. Plenty of mysteries don’t have this structure; however, though it’s not universal, it is common and, more importantly, it’s the structure that the best mysteries have.
The first major violation of this structure in this episode is that the killing isn’t even murder. It is more properly manslaughter, since they did not intend to kill but nevertheless did kill during the commission of a crime (assault).
The second major violation of this structure is that the death didn’t cause a rupture in the community. In fact, Carl Mestin’s presence caused the rupture in the community and his death fixed it. It didn’t perfectly fix it, but everyone was better off with Carl Mestin dead.
Worse, the part that Carl Mestin’s death didn’t fix wasn’t fixed any other way, too: Carl’s inheritance of the ranch. With Carl’s death it doesn’t go to his widow, since he wasn’t actually married, but if he doesn’t have any near relatives, it would go, not to Mary, but to the state of Wyoming. About the best case for Mary would be that, with Mestin dead, no one who will speak up on Mestin’s behalf will mention the existence of this will and consequently Mary can inherit under the rules of intestacy. If things turned out that way it would just bring us back to Carl Mestin’s death being the thing which fixed the problems that his life caused. (It would actually work for Mary to inherit as his daughter, presuming Mestin died intestate, but that just causes other problems.)
Which means that Jessica’s solving of the crime did no one any good.
And the thing is, I mean literally no one. Not even the Sheriff. Contrast this with Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, Murder On the Orient Express. (spoilers ahead, but, dear reader, as you’d have to be 92 years old at the time of my writing this to not have had your entire life to read it, I think you’ve had enough time and I can discuss the plot with a clear conscience.)
Murder On the Orient Express, like Funeral At Fifty Mile, has the solution that almost everyone did it together. And, further, it has the property that the victim really had it coming, and his departure from the world fixed problems caused by his wickedness while it did not introduce any new problems, except for the responsibilities given to the authorities. Which brings us to the key difference: in Murder on the Orient Express, the authorities had a real problem caused by the death. Specifically the director of the Wagon-Lit company had a murder on his train and for which he was responsible to his passengers because passengers really dislike trains on which people get murdered. And owners of companies do not like it when their customers get murdered while being customers. Poirot solved these problems for him without creating more problems. He laid out two possible solutions: an uncatchable fake assassin who crept away in the snow but who was specifically after the victim and who might have killed him anywhere, and the real solution. He laid out the assassin theory first and the director of the Wagon-Lit company at first dismissed it, but Poirot admonished him to not be so quick to dismiss it because he may come to like it after hearing the second solution. And, indeed, he did. After Poirot carefully laid out the real solution, the director said that clearly he had spoken too hastily and obviously the first solution was correct. That is, Poirot gave him a way to fulfill his duty to the rest of society and also to act justly in this case, and left the decision with him.
By contrast, Sheriff Ed Potts didn’t really have any obligation to the community to solve the killing of Carl Mestin because the general opinion in Fifty Mile was that Mestin was born to hang and the world was clearly better off without him in it. And these are the people who employ Sheriff Potts and the only people to whom he answers. Unlike the director of the Wagon-Lit, if he just left well enough alone, everyone would be happy. And it is in this context that Jessica demanded that the four friends not let the Sheriff leave well enough alone.
This brings us to one of the strange things about Jessica Fletcher as a person: her greatest faith is in civic authority. She is, perhaps, best described as a devoted believer in the American Civic Religion. (It’s an amorphous, hard to nail down religion which is vaguely deist and holds America to be something sacred and thus all its institutions are sacred.) She has notions of justice, but her devotion to the American institution of the courts is greater. Poirot, being Catholic, could hold that human institutions are fallible and not always to be trusted with the difficult cases. Jessica cannot; she must see the law carried out no matter what.
Which means that Murder, She Wrote does better when it sticks to actual murder and leaves things like manslaughter, justified homicide, etc. alone. Les Miserables would not be improved by having Javert as the protagonist.
Moving on from the ending, the characters in this episode were mostly pretty good. None of them were well fleshed out but they at least all had a few hints of a personality and the actors did a lot with those hints. William Windon as Sam Breen, in particular, was a ton of fun. This may be why he replaced Claude Akins as Jessica’s close Cabot Cove friend starting in the second season.
The main exception was Sheriff Potts. He was a caricature from the beginning, which can be a fun start if the caricature becomes a character; that is, if he gets turned into a real person who simply has some interesting quirks. That often reflects how we meet people, after all. At first we notice their unusual characteristics, then we get to know them. The problem with Ed Potts is that he never became a character. The closest they came was having him drive Art back home after dropping the charges, as that did require some sense of responsibility. But on the whole I found him annoying without any compensation for that annoyance.
The setting was also enjoyable: Fifty-Mile, Wyoming, was a nice place to visit.
Another point in this episode’s favor is that it does actually establish how Jessica is connected to the place. Over the seasons, Jessica has an oddly large number of old friends who are never really explained and are often not very plausible; attending the funeral of someone her late husband served with in the Air Force is a nice way to explain this that is plausible.
As far as plot holes go, this episode did pretty well. I think one plot hole was that the people were a bit over-concerned that Mary never find out that she was Mestin’s daughter. It would be pretty unpleasant to find out that the man you thought was your father was merely a man who loved you and raised you as his own, but your real father is a scumbag rapist. On the other hand, it’s not like anyone gets to pick his parents and having someone raise you lovingly because you’re the daughter of a good woman he loved would help her to deal with it, and it’s not like anybody in the area believes in a tainted bloodline, so she wouldn’t face any practical consequences. I don’t want to overstate that; I completely understanding not wanting to burden her with the truth, but that can easily be taken too far. Very few good things come from running from the truth. And I very much doubt it would be worth disinheriting Mary rather than telling her the truth. Especially now that she’s an adult. As a child she might worry that she will take after her real father, but as an adult she knows who she is, regardless of who her father was.
The only other real plot hole I can think of is the noose outside of Jessica’s window. That really came from nowhere and went nowhere and didn’t fit the character of any of the four conspirators. They really just did it so that they could go to commercial break on a dramatic note and couldn’t come up with anything. But at the same time it only takes a few seconds and could easily be excised from the episode without anything else having to be changed. Well, that’s not quite true. Instead of Jessica saying that the noose outside her window was tied by a right-handed man, she’d have had to say that the noose around Mestin’s neck was tied by a right-handed man. Half a line isn’t much of an impact.
Actually, there’s one more plot hole I can think of: I’m not sure that Sally not having a tan line under her wedding ring is actually proof that she wasn’t really married. Sally would, in any event, have been pretending that she and Carl got married recently, which means that even if it were true she’d have had no time to get a tan line from her wedding ring.
Well, that’s the end of the first season of Murder, She Wrote. Back in 1985 it was almost five months until Season 2 would begin with Widow, Weep For Me.
On the seventh day of April in the year of our Lord 1985, the twentieth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in the fictional city of Desert Palms, California, it was titled Murder At The Oasis. (Last week’s episode was Armed Response.)
While we hear someone tinkering on a piano we get some establishing shots of a very fancy house with a gate and a security guard house next to the gate on the driveway. Then we then see who is tinkering on the piano and meet one of our main characters:
His name is Johnny Shannon and the various gold records framed on the wall suggest that he is connected to the music business and is quite successful. (Why he’s wearing his coat like a German officer is not explained.)
We also very quickly establish that he’s extremely unlikeable. He calls in his son, Mickey…
…and then berates him for composing such a terrible piece of music. We get the impression that this is a common occurrence because Mickey is only mildly disappointed and calmly tells his father to just play it at the right tempo, which he proceeds to demonstrate.
While Mickey is playing it, Johnny summons his assistant, Buster:
Buster makes Johnny wait a moment, though, so he can tell Mickey that he likes the piece and it’s good work.
Johnny, disappointed by this reaction, orders his car to be prepared because he has a lunch date at a tennis club. On the way there, they receive a phone call on the car phone from a major mob boss, but Johnny refuses to take the call because he’s now “protected.” He clarifies to Buster that he has “a special kind of insurance,” but then says no more about it.
At the tennis club, we actually see Jessica and her old friend Peggy, who is Johnny’s ex-wife.
From some casual conversation we find out that they’re expecting Johnny to join them for lunch.
Which he eventually does. There’s a bit of small talk where it turns out that she recently leased a house in the area so she could visit her children since they rarely visit her anymore. Mickey is one of those children and then we meet the other: Terry.
Terry then excuses herself because she has to meet a friend and Johnny expresses concern that it’s not “that tennis bum”. Her refusal to respond suggests that it is and this is confirmed by the tennis bum coming up to her table a minute later and kissing her for an extended period of time.
Johnny gets up to intervene and Peggy lays a restraining hand on his arm, saying that Terry is old enough to choose her own friends. Johnny replies that she told him this before and she was wrong, then, too.
His interfering goes about as well as one can expect it to; the tennis bum shoves Johnny and then several people whom Johnny employs comes to his aid, restraining the tennis bum.
Curiously, this is interrupted by a man who introduces himself as Sergeant Barnes of the police and asks what the trouble is. When Johnny tells Barnes that he doesn’t want the tennis bum around his daughter, Barnes replies that he doesn’t work for Johnny. Johnny then replies, “You must be new. Ask around. Somebody’ll set you straight.”
He then escorts Terry home.
With Johnny and his entourage gone, Peggy tells Jessica the backstory: when Terry was seventeen she eloped with a boy that Johnny didn’t like. Johnny sent some men after them who roughed up the boy then gave him a one-way airline ticket out of the country. Johnny had the marriage annulled and Terry never forgave him. She still lives in her father’s house to get back at him—to torment him with behavior like this.
Later that night, at Johnny’s house, Buster brings Johnny a glass of milk only to find the door locked. He knocks loudly, then even louder, but no matter his volume he gets no response. In desperation he calls Lou, Johnny’s bodyguard. Mickey, hearing the commotion, knocks on Terry’s door, finding her with the tennis bum.
Back at the door the bodyguard has arrived and breaks the door down. They go inside and find Johnny, dead.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen an ad like this:
When we come back from commercial, Jessica and Peggy are driving along. After Jessica observes that Peggy is driving too fast, Jessica offers her condolences. Peggy replies that at least Jessica had a happy marriage with Frank; Peggy isn’t even a widow. She apologizes then thanks Jessica for going to the house with her because she can’t face it alone.
The scene then shifts to the men’s locker room at the… I’m not sure what this place is. Perhaps a tennis club? Anyway, she goes into the men’s lockerroom and finds the tennis bum she had been with and tells him that her brother is sure to tell the police that he was in the house the night before. She gives him money and tells him to flee the country if he doesn’t want to be part of a murder investigation. She adds that he should not try to contact her.
When the tennis bum asks, “what about us?” She scoffs and tells him to not be stupid. Now that her father is dead, she doesn’t need to play “let’s pretend” anymore. She adds that the truth is that she doesn’t even like him. (He doesn’t take this well, but nothing comes of it.)
Jessica and Peggy then arrive at the house. Oddly enough, she still goes by “Mrs. Shannon” despite being divorced from Johnny Shannon for years.
Inside the house, Mickey is glad to see his mother. He’s also glad to see Jessica, because they can use a good detective. Jessica objects that her exploits have been greatly exaggerated, but Sergeant Barnes walks into the room and answers her that he’s heard differently.
He’s the new police officer from earlier, and he explains that he’s been assigned to the case because in Desert Palms they don’t have a homicide division. He was on duty when the call came in so it’s his case.
Peggy, Mickey, and Sergeant Barnes press her to help on the case, but Jessica is reluctant. I always find this strange because if the police detective doesn’t want her on the case, she can’t be kept out. I wish that she was a bit more consistent as a character. Anyway, Barnes eventually gets her to help by telling her that she’s covered the subject of murder well in her books, even if she’s not always accurate. This piques Jessica’s interest, and she asks why he says this. When he says that he’ll explain on the way to the crime scene, she accepts. As they walk to the other room, he tells her, “You’re a little shaky on police procedure. And you always make your killers more interesting than your cops. You see, most killers are very dull people.”
They then leave the room and Mickey and Peggy discuss Terry in terms meant to make us suspect her, which, in Murder, She Wrote, means that she’s definitely innocent. It’s more reliable than a solid alibi.
In the room where Johnny was killed, Jessica notes that the door had a spring lock, so the killer must have pulled it shut on the way out.
They discuss the room as characterizing the victim:
Barnes says that Johnny was found in his favorite chair. He was shot in the back of the head and probably didn’t know he was about to be killed. Jessica wonders why he was sitting in a chair opposite to a blank TV when there was a perfectly good couch to sleep on, if that’s all he was doing.
Barnes agrees that this is puzzling. He adds another puzzling thing: no one heard a shot. The walls are thick but if you walk past the room in the hallways with the door closed, you can hear if a piano is being played, so they should have heard a gun, which is much louder than a piano.
Jessica says that she’s never seen a silencer herself, but mystery writers are addicted to them. (I think that this was true only of a certain era; but certainly this was part of that era.) Barnes objects that “mufflers” would be a better name for silencers; you can’t actually silence a gun and there’s always some noise.
Interestingly, that’s not quite true. The British developed an effectively silent gun called the Welrod.
It uses a series of solid rubber wipes in addition to many baffles in order to suppress the sound down to the point where it’s quieter than people speaking conversationally. The trade off is that you can only fire a dozen or so shots from it before the wipes are too degraded to suppress the sound that effectively. Also, it fires sub-sonic ammunition. This part is critical because it doesn’t matter how well you suppress the explosion which propelled the bullet if the bullet itself creates a supersonic boom. As a result, it has an incredibly short range—measured in tens of feet. On the other hand, its purpose is incredibly close-range assassination, and it actually has a concave front to allow it to be effective when pressed up against a person, so this isn’t too much of a limitation.
That said, it’s very unlikely that a killer in California in 1985 would be using a World War 2 British special services assassination pistol. There were a few similar guns made over the years but they’re exceedingly rare because there’s basically no market for them. So, in practice, Sergeant Barnes is right.
Jessica says that if the sound was muffled and not recognizably a gunshot, it might have gone unnoticed, confused with ordinary household sounds such as radio, television, etc. Barnes agrees that might be the case, but asks how on earth the killer got through the security system. There are guards on duty 24 hours per day at the front gate and the service entrance, at the back of the house, is protected by a tall fence and a sophisticated alarm system with TV cameras. The gate is opened remotely by the guard at the front gate after confirming the identity of the service person over the camera and through an intercom for voice verification. Nobody pushed the buzzer on the back gate last night and nobody could have gotten over the gate or wall without the alarm going off.
Jessica states the obvious conclusion: the murderer came from inside the house. (This was not lost on Barnes, who had already come to that conclusion.)
Having said that, I’m not sure it’s right. It’s unlikely that the tennis bum got in through the front gate by being on the invitation list—Johnny would almost certainly have told the guards to forbid him entrance—so his presence demonstrated it is possible to get in.
The scene then shifts to Terry pulling up in a fancy car as tense music plays. I’ve no idea why this might be important since we’ve already established that Terry is definitely innocent, but it’s a good excuse to show the front gate:
Terry goes into the house and demands to know what Mickey told the cops before she realizes that her mother is there. She then switches to condoling with her mother, which Mickey doesn’t take very well. Some hot words pass and Terry runs off.
Back in the murder room, Jessica and Barnes are discussing motive. Barnes suggests the standard: someone who stood to inherit. It was the servants’ night off, so other than family only the bodyguard and Johnny’s assistant were there.
When Jessica asks if the motive could have been robbery, Barnes shows her a hidden wall safe in the room which Mickey told him about:
Barnes doesn’t think this is the motive, though, since the killer wouldn’t have shot Johnny before making him open the safe in that case. Unless, as Jessica points out, the killer already knew the combination. Barnes admits this possibility, but while the safe contains valuable things, members of the household confirm that nothing is missing. Jessica then points out that her theory is unlikely since someone who knew the combination wouldn’t need to kill Johnny to steal it, they’d only need to wait for him to be out of the room.
Jessica then wonders if the motive might have been something else. There’s an obvious spot on the wall where something that was framed was missing. Barnes says that it wasn’t anything, though—just an old picture of Johnny and his kids.
This is interrupted by Buster, who asks the Sergeant to come quickly because the bodyguard is convinced that Mickey killed his dad and is busy assaulting him by the pool.
They get there in time and Barnes knocks the bodyguard into the pool. Mickey isn’t feel great from all of the strangulation he just experienced, but he’s otherwise OK.
The bodyguard insists that Mickey needs to be arrested, and when questioned, explains that he finally remembered that he wasn’t the last one to see Johnny alive—he saw Mickey go into the den after he left it.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial Sergeant Barnes asks Mickey what’s up. Mickey says that Lou (the bodyguard) had it all wrong. He did go down to the den to show his father some changes on the arrangement he was working on but his father didn’t want to see it until the arrangement was finished. So he immediately went back upstairs. He wasn’t in the den for more than a minute. (I’m not sure how the short duration is important because it takes only a few seconds to shoot someone in the back of the head. Perhaps Mickey is still groggy from being strangled.)
Mickey then goes on to say that he didn’t always get along with his father and there were times when he hated him, but when he was angry at his father he’d always think of the good times, before they moved out to the desert.
This is interrupted by Terry, who walks up with Peggy. Terry says that Mickey didn’t kill her father, there was someone else in the house—the tennis bum. She let him in at the rear service entrance. She used the master switch to turn off the alarm long enough for the tennis bum to get in and make it to the house. The guard would only notice that the system was switched off if he was paying close attention because the only indication is a tiny red light. The night man reads a lot and doesn’t check the panels often. The TV monitors are always off unless the alarm is tripped.
When Barnes remarks that she knows a lot about the security system, she replies that this isn’t the first time she’s let a man into the house.
When Terry mentions that she sent the tennis bum away and doesn’t know where he is, Barnes borrows the telephone and calls in an APB on the tennis bum.
As he’s doing this, Jessica asks where Lou (the bodyguard) was when Mickey came out of the den, that Mickey didn’t see him. He went to his room because Johnny told him to get lost. Buster says this means that he was expecting a “broad” (a woman). He always sent Lou away when he was expecting a female visitor.
Lou doesn’t think this is plausible, though, because he wasn’t given a name to call down to the front gate. Jessica mentions that perhaps the guard knew this woman on sight. When Lou said that Johnny’s rule was female guests always had to be specifically called down, Jessica looks at Peggy and says, “there are exceptions to every rule.”
Jessica and Peggy talk privately; Peggy confirms that it was her and that she wanted to talk to Johnny about Terry, but she found him in a mellow and affectionate mood and for the first time since she left him, they made love. She then discusses how Johnny always had a way with women—which was why she ended up leaving him. He was always using women and seemed genuinely surprised that Peggy cared. He even once took a girl away from Buster, who was heartbroken over it until he made a joke of it.
A bit of talk later, Jessica asks if Johnny had any enemies and Peggy said that last night Johnny was bragging about “putting one over” on a mobster named Milo Valentine (this would be the mobster who called him on his car phone, that he said he had protection against). Milo started Johnny in show business, but their relationship turned sour. Last night, Johnny said that he felt like he could nail Valentine to the wall, but didn’t explain what he meant by that.
Jessica then goes to Sergeant Barnes at the police station to give him her latest theory that Johnny was killed by a hitman. She remembers reading that shooting someone in the back of the head was part of the mob’s execution ritual. Which sounds rather inconvenient and also at odds with the mark of a professional killer being to shoot someone twice—once in the heart and once in the head. But, what do I know?
Barnes isn’t overly impressed by the idea that Johnny was killed by a hit man but he doesn’t dismiss it. When he worked in Chicago before he came here, he remembers hearing rumors that Johnny had a mob connection.
Jessica thinks that this would put the kabosh on the tennis bum theory, but Barnes disagrees. Hitmen don’t wear a t-shirt that says “professional killer”—they have some kind of cover. Tennis seems good for this, allowing him to move around. He’d have started an affair with Terry to gain access.
Back at the Shannon residence, Buster is out by the pool making a phone call to Milo Valentine, saying that he has an urgent matter to discuss. When he hears Terry draw breath in surprise (she’s listening on another phone, inside the house), he realizes the conversation is being overheard and asks who’s on the line, to no avail.
Jessica then comes up to the house in a taxi, and after questioning the security guard offscreen, she goes inside and talks with Terry, who is sitting in her father’s favorite chair and watching tapes.
She comments on the tape that she was watching. “That Vegas showgirl nearly became my stepmother. But so did a lot of others.”
During the conversation, it comes up that Terry took the family photo that’s missing from the wall up to her room. She took it right after they found her father because she needed something of him to hold onto. The guy on the tapes is a stranger; her daddy was the man in the photo.
Jessica asks about the tennis bum and how they met. Terry says that he was the loudest, most obnoxious player in the bar at the tennis club so, knowing that her father would hate him, she picked him up. She’s fairly certain he didn’t kill her father, though, since when she told him that her father was in the den, the tennis bum was too scared to leave her room.
Terry also ends up telling Jessica about Buster’s phone call to Milo Valentine. Jessica also gets some further information about the VHS tapes above the television. Most are of Johnny’s TV shows, but a bunch are of his pool games. He had a camera installed to record the pool table so he could watch his games and figure out how to improve.
Jessica says that it’s hard to see in the dark corner where it is.
The scene then shifts to a few miles north of the Mexican border, where some police catch up with the tennis bum and arrest him. As he’s being led to the police car, he says that he didn’t kill Johnny Shannon, Terry did.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
(You’d only have seen this particular ad if you lived within a few hundred miles of the Pocono mountains.)
When we come back from commercial we’re at police headquarters where the tennis bum is interrogated in front of Jessica and Johnny’s relatives.
It’s strange enough when Jessica is at police interrogations; I’ve got no idea why almost everyone is here.
The upshot of the interrogation is that the tennis bum believes that Terry killed her father and used him as a patsy, which is why she paid him to leave.
Interestingly, Jessica actually tells the tennis bum to reconsider not having an attorney present, which is out of character for her. Out of character for him, he takes this advice and says that he wants a lawyer, which ends this interrogation.
Once the tennis bum is escorted out to make a telephone call, Jessica remarks to Sergeant Barnes that it seems unlikely a professional killer would have no better escape route than an unreliable van on a back road to Mexico. (She doesn’t add that it’s even stranger for him to hang around and wait to make his escape, rather than starting that night.)
Barnes replies that perhaps he’s new at it, or perhaps he’s not a pro and perhaps he’s telling the truth about Terry. Some bickering later, the Shannons leave for their home and Jessica joins them because she has something she wants to look into. Barnes asks if she’s going to let him in on it and she replies that she will once she’s sure—she’d hate to look foolish in front of the police.
Back at the house, Jessica talks to Buster, who explains that the phone call was only because he was worried that Valentine might have a contract out on Buster as well as Johnny. He also explains what the cause of the split was—Valentine got Johnny started, which gave him control over Johnny, which Johnny resented when he made it big. Johnny chafed under this and eventually started making his own moves. When Johnny failed to make an appearance at a political rally for one of Valentine’s payroll politicians, Valentine flew over and had a meeting with Johnny in the den. Buster wasn’t in the room but did hear the sounds of pool being played.
Jessica puts two and two together and concludes that Johnny taped the game with Valentine and then threatened him with the tape. The killer must have had a double mission: to kill Johnny and to retrieve the tape.
When Jessica tells him not to worry about a contract being out on him—had there been one, he’d already be dead—he tells her to say no more, he gets the picture. She asks him to repeat “I get the picture” then she announces that she knows who the killer is. She calls Sergeant Barnes to let him know that she’s solved it.
When he arrives, she begins by explaining how the killer got in. He kept a close eye on the tennis bum, figuring that he’d be brought into the house sooner or later. That night, he got lucky and followed the tennis bum in. He knew where the den was because Milo Valentine had been in the house and described the layout for him. He figured that Johnny wouldn’t help him find the tape, so he shot Johnny immediately. He then locked the door and searched through the tapes. Jessica experimented and all of the tapes up to the missing tape were played for a short time, while all of the ones after the missing tape were at the very beginning. The killer then turned off the VCR and TV, then waited. While Lou was breaking down the door, Terry turned off the alarm to let the tennis bum out. The killer went out behind him.
Barnes says that this makes sense but leaves them with the problem that they can prove that the tennis bum was in the house and can’t prove that anyone else was. Jessica demurs. The morning after the murder, Sergeant Barnes told Jessica it was his first time in the house, but he knew what was in the picture missing from the wall, despite Terry having taken it to her room right after her father was found dead.
Barnes replies, in surprise, that Jessica is good. He then takes out his gun and puts a silencer on it. He says that he never kills unless he is well paid for it, and it hurts him to make an exception in her case.
Jessica then calls to the waiting people, who come in.
She then tells Sergeant Barnes that he would be well advised to not make any sudden moves. Lou took Johnny’s death very hard.
He thinks for a moment, then smiles and hands Jessica his gun. She thanks him, saying that it means a great deal to her. He asks if she means as a trophy, and she replies no, as the only real evidence that he killed Johnny Shannon. “Ballistics will prove that the bullet came from your gun.”
After a moment, she adds, in reference to their first conversation, “That’s police procedure.”
This was a very interesting episode. It’s most notable quality, of course, is that the police detective was the murderer. This was extremely rare for Murder, She Wrote—as it should be. But I think they did a good job of pulling it off.
The main danger of having the police detective be the murderer is that he is, with regard to the investigation and often with regard to the crime itself, super-powered. That is, the extra powers which the police are given in order to fight crime put them at a tremendous advantage for committing it. The result is that it really should be impossible to catch them, and catching them requires the writer to make them do something very dumb in order to get caught.
I think that they avoid that in this episode. Barnes knowing what was in the picture was, perhaps, not maximally convincing—I’m not sure why he ever looked at that part of room—but it wasn’t dumb. He had been in the middle of discussing the case with Jessica and he had to act the part of the police detective trying to solve the case. He had to discuss it for real in order to be convincing, and he had to reveal to her all sorts of things he learned from the family. It is plausible that he had lost track of what he knew because he was the killer and what he had learned as the police detective, even if the particular execution could, perhaps, have been improved upon.
The other golden age rule this episode broke was having a hitman as the murderer. A professional killer with no connection to the victim and no personal interest in the victim’s death is simply outside of the mystery genre. That said, this episode introduced the mobster right at the beginning and introduced the character of Sergeant Barnes before he was investigating the crime. Barnes remained a significant character throughout. The episode also introduced the idea of the hitman very early, even apart from it being implicit in a mobster being involved. Further, Jessica took the option of the hitman as a live option as soon as it was mentioned. So while it broke the rules, I think that they pulled it off.
I think it was for the best that they had a hitman be the murderer very infrequently. Having said that, I have to admit that it was the case in one of my favorite episodes (Snow White, Blood Red), so when they did it, they tended to do it well.
Another good thing about this episode was the characters. They kept the cast relatively small, which enabled them to have some character development for most of them, which they took advantage of. To be clear, the character development is mostly us learning about the characters rather than the characters having an arc; that’s simply appropriate to the format. But we get complexity on several of the characters. The character of Terry is probably the most obvious, from this perspective: she starts off seeming to be a hedonistic spoiled brat who is coolly distant from her father because he represents restraint, but we find out that she was angry at him and unable to form a real relationship with him. The moment when she tells Jessica that the showgirl in the video almost became her stepmother, but then so did a lot of other showgirls, too, reveals a lot. The moment when she said that the guy on TV wasn’t really her father, her real father is the guy in the picture of happier times was quite poignant. There’s a sense in which it’s true, but also a sense in which it isn’t. Each action that we take does shape us and is part of who we are, but it is also true that some of the actions that we take are unnatural to us—they may warp and twist us, but they are never really part of us. Which is not to say that we can’t cling to them until the original isn’t left, but the distinction remains true even if we turn it into a theoretical, rather than practical, distinction. And underneath the glitzy jewelry and promiscuous behavior, there was a little girl who wanted her father back.
Mickey is another interesting character. At first it seems like he might just be a stereotype of a son who was never good enough for his successful father, but he has real depth. Even right at the beginning, he simply doesn’t respond to his father’s bluster. I didn’t describe it in the plot summary, but Johnny even tells Mickey to let him have it, saying that he (Johnny) told his own father off more than once, but this doesn’t phase Mickey. It’s not that he’s putting up with it; he just doesn’t care. But what gives it depth is that they make it clear that he’s not intimidated. He has his own goals and is pursuing them, and even still has some affection for him. He points out that his father might be wrong because this would actually be beneficial for his father to consider. This gets reinforced later, when he says that he was deeply frustrated with his father but when he gets mad he thinks of the good times.
Peggy is probably the best fleshed out of the characters. She’s divorced from Johnny but clearly doesn’t want to be. The part where she tells Jessica that she’s not even a widow is particularly poignant. She feels a widow’s loss, but does not have the support of the community a widow would have. They do not go any deeper into it than this but it points very strongly to some of the costs of divorce and even more of society having moved to being so accepting of divorce. Worse for the character, she’s one of the people who accepts divorce and thus has no framework to make sense of her grief. She eventually fades out of the story after her reunion with Johnny is revealed in order to clear up a red herring, but had there been more time there would have been very interesting places to go with her.
Even the character of Sergeant Barnes is interesting, in this episode. On the one hand, he’s keeping an eye on Jessica because he doesn’t trust her and wants to mislead her; on the other hand he is a bit hubristic and assumes that he did such a good job that she can’t possibly catch him. This raises the question of whether he was sincere when he told Jessica that she goes wrong by making her killers too interesting while in reality most killers are very dull people. One possibility is that he’s sincere but holds himself to be far more interesting than the average killer. Another possibility is that he’s insincere and thinks that the killers are actually more interesting, and this is misdirection. Yet another possibility is that he doesn’t think of himself as interesting, for as G.K. Chesterton once observed, every man is normal to himself. Or, to quote Chesterton:
To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all. In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
Another unusual aspect of this episode is that I can’t think of any major plot holes. The one question I have is how Barnes knew what the missing photo was, since his business would not (obviously) have taken him to that wall of the room, and it was a very large room with many things on the wall. On the other hand, this could be explained by Barnes making a general search of the room before concluding that the only relevant thing was the VHS tapes. He might even have been looking for the safe in the wall and perhaps tried to get in before concluding that wasn’t a way forward. And, really, that’s it. You can ask questions about how Barnes managed to conclude his business with relatively tight timing, except that I don’t think that the timing was all that tight. Mickey was, supposedly, the last one to see Johnny alive, but Johnny had time to have Peggy over and for them to make love and her to leave; presumably after this he got dressed and, feeling wistful, went to watch some tapes of his glory days, when Peggy was still his wife, where he got shot by Barnes. There is, perhaps, a bit of explanation that would be helpful for why Buster brought Johnny a glass of milk at what must have been one or two in the morning without it having been request immediately before but something could easily have been worked out. As Murder, She Wrote goes, this is airtight.
I came across another very interesting post by Caroline Furlong which can probably best be described as explaining to women why men’s fiction has so much action and so little emotional talk, but there’s quite a lot more in it—including some interesting discussion of people being trustworthy vs. people who abuse trust, for example—and I recommend reading it in full:
Something I think worth mentioning is that people (I do not mean Ms. Furlong) often confuse what takes up most of the words of a story with what the story is about. I think that there’s a very useful analogy to be had, here, from a physical lens: a lens is a large piece of glass whose purpose is to focus a large quantity of light down to a small point. Similarly, a story is very often a large quantity of words whose focus is a scene or two. But the whole point of all of those words is to earn that scene.
This can easily be shown by taking any truly great scene and showing it to someone who doesn’t know the story. It will, invariably, mean nothing to them. Or you can even see this in jokes: if you tell someone the punchline of a joke without its setup, it’s not funny.
The emotional scenes in men’s fiction are much like this: the extremely rare times when manly men talk about their feelings with each other are incredibly important, but only if you earn them by properly setting up the extremely rare circumstances where this is natural and healthy and manly. A really great example of this is the ending of Casablanca. The speech that Rick gives Victor Laszlo is an example of it; in it he tells him how he feels about Ilsa. It’s also subtle but you can see Victor Laszlo tell Rick how he feels; his almost-smile as he accepts what Rick tells him without believing it, and the way he welcomes Rick back to the fight. Much of the ensuing dialog between Rick and Captain Renault conveys how they feel, even if you have to read between the lines see it. But then you get the magnificent final line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” It is magnificent precisely because it is earned by the entirety of the movie that led up to it.
You can also see this in well-written male characters which are written by women, by the way. Consider Mr. Darcy from Pride & Prejudice. It is precisely his reserve that makes it so striking that he says to Elizabeth, “I must tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” It is this reserve that makes the letter he wrote to Elizabeth so meaningful. It’s what makes this line so powerful:
“If you will thank me,” he replied, “let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you, might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe, I thought only of you.”
More properly, it’s his reserve combined with all the rest of what he’s done and what happened, that all of these things are earned and we learn of his feelings in conditions that make it reasonable and manly of him to communicate them in those very unusual moments.
All of this stands in contrast to that women’s fiction which is mostly “fluff.” That’s Ms. Furlong’s term for it, but I think it’s well chosen, because the emotions are mostly very transient—like the lilies of the field, they are here today and tomorrow thrown into the fire. This reflects the feminine orientation toward maintaining a household, which involves keeping track of many people and their current relationships to each other. Speaking as someone who does a lot of this himself because he has three children, you need to keep track of how everyone’s doing because the day-to-day changes in people are significant. When someone is suddenly quieter, there’s a good chance that they’re sick—or have some other problem that they need help with. If they’re suddenly louder, they might have a problem they need help with or they might be getting more caffeine than they realize. If they feel lousy and are lethargic about things that they want to do, they’re probably sick, whereas when they just feel lousy they might be having a stress reaction to something they don’t want to do. Similarly, some problems between kids they need to work out on their own, but some you need to step in and guide them to work out because they’re not doing it on their own and you don’t want to let problems fester. Letting problems fester leads to less well-developed social skills than when you step in and fix the problems they can’t, because people will mal-adapt to bad circumstances. Those women who have a facility for this—and it’s probably most of them—find the application of this facility to fiction satisfying, in a very analogous way to how many men find carving, or woodworking, or beating a video game very satisfying to their facility for problem solving. Thus the fluff—tons of transient emotions on display—gives lots of scope for refining one’s reading of people based on their trivial actions and comparing to the feelings that they express. (This is, of course, an oversimplification of what’s appealing about it to the people to whom it appeals.)
The Red-Headed League is, justly, one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories. But while it is mostly known for the cleverness of the plot, I really appreciate that its structure shows how thieves are often their own worst enemies.
The most notable quality of a thief is that they are not willing to do the just work to get what they want. Outside of a highly developed economy this mostly means that they are not willing to build, or husband animals, or plant crops, or spin or weave or whatever it takes to get what they want. Within a developed economy this means that they’re not willing to pay for what they want with money that they have earned. And while most of the time this means that they take money from others, it also means that they are not above getting people to do work and then not paying them. And this was the downfall of the Red-Headed League.
The reason that Sherlock Holmes foiled the bank robbery for which the Red-Headed League was set up is that Mr. Jabez Wilson came to him to find out what the Red-Headed League was about. The reason that Mr. Jabez Wilson came to Sherlock Holmes was because the Red-Headed League was summarily dissolved and all efforts to try to contact the representative of the Red-Headed League showed that something underhanded had taken place. The reason that the Red-Headed League was dissolved was because the tunnel that they were digging into the bank had been completed. They no longer needed Mr. Wilson out of the way so they invested no more time or money in him. I think it is not coincidence that this took place on the day that Mr. Wilson was to be paid for the previous week’s work. Had Mr “Duncan Ross” of the Red-Headed League showed up and paid Mr. Jabez Wilson the four pounds, Mr. Wilson would have gone home happy that Saturday and not contacted Holmes.
Saving four pounds cost the thieves £30,000.
On its face this might sound stupid but the brilliant part of the story is that it is stupid in exactly the sort of way that thieves often are. It’s not that they didn’t think of this at all; they did and just thought it sufficient for Vincent Spaulding to tell Mr. Wilson to wait for a letter in the mail. That is, they trusted that instead of spending money (and thereby doing work) they could instead trick Mr. Wilson into doing what they wanted.
This is excellent symbolic structure in the story because the fundamental problem with stealing is that it does not actually work; stealing is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. If only the criminals had been a bit more diligent, they would have gotten away with it… means, in the end, that they would have succeeded if they were not the sort of people who are thieves.
(There are always exceptions; the world is only ever partially fallen because, to be completely fallen, it would have to not exist. You will occasionally find people who are oddly virtuous in pursuit of some vice, but it is always a temporary thing. Vice is a degenerative disease because virtue is only ever maintained through constant renewal, and the renewal comes from aiming at something higher. When someone gives up on the higher aim to the point of becoming a career criminal, they have abandoned the source of renewal that will maintain their virtue. And so they will degenerate.)
On the seventeenth day of March in the year of our Lord 1985 the eighteenth episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set just outside of Cabot Cove, it was titled Murder Takes the Bus. (Last week’s episode was Footnote to Murder.)
The episode actually begins with Jessica and Amos discussing their travel plans to some kind of meeting of the Maine Sheriff’s Association. Since the car isn’t working and they’ll have to take the bus, they’re likely to miss the hors d’oeuvres, which disappoints Amos greatly.
But they should be there in time for the drawing—they’re giving away a big screen TV—and Amos feels that it’s his lucky night. (At the time, a “big screen TV” would have been a large, heavy cathode ray tube TV whose screen measured around thirty inches, or perhaps a little bigger. There were projection televisions of the time that might measure up to sixty inches, but they were extremely uncommon, especially because they had pretty poor picture quality, even by the standards of the day.)
At the bus stop we meet a few characters. Here’s Cyrus Leffingwell. He’s got a thick Maine accent and likes local busses because you can sit back and enjoy yourself.
Also, from the smell of the air (and the occasional bit of thunder that we can hear) he predicts that it will be raining in twenty minutes.
A moment later the bus comes and people begin to board. Jessica is surprised to see a new bus driver, as a fellow named Andy Reardon normally runs this route. The bus driver explains that Andy has the flu.
There are not a great many people on the bus, but we get a look at a few of them.
This is Kent and Miriam Radford. Kent is a professor. Miriam recognizes Jessica—she’s a fan.
Sure enough, the storm overtakes the bus and it begins to rain hard before long.
Also, probably not entirely by coincidence, but unusual for Murder, She Wrote, the first shot we get of the bus driver’s face coincides with the guest star credit for the actor playing him.
As the bus makes its way through the stormy night, it comes up to the state prison, where a man who has been standing in the rain hails the bus. We know it’s the state prison because of an establishing shot of a helpful sign:
The man gets on looks around, noticing something that gives him pause.
He’s going to Portland and doesn’t have a ticket, but apparently on this bus line you can pay the fair in cash. Which he does. After receiving his change, he silently walks to an available seat and sits down.
Jessica notices the book he’s holding.
The original shot was very dark and I could barely make out the title, so I edited it to increase the exposure. It’s a well-worn copy of The Night the Hangman Sang. (So far as I can tell, that’s not a real book.)
A bit later, they run into an obstruction. A man in a yellow raincoat boards the bus for a moment to explain that powerlines are down and while they can get through, they need to be very careful. There is also a fair amount of flooding. The road is open, but the guy doesn’t know for how long it will remain so.
Quite unusually for Murder, She Wrote, we’re about five minutes into the episode and still getting the occasional credit. This is quite the slow opening, though the suspensful music helps by letting us know that it is going somewhere.
After a while of the bus continuing on its journey, Miriam gets up from her seat and sits in one behind Jessica and introduces herself. She’s a huge fan and tells Jessica that she’s in Miriam’s top ten most stolen list—Miriam is a librarian. They’ve had to replace Jessica’s books dozens of times over the years.
Some time later, a man who just got out of a broken-down car hails the bus. He gets on and inquires the fair to Portland.
The bus driver asks if he was the one following the bus for quite some time and he replies that he was—he thought it would be safer with the bus taking the brunt of the storm. He adds that he’s now sorry that he passed the bus and finds a seat.
As he puts his coat into the overhead compartment, he inadvertently reveals that he’s carrying a gun.
Jessica notices, and some sinister music plays.
Some time later, the bus pulls up to a diner. The bus driver calls back to the passengers that they seem to be having some engine trouble. They’re welcome to get out and stretch their legs while he checks it out.
As the passengers shuffle off the bus, Jessica notices the name of the bus driver.
Inside the diner, as the people from the bus file in, we get some characterization. The owner of the diner is surprised to see them—he heard on the radio that the road was closed—but friendly. The professor (Kent) says some extremely nerdy things which confirm his professorhood. There’s also a little bit of bickering, which helps to establish how much people would rather get to their destination than be inconvenienced.
When Amos gets up to look at the menu, Jessica notices something in the bus out the window.
I’ve upped the brightness in the dark areas a bit, but even so, you can’t really tell who those people are. They do seem to be having a bit of an argument, though—there are some angry gestures.
A while later, after Jessica and Amos finished the pie that they ordered shortly after coming in, the bus driver comes in and says that they’re not leaving soon, he just needs to rest for a bit. Amos goes to a payphone outside to call Portland and let them know what’s up—it turns out Jessica is supposed to give a speech at the event—and Jessica goes out to the bus to get the book she was reading and forgot to bring in with her.
On the bus there is only the man who was picked up just outside of the prison, apparently asleep. When Jessica tries to wake him for some reason, his head lolls over and it turns out that he’s dead.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back from commercial break, Jessica has brought Amos and they’re examining the body. He suggests notifying the bus driver and not moving anything until the coroner arrives. Jessica convinces Amos to at least do a little investigating, even though he’s out of his jurisdiction, because the killer had to be one of the people on the bus and it will be some time until the authorities arrive.
Amos consents and checks the corpse’s pockets, but there’s nothing in them.
Jessica remarks that it’s ironic that the man should be killed the very day he’s released from prison. I don’t see how it’s ironic in any way, but they had to work in that he was recently released from prison somehow. Anyway, Amos objects that he could have been a visitor or a weekend guard. Jessica doubts it, though. He’s wearing a new suit, he has on new shoes, and paid for his bus fair with crisp new bills.
Looking around, they find his wallet on the floor. It contains the man’s release paper—his name turns out to be Gilbert Stoner—some money, an out-of-date driver’s license, and a photograph. Jessica concludes that someone was looking for something. Then she notices that Gilbert’s suitcase is missing.
She then looks down at the body and in a flash of lightning she notices some smudge marks on his neck and on the collar of his shirt.
Just then Miriam comes onto the bus to get a book. She then sees the corpse, screams, and nearly faints.
The scene then shifts to some time later with Kent comforting his wife and her crying about how awful it was. Cyrus then walks in and says that he tried to call the police but the phone line appears to be dead.
The owner of the store brings out some coffee for everyone and tells them that it’s on the house (an expression meaning that the store is paying for and there’s no charge to the people receiving it).
Amos then gets up and introduces himself. While he has no jurisdiction here, he has an obligation to assume authority until the local police arrive, and he hopes that they will cooperate.
Jessica then remembers where she heard the name “Gilbert Stoner” before. It was during some research she did for a book. He was involved in a robbery in a bank in Augusta. (Augusta is a town in Maine, about fifty miles north-east of Portland.) This rings a bell for Amos—the Danvers Trust Company.
The owner of the diner speaks up, saying that he remembers that being all over the TV for weeks…
…about fifteen years ago.
Kent then rattles off some information about it. Three men pulled it off but were apprehended. Cyrus concurs, though he says, “at least one of them was.”
At Jessica’s prompting, Amos then asks for everyone’s names, why they were on the bus, and where they were at the time of the killing. There is some grumbling at this and someone remarks that, “Obviously, he thinks that one of us killed him.”
Amos replies, “I think ‘obvious’ is the right word, sir. Unless, of course, this Stoner fellow somehow managed to reach up behind his head and stab himself in the back of the neck with a 10-inch screwdriver.”
Amos sometimes has a way with words.
Kent and Miriam introduce themselves—he’s an associate professor of Mathematics and she’s a college librarian (the head librarian, she points out). They’re on their way to Boston to do some research. Kent says that he was in the “video alcove” playing “Road Hog.”
Cyrus says that Kent is telling the truth—he heard Kent playing the game while he (Cyrus) was in the gift shop. Why a diner would have a gift shop, no one says. Cyrus mentions that he’s from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is a retired mailman, and has no idea who the poor dead fellow is.
We then meet a young couple who have been on the bus and occasionally bickered in terms sufficiently suspicious-sounding that I was immediately convinced that they’re red herrings.
He’s Steve Pascal and the woman is his wife. Her name is Jane. He’s a computer engineer and they’re on their way to Portland. She was inside the whole time and he was outside trying to use the public phone. He couldn’t get through and eventually the line went dead.
Jessica interrupts to say that she saw him through the window having a heated discussion with Stoner on the bus. Pascal replies that it wasn’t heated at all—they just exchanged a few words, no more.
We then meet Joe Downing.
He’s captain of the fishing trawler MarySue, out of Gloucester. (Somebody had fun with the names, here.) He’s going back to his boat after having visited family, and like Cyrus, had never heard of Stoner before. He was in the bar, having a drink. (Earlier, he asked the owner of the diner if it was possible to get a drink and the diner owner said yes, but he’d need a few minutes to open the bar. This diner has a remarkable number of amenities.)
We then meet the guy who got on the bus after his car broke down. His name is Carey Drayson. He was in the men’s room drying off his clothes on the radiator. He adds that if his car hadn’t skidded off of the road, he wouldn’t have been there.
Jessica asks why he’s carrying a gun and in response he shows Amos his permit to carry a concealed weapon. He’s a jewelry salesman and needs to protect himself since he carries valuable jewels in the case he keeps with him.
The Sheriff then asks the bus driver about the screwdriver. He replies that he left the toolbox open in the front of the bus and anybody could have taken the screwdriver out. He was working on the engine the entire time so he wouldn’t have seen. He thought he heard some people get on and off the bus, and he heard some raised voices, but he didn’t pay attention.
Jessica then questions Steve Pascal. She says that he was lying about his conversation with the victim being peaceful. She further says that his resemblance to one of the people in the photograph that the victim was carrying is probably more than coincidental.
Without saying anything Steve gets up and takes a look at the photo.
I can’t say that I see the resemblance.
He looks for a bit, then says that he doesn’t have to answer Jessica’s questions, or anybody else’s either and walks off.
Jane (his wife) comes and looks at the photo. She protests that she knows that Steve didn’t kill Stoner. Amos asks who the man in the photograph is—he doesn’t specify which of the three he means—and she replies that “he” was Steve’s father. He was killed in the Danvers robbery along with an innocent bystander. The innocent bystander was a woman, but she doesn’t know more than that. Stoner and the other man got away, but they caught stoner three days later. They never caught the other man and never recovered the money from the robbery.
Jessica goes to investigate and we get some shots of various parts of the diner.
Jessica ascertains that the Road Hog video game makes plenty of noises as if one is playing even while no one is there—that was fairly common for arcade games of the time.
We also see a bit of what I assume is the gift shop:
Down at the end of the hallway is a door leading to the outside:
Amos counts it up and nearly every area anyone was in at the time of the killing has a door to the outside (the bar and kitchen do as well). Which means that anyone could have done it. They then decide to check outside.
In the bus, Amos notices a light on that concerns him. It suggests that a “damper switch” is on. (Amos mentions that he worked as a bus driver for a summer before he joined the police force.) Jessica then goes around checking the doors and finds that the door to the kitchen is unlocked. She checks the next door (the one to the hallway) but before she can open it she notices some clothing on the ground. As she investigates the door open and Steve is there, glaring at her and looking as ominous and menacing as humanly possible.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we get back from commercial Steve says that he wanted to talk to Jessica and she replies that she thought he might. He apologizes for losing his temper but he didn’t kill Stoner. She doesn’t acknowledge this but instead asks him to help her get the suitcase inside—it is Stoner’s, and getting wetter by the minute.
Inside, she and Amos inspect the clothing while Steve and his wife watch. After they don’t find anything, Jessica asks what the argument was about.
Steve said that the bank robbery ruined his life—he was in junior high when his father died and from that moment on he was the son of a thief—and he took the bus because he wanted to meet Stoner and demand his father’s share of the money. But when he met Stoner, he found that he was a wreck of a man. The robbery destroyed Stoner’s life as it had Steve’s father’s, and he (Steve) decided then and there that he wasn’t going to let it destroy his, so he just walked away.
Jessica asks how Steve knew that Stoner would be released today. In reply, Steve pulls out the newspaper clipping that announced it. Amos reads the clipping aloud, as it gives some more details. The innocent bystander who was killed was Julie Gibbons, who was 16.
The coincidence of the girl’s last name and the bus driver’s last name is not lost on anyone. And Amos tells Jessica that he had figured out who did it half an hour ago—presumably a reference to what he found out when he investigated the bus.
Back in the main part of the diner, Amos makes a citizen’s arrest of Ben Gibbons. He explains that he noticed that the damper switch was thrown—and explains that the damper switch is to be used only in an emergency of the engine running away. Once it is thrown, the engine cannot be restarted until the damper switch is reset by hand. The damper switch reset is way in the back of the bus and cannot be reached except by some kind of tool like a very long screwdriver. Which Amos takes to mean that the bus driver needed to take the screwdriver out himself and so no one else took it because he had it the whole time.
There are some flaws in this logic. While the damper switch being thrown does suggest that Ben threw it in order to waylay the bus, if the damper switch had not yet been reset by the time Amos inspected it, that means that Ben did not reset the damper switch and so there was no reason to conclude that he must have had the screwdriver. Also, Ben wearing a rain coat suggests that he was working outside the bus, and Amos seemed to go outside when he saw the damper switch light and excused himself to go look at something. So to murder Stoner inside the bus, Ben would have had to take out the long screwdriver then go inside the bus to murder Stoner then leave the screwdriver there for some reason. All quite possible, but none of that is an obvious conclusion from Ben having sabotaged the bus.
Anyway, Jessica interrupts to ask Ben a question about the Danvers case—she points out the last name of the girl who was killed. He admits that Julie Gibbons was his daughter. He dreamed about revenge every day since she died. When he heard about Stoner’s release he switched routes with the regular bus driver and did fake the breakdown. He worked on the damper until Stoner was alone. Then when he went back in the bus, Stoner was sleeping like a baby. This enraged him so much that he stabbed Stoner in the neck with the screwdriver.
When Cyrus says thanks God that this ordeal is over, Jessica gives him the bad news that it isn’t. Ben may be convinced that he killed Stoner, but Stoner wasn’t sleeping when Ben stabbed him. He was already dead. There was very little blood on the screwdriver and around the wound because he had been dead at least fifteen or twenty minutes already and the blood had begun to settle in the lower parts of the body. She’s convinced that the coroner’s report will show that Stoner died of strangulation.
After Amos goes outside to try the pay phone again (the line is still out) the Diner owner remembers that his son has a CB radio in the back room. He has no idea how to use it but if anyone here does, they’re welcome to try. Carey Drayson, the jewel seller, says that he knows. He, Amos, and the owner of the diner go off to try. Jessica notices that Carey left his briefcase on the table.
Some time later, when Carey is alone in the room trying to hale someone on the CB, Jessica comes in and remarks that he’s awfully careless with his jewels, if indeed there are any in his briefcase, which she doubts. When she asks if Sheriff Tupper can take a look in it, he says not to bother and hands her his real business card.
This diner has an amazing variety of rooms in it.
He’s an investigator for the company which insured the Danvers Trust robbery. He was assigned to follow Stoner in the hopes of being led to the money. That’s been made more difficult, but he holds out hope that if they find the killer it might lead to the money. Jessica, however, isn’t so sure that it’s that simple.
Back in the main room Jessica and Amos discuss the case over coffee. Clearly, somebody was looking for something in Stoner’s briefcase, but did they find it? And where was the overcoat and the book? Why weren’t they with the suitcase?
On a hunch, Jessica says that they need to go back to the bus. There, Jessica realizes that Stoner’s body isn’t in the seat he was sitting in on the trip. He had been sitting several rows back. In that seat, Jessica finds the overcoat and the book.
Back inside, Jessica examines the book. She finds it very strange that while the dust jacket is in tatters, some of the pages aren’t even cut. (Books printed in print runs, as all of the books back in the 1980s were, use extremely large sheets of paper that are then folded up into signatures and cut. This cutting process is occasionally imprecise and leaves a folded edge intact, requiring the reader to cut it himself. By the 1980s this kind of manufacturing defect was rare, but not unheard of. I can recall having to cut a page, once.)
The power then fails. The owner of the diner tells everyone to not worry—he has a generator out back. He and Amos go together to get it started. In the dark, someone leaves the room but we can’t see who. Moments later, a shot rings out and Jessica says that it came from the office where Mr. Drayson is. The power comes back on as she gets to the office. As Amos arrives, we see Jessica examining a wound in Mr. Drayson’s arm.
This has to be the most spacious storage closet a diner has ever had.
As others come in, the diner owner notices that someone smashed up the CB radio.
Jessica adds that whoever it is now has the gun. And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back, Amos searches each person but no one has the gun.
As Jessica is bandaging up Casey, Captain Downing takes over the work when Casey complains of pain, explaining that a sailor needs to know how to care for himself and his mates, since when you’re at sea you’re an island unto yourself, so to speak. Jessica admires his work. I can’t help but think that this means that he’s the culprit and gave himself away by tying a landlubber’s knot rather than a seaman’s knot, or something like that, but Jessica doesn’t say.
She then notices that Stoner’s book has disappeared. After a bit of discussion, Jessica accuses Miriam of stealing it because it was rare and she knew its value. (Miriam has made small talk more than once about how little money she and her husband have.) Insulted, Kent dumps Miriam’s knitting bag out on the table to prove Jessica wrong, only to prove her right.
Miriam took it because it’s extremely rare and worth nearly $2,000. It would be worth more but the dust jacket and binding are in terrible condition.
Jessica finds the part about the binding interesting because Stoner clearly didn’t buy the book to read it. She examines the binding and finds that a safe deposit key had been stashed in it.
Jessica then asks Captain Downing if that’s what he had been looking for. She then adds, “Or should I say Mr. Downing, or whatever your name really is. I think you can drop the pretense of being a sailor. A real sailor would have tied a square not, not a granny, as you did.”
(Square knots and granny knots are very similar, but the square knot reverses the direction of the second wrap-over from the first and results in a more secure knot.)
Captain Downing then pulls the gun out of Amos’ overcoat—Amos exclaims at this and Captain Downing replies that he figured Amos wouldn’t look in his own pocket. A gust of wind blows open the door, distracting Downing, and Amos and Steve, working together, manage to overpower him.
When the situation is resolved, Downing exclaims that they won’t be able to pin Stoner’s murder on him. Stoner was already dead when he searched his things for the key. He admits to being the third partner, but Stoner double-crossed him and hid the money. He protests that it is absurd to think that he killed Stoner under these circumstances, though, when he’s stuck here like a rat in a cage. All the authorities needed to do was find out who he was and his motive would put him away.
Jessica then figures it out. She says that Downing is telling the truth and Amos was right all along. It was Ben Gibbons who killed Stoner. She thinks he didn’t mean to kill Stoner, but it can be proved. There were grease marks on Stoner’s collar—which never would have been there if Ben had merely stabbed Stoner, as he said.
Ben sits down and confesses. He hadn’t originally meant to kill Stoner. He just wanted him to know how much hurt he had caused. But Stoner was cold. He said he didn’t care about some dumb kid that got in the way and he’d done his time and there was nothing anybody could do. This enraged Ben so much he grabbed Stoner by the neck and didn’t let go until Stoner was dead. When the rage passed he realized what he had done and that he was no better than Stoner had been. When he saw the Captain get on the bus he figured he was a goner, but to his amazement the captain only rifled through Stoner’s things and stole his suitcase. After a few minutes of wondering what to do, he realized that he needed to stab Stoner with the screwdriver. The coroner would figure out that wasn’t how Stoner died, so that was the only way to escape, since the police would surely look into people’s backgrounds and prior relationships.
The next day, in better weather, the local police take Ben into custody. Cyrus Leffingwell remarks to Jessica that he feels sorry for Ben. Jessica concurs, saying that a good lawyer may be able to make the case of temporary insanity, and that perhaps it would be justified. Leffingwell asks if she and Sheriff Tupper will be joining them on the bus but she informs him that they’re going back to Cabot Cove so he bids her a fond farewell and she says that the pleasure of their acquaintance was all hers.
Amos then comes up and fills her in on what they missed in Portland. When Jessica didn’t show up one of the Sheirffs who loves the sound of his own voice ad-libbed a speech for over an hour. And he knew that they should have been there for the drawing for the big-screen TV. When Jessica tells him that she’s sorry for him, but he’ll survive without it, he replies that it wasn’t his name which came up, it was hers.
And on Jessica’s reaction to that we go to credits.
I really liked this episode. I mean, how do you not love a mystery set on a dark and stormy night?
Actually, it’s not that hard, given that plenty of bad mysteries have been set on dark and stormy nights, but none the less it is a great element to a story. And the broken down bus at the diner really cements the isolation and gives us the fun of a very limited cast of characters and short windows of opportunity. It even has a minor flavor of Murder on the Orient Express to it, in how many characters turn out to be related to the dead man.
The downside to the great setting with the tight constraints that really increase the intrigue is that it makes the writer’s job much harder, and they were at the limits of their ability. For example, why did the bus driver wait until Stoner was alone? There was no great likelihood of him ever being alone. It was established that Stoner was afraid of his former partner and the best way to avoid being alone with his former partner was to avoid being alone. Now, there was no way for the bus driver to know that Stoner’s former partner would be on the bus, but people in storms don’t usually try to isolate themselves.
I do think that this can be worked out, though. If the bus driver had done research and found out that this diner was the world’s largest diner with a maze of rooms, after enough hours waiting it would have been reasonable for him to take breaks from working on the engine and people will eventually find some way to entertain themselves, so he could probably have eventually found a way to get at Stoner that at least wasn’t too likely to be overheard, even if just because everyone had drifted to different places and nowhere had more than a few people in it. Which should have been sufficient for his purposes, if he really only wanted to tell Stoner how much pain he had caused and wasn’t originally planning to kill him.
But why did Stoner remain alone on the bus? He had no reason to and significant motivation to not do that. Speaking of people who probably shouldn’t have been on the bus, why did Steve bring his heavily pregnant wife on the bus to confront Stoner? Also, why did he wait until the bus broke down? He’d have had no way to know that the bus would brake down and it would be far more natural to go sit next to Stoner shortly after he got on the bus. That would have prevented Stoner from getting away, while waiting for a bus station would have made it easy for Stoner to refuse to talk to Steve.
The safe deposit box key is also a problem. Safe deposit boxes require the regular payment of a fee to maintain them. There are grace periods and such, but there’s no way that Stoner was able to pay them from prison for fifteen years. Among other things, if he tried, the authorities would have found out about the safe deposit box and issued a warrant for it. And while there are grace periods for abandoned safe deposit boxes, after fifteen years the contents of the box would have been long-ago escheated to the state. Even before that, the bank would have opened and inventoried the abandoned safe deposit box. Since that would have been only a year or so after a notorious bank robbery, there’s a good chance they’d take a look for obvious things like consecutive serial numbers and contacted the police to check. Banks are required to report transactions over $10,000, so the discovery of $500,000 in cash would certainly raise a few eyebrows. This last part is pretty fixable, though—instead of a key to a safe deposit box Jessica could have found a map to where the money was wrapped in several layers of sealed plastic bags and buried in a chest. That would have been a lot more fun, too.
Which brings me to the question of who killed Stoner. I think that it was a pity that it turned out that the bus driver actually killed Stoner. It would have been more fun if it had been the Captain. A simple revenge killing isn’t properly the subject of a murder mystery. A proper murder mystery is based on the misuse of reason towards some end that should be thwarted. (Revenge for a killing that the criminal justice system will never address is enough of a grey area to make it less fun.) Had the captain been the murderer, it would have been more fitting in this regard. And despite the captain’s protestations, it would not have been stupid to have killed Stoner at the diner. No one knew that there was any connection between them—that’s the whole reason that the captain was never caught. He could also have had a double-motive: he could have been reasonably prosperous and afraid of Stoner blackmailing him. The statute of limitations would have been up but it coming out that he had been part of a bank robbery gang that got an innocent girl killed would have cost him quite a lot—respectable people would have wanted nothing to do with him. Some people will do a lot to avoid losing social status.
One final nit I have to pick is the question of how did everyone know that Stoner would take this bus? They established that it was made public when Stoner would be released, but in 1985 it would not have been easy to find out that the only thing someone released from that prison can do is to take the bus and that there’s only one bus which comes through in the evening. Which is, itself, a bit odd, since prison releases usually happen in the morning and one could reasonably expect some kind of regular transportation to and from the prison for staff and visitors. Those would mostly be local busses, of course, so this could probably be fixed by having people in the know aware that Stoner needed to get to Portland as fast as possible and so would wait for the one bus coming through that would take him there. I do understand why, for brevity, they didn’t address this—I like to describe Murder, She Wrote as a sketch of a murder mystery—but even under the best of conditions it is a bit of a problem.
Speaking of it being a sketch of a murder mystery, they never explained Stoner’s relationship to Julie Gibbons’ death. Jane describes it as, “[Steve’s father] was killed during the Danvers robbery. Along with an innocent bystander. A woman.” The newspaper article that talks about Stoner’s release says, “During the thieves’ escape attempt, an innocent bystander, Julie Gibbons, 16, was killed, along with one of the criminals, Everett Pascal.” They’re both rather conspicuously in the passive voice, but it sounds more like Julie was shot by the police when they were shooting at the robbers, not like the robbers killed her. Which would still make the robbers morally responsible for her death, but probably wouldn’t make them responsible for it in their eyes, making Stoner’s provocative response unlikely. “Hey, I’m sorry about your daughter’s death, but I wasn’t the one who shot her—the people who shot her were shooting at me, and I really wish she hadn’t been near us. She seemed like a good kid.” That kind of thing can go a long way to making an angry father less dangerous, and Stoner certainly gave the impression of a coward. Plus, had he actually directly killed the girl during an armed bank robbery, he probably would not have gotten out of prison after just fifteen years.
Setting the plot aside, there were a number of good characters in this episode. Cyrus Leffingwell was a lot of fun. It’s always nice to have an imperturbable character with sense in a murder mystery (other than the detective). Steve was played a bit too angry for my taste, but I very much liked his character arc. Carey Drayson had the beginnings of a good character, though after establishing him the episode mostly just uses him as a plot point and nothing more. The characters of Kent and Miriam were also interesting—they were big characters full of personality, but who had nothing to do with the murder. It’s helpful to have some counterpoint characters in a story. It’s both good for the story and also serves the practical point of not making the murderer obvious by being the only character. Of course, the temptation for the writer is often in the opposite direction—of making the murderer barely a character at all. Which is closer to what we got here—Ben Gibbons didn’t have much of a personality, though Michael Constantine did convey a lot of anguish non-verbally.
On the tenth day of March in the year of our Lord 1985, the seventeenth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in New York City, it was titled Footnote to Murder. (Last week’s episode was Sudden Death.)
After some establishing shots of New York City while wistful piano music plays, we then come to a small diner where a poet is composing a poem:
Why go on alone, rejected… with Cupid’s turgid rights neglected?
He then pulls out a gun and Jessica, walking in, says, “You’re going to kill yourself, Horace. Those cigarettes will be the death of you.” (The gun is revealed to be a souvenir lighter.)
It turns out that they’ve both been nominated for literary awards (Horace for poetry, Jessica for mystery), which is why they’re in town. He also asks after some women and Jessica replies that he left Cabot Cove strewn with broken hearts last summer.
After a bit of establishing that he’s got no money, they head off to the award ceremony.
Before we get there, though, we get an scene of a blue collar schlub who just came home…
…and sees something in the newspaper which upsets him. (To set the mood, the establishing shot was from outside, through his rain-covered window.) He puts the newspaper down, visibly angry, and grabs his keys. As he’s leaving, the camera zooms in on the newspaper article which so upset him:
If you look very closely, you can see that under the picture of the man are the words “Hemsley Post” and “Master of Ceremonies”. We can’t make anything else out, so that must be what upset him. That said, I don’t think that anyone would have been able to read this on broadcast television during the moment it was on the screen, so it couldn’t be too important.
We then meet another character, who is doing pushups. Or rather, half-pushups. (He doesn’t get lower than his elbows.) He manages seven before a knock on his door interrupts him. The camera then switches to an establishing shot through his window, and we hear thunder.
They are establishing the heck out of the rain. Perhaps someone’s umbrella is going to be significant in the episode?
The person at the door turns out to be Tiffany Harrow, the assistant awards coordinator.
Stills don’t do justice to how happy she is to meet him.
His name, by the way, is Hemsley Post. The picture of him in the newspaper must be several years old.
You can see him admiring her shoulder pads
In addition to the detail that, upon hearing the knock at the door he skipped from seven to twenty in his count (and raised the volume at which he said “twenty”), we get a sense of his character from the enthusiastic way he helps her out of her coat, unasked.
She thanks him for being the master of ceremonies and remarks that it’s a pity that he’s not up for an award himself. He replies that even the mighty oak must let a little light fall on the saplings. (This is probably the writers’ way of letting us know that he’s a washed-up literary titan who hasn’t written anything of importance for years.)
After he offers her a drink and she declines, her gaze falls on something that might well be the manuscript to a novel. We get a closeup of it, so we know it’s important:
These closeups are always interesting, but a bit conflicting. On the one hand, they mark the important clues out with no subtlety. On the other hand, they are careful to try to give us no context, so there is still something to figure out. It was necessary, given what broadcast TV was like. Don’t get me wrong; the quality of the image of broadcast TV was often pretty good, given the low resolution of TVs of the day. But it could also be fairly bad, especially if weather was unfavorable and the viewer had an cheap, old, or especially a cheap and old TV.
I tried to re-create an example of how bad it could get, going from memory:
Sometimes it wasn’t this good.
She then remarks that everyone is talking about his new, unpublished novel. He replies that it’s quite the best thing he’s ever done. It’s the definitive novel on the Vietnam war. (He puts it back in the briefcase and closes the briefcase as he says this.) When she says that she’d love to read it, he replies that no one has read it, not even his publisher. This is, in fact, the only copy.
But then his tone changes and tender music starts playing and he says that perhaps if she came back tonight, after the party, he could read some of it to her. She replies, in a seductive voice, that she finds great literature stimulating.
Then his wife knocks at the door.
He greets her by saying, “Alexis, my darling. I wasn’t expecting you.”
To which she cooly replies, “Obviously not.”
Tiffany is delighted to meet her, then leaves. Alexis doesn’t seem to care but gets straight to the point: she heard that he got a six figure advance on his new book and she’d like to discuss the $264,000 she’s lent him over the last six years. (She wants it immediately; her lawyers have drawn up a contract.)
They reminisce a bit about old times—he brings up a safari in Kenya—but she rebuffs his invitation to come back for a drink, and leaves on a threat to have her lawyers eviscerate him in court if he doesn’t sign the contract.
The scene then shifts to the lobby of a hotel, where we meet Adrian Winslow, though only after another establishing shot of the pouring rain outside.
That’s not academic garb, it’s just a flashy scarf and a dark overcoat.
He’s being interviewed by a reporter asking whether his latest book, Pericles at Parnasses, is a metaphor for the communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s. (To be fair to them, before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the number and extent of communist spies in the USA, particularly in the 1930s through 1950s, was not well known in the USA.) Anyway, he rebuffs this idea, having already stated that “history as literature” is a challenge suitable for his talents. A young woman comes up and asks for his autograph then asks if he’d read a short story of hers, but he declines, saying that his attorney will not let him read unsolicited manuscripts.
As a fun fact, Adrian is played by Robert Reed, who is best known for playing Mr. Brady on the show The Brady Bunch (which ran from 1969 through 1974). The way Mr. Reed plays Adrian is quite interesting. It’s hard to convey in words, but take the most pompous, full-of-himself person you know, at 50% more pomposity, and you’ll possibly imagine Adrian in his more modest moments.
The scene then shifts to the men’s room, where Hemsley is combing his hair in the bathroom mirror. The blue collar schlub from earlier walks in and tells Hemsley that he wants to speak with him. Hemsley is contemptuous until the sclub mentions that his name is Frank Lapinski. There’s a bit of a physical altercation where Lapinski proves to be far more adept at hand-to-hand combat than Hemsley is.
As he’s holding Hemsley in a painful arm-lock and reciting his complaint—that he’s waited four months for some kind of answer then suddenly reads that Hemsley has a new novel and should probably kill Hemsley and likely will if he can prove that Hemsley stole his book—a stranger walks in to the men’s room. Hemsley calls out to get security because he’s being robbed. Lapinski gets in one more threat, deftly deals with the security guard who walks in, then makes his getaway. (As an interesting detail, Hemsley detains the security guard from giving chase, explaining that he’s fine and the guy didn’t get anything. Ostensibly, it’s not worth the security guard risking his safety, though clearly Hemsley doesn’t want the guy caught.)
The scene shifts to Horace and Jessica walking in the lobby of the hotel where the conference is going on (the same lobby we saw Adrian in). The same woman who asked Adrian for his autograph approaches them, recognizes Jessica, and asks for her autograph, too.
She also asks Jessica to read her short story. Jessica is a little reluctant, but accepts. She gives Jessica the manuscript—her name and address are on the cover. Jessica reads her name, Debbie Delancy, and says that it has a certain ring to it. She replies that she thought it sounded literary when she made it up.
Jessica and Horace then make their way to a reception for the authors before the main event, and we start off seeing this through a rain-covered window, too.
There is thunder, as well. While in other shows it might just be cool atmosphere—storms are perfect for murder mysteries because they tend to isolate people—Murder, She Wrote usually doesn’t usually waste something like atmosphere when it comes to clues. The storm must be a clue.
That said, it is interesting atmosphere, too.
Anyway, we get the dialog from Adrian with the woman he’s talking to. He is congratulating her on her tenth week on the best seller list.
Her name is Lucinda Lark. We also learn that the name of her book is Woman Unleashed and it’s apparently a (somewhat) high-brow romance novel. Adrian can’t keep the politeness up for long, though, and when she says that her next book is going to be more literary, he scoffs and she, offended, excuses herself.
We then see Jessica and Horace run into Tiffany Harrow. Horace offers her a drink, calling it an offering on the altar of beauty, and she accepts it. When Jessica says that it’s nice for writers to get to meet each other like this, she explains that she’s not a writer—writers mostly starve, while the real power is in publishing. She correctly identifies Jessica as being in mystery and Horace as being in poetry, then excuses herself, handing the drink back to Horace.
We then see Hemsley, saying that the greatest novels have always been about war.
Those are amazingly gothic windows.
I find it interesting how much taller he is than everyone else. I don’t know that it means anything, but at the same time they chose their camera angle to emphasize it.
Anyway, Adrian hears him talking and comes over, asking him what the new book is about. When Hemsley says that it’s the definitive novel on the Vietnamese war, Adrian replies that this is remarkable since Hemsley only spent a week in Vietnam as a correspondent for Playboy. (Playboy was a pornographic magazine which was either widely regarded for its articles or else many people were willing to pretend that its articles were great in order to explain why they purchased it. I cannot say which it was from my own knowledge, but for whatever it is worth, I did not hear this claim made about other pornographic magazines of the time.)
Anyway, Hemsley is not one to take this lightly. He replies, “At least it’s not that prissy drivel you write, Adrian. Greek boys, mincing about.”
After a few more barbs traded, Hemsley tells Adrian that he gave him a good trashing ten years ago and is willing to do it again. Adrian replies that ten years ago he (Adrian) didn’t have a black belt. Presumably he means the rank of black belt in Karate, rather than owning an item-of-clothing belt which is black, since most dress belts at the time were black and this minor bit of fashion trivia would not have been interesting.
After a bit of protracted staring, Hemsley merely says “Hmph” and walks away.
He walks over to the bar, where Horace is making up poetry for Lucinda, who seems enraptured.
Is her dress made from window curtains? And where are the shoulder pads?
When she asks what it means, Horace replies that he has no idea.
To be fair, that accurately represents a lot of poetry from the 1900s.
Hemsley then interrupts and tries to engage Lucinda in conversation, which Horace doesn’t take well. He insults Hemsley’s most recent (published) novel as having bad grammar, so Hemsley punches Horace. After another visual gag of Horace lighting a cigarette with his novelty lighter than looks like a handgun and Hemsley fearing for his life, only to become more angry when he realizes the gun isn’t real, Jessica scolds Horace and Hemsley until they stop fighting.
The scene then transitions to the next day with a vertical wipe, and after an establishing shot of the hotel, we see Jessica walk up to a door carrying an umbrella and knock. The person who opens the door doesn’t seem too happy to see her.
Jessica apologizes saying that she thought that this was Mr. Post’s room. The man says that it is, and Jessica explains that she thinks she picked up Mr. Post’s umbrella the previous night, after the party. She was hoping that he had her umbrella. I guess this is why they established the heck out of it being raining the night before.
The man says that perhaps he does, and invites her to come in.
That’s when we discover that Hemsley Post is no more.
We then get a close-up shot of the murder weapon:
I could be mistaken, but that looks like a sword-handle to an umbrella. I wonder if one of the suspects—perhaps Horace—had a sword-umbrella.
Then after a reaction shot from Jessica, we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back, we get another establishing shot of the building:
These establishing shots are quite interesting. They gave viewers time to run back from whatever they were doing during the commercial break, of course, but they also give a lot of feel for the location. Most episodes set in New York City could really have been set anywhere, and it’s mostly in establishing shots that we get the sense that we’re in New York City. (That and whatever actors do a New York accent—Murder, She Wrote was rarely consistent with accents.)
Anyway, the man who opened the door turns out to be Melvin Comstock, an assistant district attorney. He asks Jessica if the sword stuck in the victim is her umbrella. She tells him, sourly, that it isn’t. Anyway, he’s taking personal charge of the case, but he introduces the homicide detective who would otherwise have been in charge.
Here, his name is Lt. Meyer. Of course, if you ever watched Murder, She Wrote after the fourth season, you’ll recognize him as Sheriff Metzger, who replaced Amos after Amos retired. Given that Metzger was a cop in New York City before coming to Cabot Cove, I wonder why they didn’t just keep the character he already played. Perhaps “Meyer” didn’t have the right sound to it.
Jessica asks about the manuscript to Post’s latest novel, but it’s not in the room. In looking for it, Lt. Meyer does find a key, however. It’s to room 2441, which is in some other hotel because there’s no twenty fourth floor in this one. Jessica also notices a smudge of lipstick on the pillow on the bed, and a copy of Woman Unleashed, signed by the author, on the nightstand. (The message, “To the old master from his humble disciple, Lucinda Lark” was dated the day before, that is, the day of the awards ceremony and, presumably, the day of the murder. I don’t think that dating inscriptions is at all a common practice and Lucinda certainly didn’t seem to be the type to know what the date even was, but I doubt that this really matters.)
Jessica then finds a pair of glasses in the bed, saying that she wondered what Hemsley was reading, since there was no book in evidence. Comstock is spending most of his time on the phone arranging publicity and is uninterested in this discovery. He’s equally uninterested in the threatening letter on Hemsley’s desk from Frank Lapinski. Keeping this letter is a bit of an odd thing to do and bringing it with him on this trip—Lapinski couldn’t possibly have known the hotel that Hemsley was staying at to send it to him at the hotel—was even stranger. I can’t imagine Hemsley intended to write back, and the other possible motives for bringing this letter are even less plausible. I suppose he brought it because murder mysteries need clues, which was uncharacteristically selfless of him.
Anyway, Comstock gets tired of Jessica being around and collects her things—inadvertently putting the glasses Jessica found into her purse—and shoves her out the door. The scene then changes to Horace being interrogate in Comstock’s office. The odd thing is that we get an establishing shot of a building that I really doubt that Comstock’s office is in:
For reference, here’s the google maps view of One Hogan Plaza, which is where the NYC district attorney’s office is:
You’ll notice that it’s a wide building, with no more than five or six floors, not a skyscraper with forty or fifty floors. I suppose that there was no stock footage available of this building.
Anyway, it turns out that the sword umbrella belonged to Horace—he bought it at an antique store on second avenue because it was raining. His accounting for his whereabouts is a bit vague—he went to the hotel bar after the ceremony and then everything was blank until he woke up at noon.
Jessica then tells Comstock that it’s obvious that someone took Horace’s umbrella by mistake.
After some haranguing by Jessica, Comstock asks Meyer whose room the key was to and it turns out to be Tiffany Harrow. She’s waiting outside, so they bring her in. She gave Hemsley the key so he’d remember her room number—he’d offered to show her the manuscript and she didn’t want to go to his room. He never showed up, though. She waited, then ended up going to dinner with Adrian Winslow.
After she leaves, Comstock grills Horace and asks him whether he did or did not kill Hemsley Post. Horace replies that, to be strictly honest, he doesn’t remember. Comstock says that’s good enough for him and has Meyer book Horace on Murder One (that is, murder in the first degree).
After insulting Comstock a bit and vowing to find the real killer, Jessica follows Meyer and Horace out to the elevator and discusses the case. Meyer tells her that everyone knows that Comstock is a real jerk but he is in charge. Unfortunately, Horace had gotten into the elevator and Meyer didn’t, and the elevator closes. Meyer then notices this and runs for the stairs.
And on that bombshell, we go to commercial.
When we come back, Horace wanders out of the elevator and sees a uniformed officer, who he tells that he’s not sure he belongs here. The officer tells him to tell it to the judge and to get back in line—a line that turns out to be for some kind of prostitution bust, but they drew a judge who doesn’t want the customers, only the prostitutes. So the men are dismissed and this includes Horace—over his protests. But the officer tells him to go, so he goes.
In the next scene Jessica is in a phone booth at her hotel, leaving a message for Horace at his hotel, then she spies Tiffany Harrow. Jessica manages to get Tiffany to tell her about we saw in the opening scenes with Tiffany, Hemsley, and Hemsley’s wife (mostly off camera, but not entirely, since TV shows in their second half hour need to recap for people who were watching something else during the first half hour).
Jessica then goes to visit Hemsley’s wife. This is one of those cases where Jessica is oddly confrontational and accusatory. It’s especially odd as her intelligence of Mrs. Post visiting her husband was that she visited him before the ceremony—and he was obviously quite alive at the ceremony. Anyway, Jessica asks if she was the woman whose intimate company Hemsley had shortly before his death and she replies that writing wasn’t the only thing that Hemsley couldn’t do lately, though it didn’t stop him from trying.
Back at her hotel Jessica runs into Horace in the revolving door and there’s a comedy bit where they both revolve several times before finally ending up in the same place. He tells her that they let him go and Jessica pays no attention, saying that he’s got to go turn himself in right away.
At Mr. Comstock’s office, he’s interviewing Lucinda Lark. Jessica and Horace walk in on Comstock asking Lucinda to sign his copy of Woman Unleashed. After clearing up that Horace didn’t escape, he was lost, Jessica begins haranguing Comstock about beginning a real investigation. For example, what about the inscription in Lucinda’s book?
Lucinda explains that this was a mistake. She had signed it before and just wrote the wrong date—she’s not very good with numbers. She then adds that, while she’s sure no one would suspect her, in any event she has an alibi—she spent the evening and the entire night with Horace.
In the hallway, as Jessica and Horace are leaving, after Horace laments having spent the night with Lucinda and not being able to remember, Jessica tells Horace that Lucinda might have made up their tryst just to give herself an alibi. If so, it’s not much of an alibi since he doesn’t remember it. But it does serve to give Horace an alibi. Anyway, Jessica is off to Brooklyn.
In Brooklyn, she tracks down Frank Lapinski. After some chitchat in which he denies knowing Hemsley Post, Jessica asks him why, if he never knew Post, he was sending him threatening letters. Frank says that she has him mixed up with someone else and excuses himself.
Jessica then runs into someone who asks her if she needs help and he turns out to be an acquaintance of Frank’s. From him, Jessica learns that Frank wrote a book about Vietnam. She then asks if she can get a cab around here and the man laughs. He directs her to a phone booth. Jessica thanks him and goes to the phone book as ominous music plays.
Superman would have found this telephone booth useless.
As she looks for some coins in her purse with which to place a phone call, she notices the pair of glasses that Comstock shoved into her purse that morning and remarks that they’re not hers.
Anyway, her first phone call is to Comstock, who isn’t very impressed, but listens. The scene then shifts to Jessica walking into a bookstore and the music shifts from ominous to cheerful, with nothing having happened. We then see why Jessica went to this bookstore:
I love the headshot of Robert Reed back in the 1970s.
This is an interesting way of conveying that his books are not very popular.
She doesn’t even bother to buy his book; she just asks where he had dinner and confirms that it was not with Tiffany Harrow. (He explained that he had dinner at the Four Seasons and the young man with him was a newspaper reporter.) When he deduces that she’s trying to solve the case herself, he begins discussing it with her and says that Alexis Post is a much better suspect than Horace. Contrary to what she says, Hemsley dumped her, not the other way around. Which is why she gave him so much money.
It also comes up that Adrian used to be Hemsley’s private secretary. He’s then called away by someone who actually wants to buy a book and the scene ends.
Back her hotel Jessica runs into Debbie Delancy. She asks what Jessica thought of her story.
That’s a nice sweater.
Jessica apologizes, saying that she’s been frightfully busy, and besides Debbie only gave it to her yesterday. She promises that she will read it, though.
Jessica then goes to see Tiffany Harrow, who’s reading a manuscript in her room. Jessica pushes in, past Tiffany’s protests, and asks if she has Jessica’s umbrella. Interestingly, while she doesn’t, she does have someone else’s umbrella. Jessica then confronts Tiffany with Adrian’s denial of having dinner together. Oddly, Tiffany says that she was worried about her key being found at the murder scene and that Adrian said he would tell everyone that they would have dinner together. This seems unlikely, since Adrian was surprised that Tiffany said she’d had dinner with him, but Jessica lets it go and instead asks about the manuscript she was reading.
Tiffany then shows it to her. It’s an autobiography of an old movie star. (Tiffany is considering going out on her own and representing it herself.)
Jessica then asks what Tiffany was actually doing the night before and Tiffany said that when Hemsley didn’t show up, she took some sleeping pills and went to bed. “Life in the fast lane can be a little lonely.”
The scene then shifts to Frank Lapinski’s apartment, where Comstock and Lt. Meyer show up with a search warrant. Lapinkski slams the door in their face, grabs a briefcase, then goes out the fire escape. He doesn’t make it far, though, as uniformed police offers box him in and arrest him. The briefcase contains Hemsley’s manuscript and Lapinski confesses to killing Post.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial we get an establishing shot of the New York city streets, we follow one car, then cut to rear projection of Jessica and Horace in a driverless cab.
Maybe the Cabbie is just missing the right half of his body.
Horace is saying that stealing someone’s novel is a dastardly thing to do and he doesn’t blame Lapinski one bit. Jessica says that, despite Lapinski’s confession, something is wrong. There are too many other people with motives covering their tracks.
Horace then asks about the manuscript that “that girl” (Debbie Delancie) gave Jessica. Is it any good, or should he not ask?
Jessica replies that it’s not bad. It’s a beginner’s story about a teenage girl remembering how she felt about her brother going off to the war. (That doesn’t sound like much of a plot, but it’s really here to draw our attention to the brother going off to war—since a novel about Vietnam has been central to much of what has happened.)
Jessica then notices the glasses that are still in her purse. She remarks that she can’t imagine how they got into her bag, but she should give them back to Mr. Comstock. She suspects that they belonged to Hemsley.
Horace takes them and looks at them, then says he doubts that. He then puts them on…
Horace is right. These are quite girly.
And says that if Hemsley Post had bought glasses, he would expect him to buy something more macho.
Jessica then realizes what she wasn’t able to put her finger on and asks the cabbie to stop the car. She gets out, gives Horace cab money, then goes to see an optometrist.
After some minor humor about her previous optometrist learning his craft at the Braille Institute—Jessica is pretending that the glasses are hers—Jessica asks him to mount the lenses in new frames. She then hurries off.
We then see who she went to meet—this late in the episode, there’s a 98% chance that it’s the killer—and it turns out to be Debbie Delancie. There’s a contrivance where Jessica swaps the glasses in the new frame for Debbie’s glasses and she doesn’t notice at all, confirming that the glasses at Post’s room were Debbie’s.
Jessica then confronts Debbie with the fact that Frank was arrested the night before for killing Hemsley Post—Debbie had been at a Cabin the day before and hadn’t seen any newspapers since she got back—and Debbie becomes distraught. Frank Lapinski is her brother—the brother the story is about. After Jessica reveals the deception about the glasses, Debbie tells her what happened.
She didn’t mean to kill Post. He had seen her approaching other writers about his story and so he approached her. He asked her up to his hotel room after the party. She knew what he had in mind; she wasn’t sure what she was going to do—talk to him, or just grab the manuscript and run—but she wasn’t prepared for the way that he just jumped on her like an animal. He apparently took Horace’s sword-umbrella by mistake. In the scuffle she grabbed it and tried to use it to defend herself, but when he tried to pull it away from her all he got was the umbrella part, thus unsheathing the blade. She fell back on the couch, holding it in front of her…
If you look very closely you can kind of see the sword.
…then he walked forward and impaled himself on it.
After he fell over, dead, she took the manuscript and gave it to Frank. Hemsley had stolen the novel almost word-for-word.
She then says that she has to go to the police—she can’t let Frank lie for her. Jessica replies that she should tell them everything that happened and that Jessica thinks that she has a strong case for self-defense.
Jessica takes Debbie’s hand to comfort her, then the scene shifts to the awards ceremony—which I thought must have already happened since they had the pre-ceremony reception the day before—and Horace and Jessica leave the room together, both having won in their categories. Horace laments that the award is brass and wood, making it unhockable (that is, unsellable at a pawn shop).
They then go to a concession stand and Horace pulls out his souvenir pistol lighter to light his cigarette and the woman at the concession stand screams, ducks, and presses an alarm button. Jessica tells Horace that he should probably give up smoking and we go to credits.
This was a fun episode. Not only was there a lot of comedy, but most of it landed. They took the idea of a gathering of literary gods on publishing’s Mount Olympus and had fun with it. I do suspect that when I first saw this episode as a young child I took all of this seriously, as an adult I can see that they leaned into the absurdity.
To be fair, while the literary world was never as much like the golden age of Hollywood stars as it is made out to be, there was a lot more money and prestige in it back in the 1980s—and in the decades preceding it, which many viewers of Murder, She Wrote in the 1980s would remember. When Hemsley said that his new novel was going to be the definitive novel on the Vietnam war, he was referring to something real. There is a sense in which Catch-22 was the definitive novel on the Vietnam war (in spite of the fact that it was set in World War 2 and published before the USA became involved in Vietnam). It shaped how people thought about the Vietnam war and gave people a language to talk about the Vietnam war through references to it.
To be fair, there aren’t really definitive novels of things as complex as wars, but there are sometimes novels that are influential enough that one might at least talk about them in this way without being ridiculous. All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, constitutes much of what many people know about the first World War—even if they haven’t actually read it and only saw parts of the movie.
And this is the sort of thing that Footnote to Murder alludes to. It’s especially interesting in this context because it has many of the hallmarks of the classic great house dinner party mystery. We have a number of important people who are mostly strangers to each other who have temporarily gathered. There is money there, though in this case it comes from whatever publisher or trade association is hosting the event. And we even get a storm, though its only purpose seems to be to establish a reason for everyone to have an umbrella.
As far as the mystery goes, I think that the choice of Debbie Delancy as the killer was interesting. On the one hand, they did a good job of making her present and unobtrusive—always there, but you don’t really think of her as a suspect. But the problem is that they didn’t connect her to the story other than by being there. Nothing happens where she knows more than she should about something related to her motivation. She never shows up to something that wouldn’t be strictly necessary for her cover story but is for her real purpose. There was never anything more to her than met the eye. To be fair, her glasses do change on the second day, but that’s a clue, not a connection.
Her actual motivation was solid. It makes sense that, Post having stolen her brother’s novel, she thought that she might have a better chance of getting it back than he did. Even if she was wrong, she could easily have believed herself more clever than him and also more capable of deceiving Hemsley Post with her feminine wiles.
While the overall story and the characters were reasonably solid, the details weren’t. About the only clue that actually makes sense were Debbie’s glasses, which Jessica found in Hemsley’s bed with no reading material around. I’ve already mentioned that it doesn’t make sense for Hemsley to have carried Frank Lapinski’s threatening letter with him and it there’s no plausible way for it to have been delivered to Hemsley’s hotel room—and a man with creditors and no income is not overly likely to have his mail forwarded to him. This is more than a little problem since without the letter, there would have been no way to find out about Frank Lapinski.
The umbrella is another problem with the story. I know that they established the heck out of it raining that night, justifying why everyone at the reception had an umbrella. So far, so good. Except for Horace’s umbrella. According to his story he bought the umbrella from an antique shop because it was raining. While this would not be impossible, and Horace is quite impulsive, he’s not the sort of person to be shopping in an antique shop and notice that it’s raining, and he’s also not the kind of person who could afford an umbrella in an antique store anyway. They were careful to establish that he had no money—he said he’d buy Jessica a cup of coffee but couldn’t afford to. Later in the episode there’s a gag where Jessica gives Horace money for cab fare and he uses it to stop at a liquor store rather than go to his destination.
There were also a number of threads which were simply never addressed, one way or another. For one thing, it seems that no one took their own umbrella home the night of the reception but no one’s umbrella was ever returned to them. That’s not critical, obviously, but it would have been nice for at least someone to get their umbrella back, or at the very least find out where it went, since it was so pivotal to the plot.
It’s also an issue that the solution to the case did nothing to satisfy Jessica’s problem with accepting Frank Lapinski’s confession. She said that it bothered her that there were so many other people with motives to kill Hemsley Post who are covering their tracks. Which is fair enough, though unless the solution was a Murder On the Orient Express style conspiracy, that objection would still apply to everyone except the killer. But with Debbie as the killer, it applies with full force—all of the people with motives who were covering their tracks had nothing to do with the death of Hemsley Post. That is a flaw with this episode in microcosm: there were a lot of threads, but they were only next to each other, not connected.
Having said that, this episode was a lot of fun to watch. It had good characters in an enjoyable setting. The premise supported the cast of interesting characters. There were also a lot of jokes, many of which landed. It wasn’t perfect, but I’d definitely put it in the top 20% of episodes.
On the tenth day of February in the year of our Lord 1985, the thirteenth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled My Johnny Lies Over the Ocean, it’s set on an ocean cruise. (Last week’s episode was Murder to a Jazz Beat.) Unusually, the episode begins with a kind of dream sequence.
Pictured in the title sequence and with blurring around the edges because this is a dream, Pamela Crane, one of Jessica’s nieces goes for a swim in a pool. She doesn’t spend long in it, gets out, then walks into her house and finds her husband dead, with a gun in his hand.
She then wakes up in a mental hospital. The dream sequence turns out to be a nightmare of something that happened months ago. A nurse calms her down and she goes back to sleep.
The scene then shifts to the next day, where her father, Dr. McGill, is talking with the doctor in charge of Pamela’s case.
He’s releasing Pamela, and Dr. MacGill has his doubts, but he’s a surgeon, not a psychiatrist, so he’s willing to trust the unnamed doctor who’s releasing Pamela. The doctor goes on to say that the boat cruise that Dr. MacGill is sending Pamela on is just what she needs—sun, fresh air, and the companionship of her favorite aunt.
That favorite aunt is, of course, Jessica. Dr. MacGill is her brother, which means we’ve finally met an actual blood-relative of Jessica’s.
As they are discussing this they walk up to a place where Pam is waiting by a car. It’s a bit counter-intuitive that this discussion would happen after Pam is already waiting outside, but also curious is the palatial nature of this mental hospital:
I don’t think it is meant to convey much, past, perhaps, that Dr. MacGill is a successful surgeon. It may just be part of the general rule that if the setting doesn’t matter much to the plot, pick a visually interesting setting.
Dr. MacGill and his daughter greet each other and hug, and the scene shifts to the cruise ship.
Man, cruise ships were so much smaller in the 1980s. This is probably an exaggeration, but you might be able to fit this cruise ship in the on-deck pool of modern cruise ships.
(The limo isn’t for Dr. MacGill and Pamela, it’s for another set of passengers.)
Those passengers are Andrea:
And her husband, George:
Looking at the ship, she tells him, with a smile, that she’s almost glad that the talked her into this. Breaking stereotypes, she goes off to make one final call to the office before the trip to make sure that there are no emergencies. (In the 1980s, the character trait of being a work-addict who has to constantly check in at the office and can’t enjoy himself because Business is all he can think about was usually given to the husband.)
On her wait to make this call, she runs into Marshall (Dr. MacGill), Pam, and Jessica. Marshall is taking pictures of his sister and daughter:
It’s a little odd to have bothered to attach the flash to the camera for taking outdoor pictures during the day (it would normally be removed when the camera is put into the camera bag for transport), but I suppose it makes the camera look more imposing, and possibly on 1980s-era TVs, more like a camera even if there’s static.
Marshall than says he wishes he could get a picture of the three of them just as Andrea is walking by. He stops her and asks her to take the picture, which she does, but says she has no idea how to work a camera. It’s easy, though, you just aim and press the button, as Marshall assures her, and she does.
Marshall then gives Pam the camera and tells her that there are several more rolls of film in her bag. He also mentions that they’ve got developing facilities onboard the ship, I think the implication being that they should periodically send him pictures at the various ports the ship puts into.
As he’s wishing his sister and daughter a fond goodbye, two more characters come up in a taxi which pulls in hastily, tires screeching.
If you didn’t recognize the two comediennes, you would be able to tell that they’re the comic relief from the way that they bicker. (One of them thinks the boat is leaving without them and calls to it to wait for them.)
Later, as the ship is under way, Jessica and Pam are walking on deck and a young man bumps into Pam.
His name is Russell Tompkins, though we won’t learn that for a while. He apologizes and is obviously quite taken with Pam but can’t think of anything to say, so after awkwardly trying to think of something for a few moments, he excuses himself.
Pam goes off to get film developed while Jessica goes to cash some traveler’s checks. I mention this mostly because I find it interesting that it is now a historical curiosity but at the time was a commonplace activity.
For those who don’t know: traveler’s checks (or traveller’s cheques, if you prefer that spelling) were a means of bringing money while travelling to foreign places which were used before the use of international credit and debit cards became easy. The traveller would, for a fee, deposit money with a bank that would issue the checks. The checks had two lines for signatures on them, one to be signed at the time of issuance and one at the time of use. The bank guaranteed that if the signatures matched, the check would be paid, even if they were stolen. The double-signature offered some protection against theft, since the checks would be worthless unless the thief couldn’t successfully forge a signature to match, possibly in front of the merchant who would be accepting them. They could be cashed in the local currency, rather than the issuing currency, which is why foreign merchants would accept them. They were also a slightly safer way to carry cash than actual cash, because of the double-signature involved was a little more protection than cash would be. It was also the case that for higher values, traveler’s checks were less bulky can cash.
As Jessica hands the check to the purser to cash, she mentions that she hopes that she didn’t cause inconvenience—she’s sure her publisher used its influence to get her on the cruise at the last minute. The purser reassures her that she didn’t cut ahead in line—the cruise is only 90% booked.
The purser further explains that the ship is old and has just been refurbished, and this is a “shakedown” cruise which was only added to the schedule a month ago. They were taking last-minute bookings through yesterday.
When Jessica returns to her room, she finds Pam crying. She had been reading her husband’s last letter to her, which was a kind of extended suicide note. As Jessica comforts Pam we get some backstory. Johnny had financial trouble, and had always been secretive. He was adopted and was ashamed that his birth mother had been an unwed teenager—Pam had only found that out four months after their wedding.
Pam asks Jessica to read the letter—she hasn’t shared it with anyone else, yet—but after handing it to Jessica they’re interrupted by room service, who brings them a bottle of champagne. The crewman, who is a living Italian stereotype named Ramon provides a bit of comic relief for a minute, then leaves. When he’s gone Pam reads the card that came with the champagne and is trouble. It says, “Bon voyage, Pepper. Have a lovely trip.”
“Pepper” was a pet name that Pam’s deceased husband had for her—he was the only one who called her that.
One grave look and a quick establishing shot of the ship under way at sea at night later, the scene shifts to the dining room. The two comedy relief ladies walk in and see the Maitre d’, who tells them their table number.
Carla, the one in red, spots a wealthy man (“An Oklahoma Cattle King”) and bribes the Maitre d’ to assign them to his table. He complies, though it’s unclear whether he’s actually doing it because of the bribe or if it’s generally acceptable to make seating requests. Since most people on a cruise don’t know each other, it’s hard to imagine it can make much difference which table people are seated at or, for that matter, that the cruise has any way to assign people to tables other than randomly.
As they’re shown off to their table, George Reed spots Jessica and wants to meet her and introduce Andrea to her. Andrea is a little shy but goes along with it. When they get to Jessica’s table, George professes to be a big fan. He introduces Andrea, but Jessica says that they’ve already met and Andrea then recalls the photo she took for them by the dockside.
A small amount of chitchat later, Jessica invites them to join her and Pam for dinner, but George declines as he doesn’t want to intrude. As they walk off, Jessica notices that the nice young man who bumped into them earlier is eating alone and suggested inviting him to join them. Pam admonishes Jessica to not try to set her up and Jessica unconvincingly professes that the thought never entered her mind.
As they start looking at their menus, Pam notices a special, paper-clipped to her menu.
This was Johnny’s favorite meal; Pam made it up and never shared the recipe with anyone. She’s shaken and gets up, scattering silverware and knocking over a glass, drawing attention. After she runs off the Maitre d’ comes over and asks what’s wrong. Jessica asks whose idea the special was (it was clipped to her menu, too). The Maire d’ says that it was no one’s idea as it’s not on their menu and must be someone’s idea of a joke. Strangely, he seems angry at Jessica for having had the temerity to have this joke played on her, and after ripping up the card he walks off.
As much as this is an interesting part of the mystery, I do have to say that the recipe is not very complex. Stuffing chicken is a common enough idea and while cheese is probably more common than nuts, nuts aren’t too far behind. And mushrooms are well known for going well with chicken, at least if you’ve sauteed them in wine first.
Anyway, Jessica looks baffled by the news that this item was not on the menu, so much so that she takes off her glasses, then we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back from commercial, after an establishing shot of the ship underway at night, Jessica is in the purser’s office, asking the purser if it’s possible to find out who sent the anonymous champagne.
The purser looks it up in her filing cabinet and it turns out that it was an unsigned note with cash enclosed. (Enclosing cash was far more common in the 1980s than it is now; it’s not odd that the purser didn’t think that suspicious.) They give us a closeup of the note:
Jessica pulls out Johnny’s suicide note and the handwriting matches. Or, I should say, seems to match. The way that Johnny was found dead, by Pam, in the opening sequence, leaves no doubt that he is genuinely dead. Jessica says that she’s going to keep the note requesting the champagne and walks off.
Later that night Pamela is walking alone on the deck when she hears the name “Pepper” whispered in what sounds like a man’s voice. We cut between eerie moments of Pam trying to find the voice and Jessica back in the cabin trying the champagne that was sent. Why, I’m not entirely sure, since if it was purchased with cash and an anonymous note, it would have been selected and delivered by the ship’s staff and couldn’t possibly be tampered with. Of course, enough strange things are happening that it may be wisest to take nothing for granted, even the seemingly impossible.
After a little bit of comic relief on deck with one of the comediennes who is walking with the “Oklahoma Cattle King,” Jessica comes up and asks if they’ve seen Pam. Jessica describes Pam as “very pretty, blonde.” I find this description interesting. Maybe I’m just being put off by the giant 1980s hair and overly red makeup, but in any event, with opinions of beauty varying so much I would have used a more objective description, such as mentioning her height and hair style. Which suggests to me that this might be a way to play up the character for the audience. Be that as it may, they’re interrupted by the sound of a woman screaming.
It turns out to be the other comedienne, who is frightened at the sight of Pam lying unconscious on the ground. I’m not sure why she screamed at this—screaming is usually a fear reaction—but it was dramatically useful. Jessica and the young man who admired Pam, Russell Tompkins, rush up and the Russell, after ascertaining that she’s alive, called out to get the ship’s doctor.
The scene then shifts into the ship’s infirmary where the doctor finishes applying a bandage to Pam’s forehead, remarking that it was a bad fall but could have been worse. As he walks off the Captain, played by Leslie Nielson, questions Pam.
At the Captain’s request Pam tells the story; the only part we didn’t see for ourselves was that she was pushed down the stairs. That said, since we just got back from commercial break this is a good way to catch up anybody who just flipped to this channel.
Jessica asks that Pam spend the night in the infirmary. The ship’s doctor says that it would be best since she lost some blood. This is convenient to the plot but a little silly—how much blood can she have possibly lost through a cut on her forehead? Anyway, the captain agrees and Jessica asks that a constant guard be posted, to which the captain reluctantly agrees. Jessica then asks if she can speak with the Captain privately.
Back in his office, Jessica shows him the notes. The Captain agrees that the handwriting on the notes is identical, though Jessica suggests it might also be an excellent forgery. Since Johnny was known to be quite unambiguously dead, that really is the only option, but Jessica doesn’t mention this. Jessica suggests that the champagne be “tested” but the Captain incredulously points out that they don’t have the kind of facility that would test for “poison” aboard. (Given that there are thousands of poisons, even if they had a forensic laboratory on board, it would be far more productive to feed some to a mouse and see if it dies. It’s one thing to test for specific poisons based on symptoms, it’s quite another to test for every possible poison.)
Anyway, the Captain is a bit taken aback by the scope of the problem. There are 680 people aboard the ship. Jessica suggests that they can narrow the suspect list down considerably. Whoever is after Pam must have booked after Jessica did, and since Jessica booked only four days ago, there can’t be that many people who did that.
The Captain looks at the records and only about a dozen people booked after Jessica did. He shows her the list, remarking that it’s amazing what computers can do, nowadays. Jessica also requests 24 hour protection for Pamela and the Captain agrees.
The next morning she runs across George and Andrea. Andrea asks after Pam and Jessica tells her that it was just an accident. Pam was climbing the stairs and just slipped. I’m not sure why Jessica is lying, but I suppose it’s less awkward than admitting the truth. Or perhaps the idea is to put the killer off his guard.
In the next scene Jessica and Pam are walking along the deck discussing the case. There’s a moment of humor about the bodyguard who’s following them—for some reason Pam wasn’t told about this—but we do get a bit of backstory. Johnny’s adoptive parents died in a car crash several years ago. There is a bit of a lead with his adoptive mother, though—several months before he died she contacted him. She wrote a note and asked to meet, but she never showed up.
Shortly after this comes out, Russell Tompkins shows up and asks Pamela how she’s feeling. Jessica invites him to join them on their walk, pressures him into accepting, then immediately remembers she has an appointment for which she is late and runs off. This is close to the least subtle I’ve seen Jessica be.
This does segue us into Jessica using the ship’s radio phone to call her brother Marshall and ask him to do some digging into Johnny’s birth mother. She suggests contacting Marshall’s drinking buddy Judge Willis and getting him to help in view of the extraordinary situation. Marshall agrees, and tells Jessica that, though it doesn’t seem to mean anything, Pam’s house was broken into a couple days ago and nothing seems to be missing.
After the phone call she and the Captain discuss the situation. If the person terrorizing Pam is Johnny’s biological mother, that narrows the list down from the original twelve who booked after Jessica to women in their 40s who booked after Jessica, which are the two comic relief women and Mrs. Andrea Reed. The Captain won’t believe that Andrea is terrorizing Pam. He’s known her for years and the Reeds even honeymooned about his ship last year. “If she’s insane then I am too,” he declares. To which Jessica responds, “That’s precisely what the Bordens said about their daughter Lizzie.”
For those who don’t know, Lizzie Borden was accused (and acquitted) of the murder of her parents, and about whom the poem was written:
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.
As Jessica prepares to leave, the Captain tells her that there is a fourth candidate: the purser, Miss Shelley. She’s forty three years old and three days ago the scheduled purser took ill and Miss Shelley volunteered to replace him and was quite insistent about it.
And on that bombshell the scene fades to black and we go to commercial.
As Pam and Russel Tompkins get acquainted, Jessica, elsewhere on the ship, receives the developed pictures Pam had put in the day before. Then the PA system pages “Passenger Pepper Crane” and directs her to the purser’s office. Pam runs off, and Jessica, hearing it, runs to the purser’s office.
In the purser’s office, the purser is confused as to why Pam is yelling at her about a practical joke, but upon hearing her name she says that she doesn’t know about any joke but they did receive a telex for her.
It says REMEMBER DARLING, UNTIL DEATH DO US PART, “JOHNNY”
Upon reading it, Pamela faints.
I’m a bit unclear as to why they paged “Pepper Crane” when the telegram is addressed to “Pamela Crane,” and it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get an explanation Perhaps this is just be a mistake that the prop department made. The scene shifts to sick bay where the Captain orders that no one is to come in or out unless it’s an emergency. Jessica then suggests that they have a talk with Miss Shelley.
Miss Shelley explains that she took the assignment because she needed an escape from a difficult relationship. The man’s name is Geoffrey Windom, but don’t call his house because his wife will answer. She also looked into the “telex” and it was placed several days ago with orders to delay transmission until today. The sender remained anonymous.
Jessica then goes off to find the two comedy relief comediennes to interrogate them in her inimitable, subtle style. By which I mean that Jessica pretends to be dim-witted and superstitious. After a bit of small-talk she tells the women that they were able to get on the ship at the last minute because it’s a “jinx ship,” which explains how many things have been going wrong for her. A mention of their travel agent prompts them to explain their backstory—they had been planning a longer vacation the following year but then the company policy changed and they couldn’t save vacation, so they had to use it or lose it. This ship was the only one they could book on such short notice.
As George Reed passes, Jessica excuses herself to talk to him. She says that it’s urgent that she talk to his wife, and he says that Andrea has been sleeping in the cabin. That alarms Jessica, since a little bit ago one of the stewards had been sent to find all of the suspects and he checked Andrea’s cabin and couldn’t find her.
They rush off to her cabin and discover that she’s dead.
We then get a closeup of the items on the floor by her hand:
Jessica takes George back to her cabin. When the Captain comes in, they’re looking through photographs. They show the Captain the paper that was clutched in Andrea’s hand. It was a photograph of Pam with Johnny:
There were a lot of other photos, all taken with a telephoto lens, in her luggage. There was also a copy of Johnny’s birth certificate and a sample of Johnny’s handwriting.
George then narrates the events of the last few hours. They were sunning themselves on the deck when they heard the page asking her and two other women to come to the Captain’s office. She suddenly became agitated and said that she didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially to the Captain. She said she was going to their cabin to lie down. He offered to go with her but she refused.
This is interrupted by Jessica getting a phone call on the radio phone in the Captain’s office. It’ turns out to be’s from Jessica’s brother Marshall with the information Jessica had requested. Johnny Crane had been born to a seventeen year old high school student named Andrea Jeffries.
George confirms that Jeffries was Andrea’s maiden name.
The Captain concludes the case is over, which Jessica seems to accept. She walks with George Reed out of the office. He remarks that she’s been very understanding, given all that Andrea put her niece through. Jessica comforts him, saying that once the authorities find the private detective who took the photos, the case will be closed. George is surprised at this and says that he’s certain that Andrea took the photos herself since she was an expert photographer. As he walks off, Jessica looks concerned.
Jessica meets Pam in the infirmary. When Pam remarks she feels bad for Andrea, to be so unhappy as to do that kind of thing, Jessica replies that Andrea wasn’t unhappy at all. She was a bright, hard-working woman who made a mistake early in her life, but she didn’t deserve to be murdered. When Pam asks by whom Andrea was murdered, Jessica says that it was by her husband, but she’s just not sure how to prove it.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial Jessica tries to talk the Captain into detaining George Reed, which the Captain flatly refuses to do simply upon Jessica’s say-so. I’m really not sure why Jessica was asking for George Reed to be detained, since it was hardly likely that he would jump overboard and escape by swimming, especially when he didn’t think that anyone suspected him.
We then cut to George Reed in his cabin, pouring himself a drink and talking to a photo of his dead wife. He toasts to love and fortune, and elaborates on the fortune part, looking forward to having all the money himself. Then there’s a knock at the door and Jessica calls out to him.
When he opens the door, we see Jessica pretending to be drunk.
Angela Lansbury is a talented actress, so it’s a decent impression of someone pretending to be drunk in an over-the-top way. She accuses George of murdering Andrea, and shows him the evidence—the photo she took of Jessica, Pam, and Marshall right before the trip.
This contradicts Andrea being an expert photographer, as George said, proving that he killed her.
George says that there’s a reasonable explanation and invites her in, but she refuses. She staggers off and George grabs a bright red jacket then follows her. The chase takes surprisingly long for how slowly a pretend-drunk woman staggers, and then George finally catches up with Jessica and tries to kill her, throwing an arm around her neck. Jessica then throws him over her shoulder and Pam and Jessica step out of a nearby doorway, and Pam takes a picture of him on the ground. He looks up and the “Jessica” he tried to murder turns out to be Russell Tompkins in a blond wig and the same coat and hat Jessica had been wearing.
The next day the ship’s crew delivers George Reed to the local authorities.
I’m not sure where the cruise could have made it to where the authorities where panama hats, shorts, and knee-high socks that’s one day away from where the cruise departed, but then it’s also slightly strange that they’re handing George Reed over to the local authorities. The murder was committed, so far as we can tell, in international waters and so far as we know the ship was flying a US flag so it is the responsibility of the United States to prosecute the crime.
The Captain then greets Mrs. Fletcher. He informs her that George Reed made a full confession. Jessica says that she can’t help but think that Andrea would still be alive if they had only come to the truth sooner. The Captain doubts it; George had been planning this for months. His original plan had been to terrorize Johnny but Johnny died too soon for that. By the time he realized the plan would work just as well on Pam, Pam had entered the sanitarium, so he had to wait for her to come out.
The Captain then says he owes Jessica an apology and offers to take her to dinner. She makes a joke about one something the comic relief Italian Stewards, Ramone, had said, they both laugh, and we go to credits.
I think that this is a very clever episode. I have to admit that I thought that the culprit was the purser, and I really didn’t see it coming that George Reed was going to murder his wife. It’s actually quite rare for a Murder, She Wrote to put the first murder after the second commercial break, but even apart from that, it had me convinced that the mystery was primarily about who was tormenting Pam. It built it up well, laying in clues and keeping the suspense going.
That’s not to say that the plot was flawless. A lot of the plot hinged on the person tormenting Pam having followed them to the cruise, but how could George have done that? He could hardly have kept a twenty four hour watch on the sanitarium in order to know that she made plans with Jessica for a cruise. Are we supposed to assume that he bugged her telephone? I don’t see how he could have. Or did he bribe the psychiatrist handling Pam’s case to tell him of any travel plans Pam might make? That hardly seems likely. But that just about runs the gamut of ways he could have known about Pam’s plans. This seems especially hard to justify because he would have had no reason to assume that Pam was going to go on a cruise at all. The most natural thing would be to expect Pam to go home after her stay in the sanitarium.
Which actually brings up a curious question: why did he follow Pam onto the cruise? If we assume he somehow got the knowledge that it doesn’t seem possible for him to have had, why didn’t he just wait until Pam was back? He wasn’t in a particular rush.
That said, the cruise probably would have been better than killing his wife randomly, had Jessica not been aboard. Well, I’m not sure. On the one hand, the cruise gives a much better chance of Andrea being “caught” which really helps to explain her “suicide,” but without Jessica I’m not so sure that would have happened. It seems equally possible that without Jessica, Andrea being the one terrorizing Pam wouldn’t have been discovered, and her suicide is hard to explain apart from her being caught. That said, it might still have worked since he could present all of the evidence of her having been obsessed with Pam and on the cruise, recognizing Pam would be fairly easy since she made herself conspicuous on several occasions. On balance, if we ignore the impossibility of George knowing that Pam was going on this cruise, I think it does make sense that he followed her.
That said, I do wonder how he dealt with Andrea being paged. She would have no reason to not immediately obey the summons, since she had no idea she was implicated, and it would be difficult for George to persuade her to go to her room and have a poisoned drink first. I suppose the best explanation is that he happened to have killed her right before the summons, and was just making the most of the coincidence when he was telling Jessica and the Captain the story.
So, overall, I think the plot held together quite well except for the part where George knew that Pam was going on this cruise at the last minute. And unfortunately the entire plot depended on that. They did, at least, bury this plot hole pretty well. About the only way to have made this work that I can think of would have been to have George have taken steps to forge some kind of connection or acquaintance with Johnny and Pamela Crane, which would entail the setup having been longer. That would provide a way for them to have been notified, though it possibly could have made them more direct suspects and reduced the degree to which “it was somebody who booked after us.” On the other hand, that was only ever the assumption because they had nothing else to go on, and it could have been worked such that they still assumed that.
Leaving that aside, I think they did a great job of leading us to believe that the culprit was the purser. She always had an explanation, but also always seemed to be at the center of what was going on. It was some top-notch misdirection.
The unbelievable coincidences were also kept to a minimum. In fact, the only one I can think of was that Jessica and Pam just happened to pick, at the last minute, a cruise captained by a man that had captained many cruises that Andrea had taken, including her honeymoon cruise. That seems too much of a coincidence to be believed, but it also was kind of a throwaway line that didn’t affect the plot in any way.
Speaking of the Captain, he was an interesting character. I can’t really convey it in my description of the episode but Leslie Nielsen has tremendous charisma which he brought to the role of the Captain. So much so that it’s hard to separate out the character as written from Leslie’s portrayal of him. As the primary authority figure with which Jessica interacted, he was somewhere in between the typical two extremes of asking Jessica to investigate and asking her to keep her nose all the way out of the investigation. I can’t help but think that apart from Leslie’s charisma he wouldn’t have been very interesting. There’s a lesson, there, I think, about improving merely functional characters with interesting characterization. I think that can be overdone, though. For example, Ramone, the Italian stereotype was certainly given traits beyond what were necessary for his very minor function of delivering champagne and searching for the suspects, but it was mostly just annoying. I think that the important thing is that the characterization must be related to their function in the story. The Captain was concerned both with the individual passenger (Pam) as well as with his hundreds of other passengers, as well as his responsibility to the cruise liner. Ramone being an Italian stereotype was as relevant as having a dancing bear on stage.
I think it worth noticing, too, what the setting of the ship contributed: it gave a closed circle of suspects like you get in the classic mystery setting of the remote mansion. That always makes mysteries interesting; it reminds me of Chesterton’s dictum that the limits of an artistic work make it interesting; the frame is part of the painting. This kind of closed environment gives us something of a tight frame around the painting. It draws our attention closer to the details. Which made it especially interesting that the episode had such an element of misdirection to it as to who the victim of the episode was.
Overall, I think that this was a good episode and a very interesting one.
Next week we’re on a private Mediterranean island for Paint Me a Murder.
On the sixteenth day of December in the year of our Lord 1984, the eighth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Death Takes a Curtain Call it’s set in both Boston and Cabot Cove. (Last week’s episode was We’re Off to Kill the Wizard.)
Unusually, the title card above is from a minute or so into the episode. The episode actually begins with an establishing shot of Jessica’s house:
(The exterior of Jessica’s house was played by the Blair House Inn in Mendocino, California, as was the coastline and many other exterior shots since shooting in rural Maine was too expensive.)
Inside the house Jessica and Ethan are listening to the news on Jessica’s kitchen television as Ethan tries a slice of apple pie which Jessica just baked.
The news reporter says that police tangled with anti-communist protesters outside the venue where the Rostov Ballet was going to give a preview performance this afternoon. Ethan asks about the slice of pie with urgency but Jessica waves him away as she gets closer and concentrates on the TV. The news then shows a woman shouting that it’s the USA, not communist Russia, and they have a right to be heard saying that the ballet should be banned. Oddly she’s named, though she isn’t shown clearly. (Her name is Velma Rodecker, and she’s called one of the protest leaders.)
After she cries out that the ballet should be banned because we don’t want red culture here, Ethan remarks that it’s enough to spoil a man’s appetite. I never took Ethan for a communist sympathizer, but you never did know about people back then.
Anyway, it comes out that Jessica is going to that performance because someone by the name of Leo Peterson invited her. After a bit of small talk of her asking how the pie is and him saying, “delicious, as always. I’d have told you if it wasn’t” and Jessica saying that she’s sure that he would, we then cut to the Boston and the title card.
Jessica and a man we presume to be Leo Peterson walk into the ballet house and as Leo presents his tickets, his gaze is caught by a gruff looking man who is watching everyone. His name will turn out to be Major Anatole Karzof.
Leo looks troubled, and the man politely tips his hat.
Inside, they meet a young man by the name of Mr. Eddington who is both the president of the arts council and also handing out programs. Jessica met him a while ago and he’s delighted to see her again. She introduces Leo, who compliments him on the choice of the Rostov ballet.
After a little small talk he hands Jessica a program and then hands Leo a program from the bottom of the deck.
It’s not subtle, but they couldn’t have been subtle back then, given television quality. I can’t help but wonder how subtle they would be if they were shooting it now, with modern high definition and no static from radio broadcasts.
Anyway, Jessica notices this completely unsubtle gesture and they walk off.
We then meet a character backstage who tells somebody how to tie a rope, then goes and hits on one of the ballerinas.
He asks her to come with him, and about ten feet over from where she was, he asks her name.
It’s Irina.
Anyway, he hits on her in an absurdly clumsy way, including pawing her to her obvious discomfort, when he’s grabbed from behind by someone his own size.
Obviously a member of the KGB sent to guard the dancers, his name is Sergei Berensky and he warns the guy to not associate with members of the company. The jerk in the argyle sweater isn’t impressed, though, and walks off.
Irina then goes into the dressing room of the star ballerina and ballerino, Natalia and Alexander Masurov (husband and wife). She embraces Natalia and asks if she’s nervous.
She is because she and her husband are going to defect to America. Irina tells her not to be afraid and Natalia thanks her for being such a good friend and that their good wishes will be with her always. They both kiss her on the cheek and wish her well in the future.
Irina seems a little embarassed by Alexander’s kiss on her cheek, but this might just be fear of the KGB because she’s already been there for like thirty seconds. At the backstage call of “three minutes” she excuses herself and runs off.
In the audience Jessica asks Leo if he’s seen the Rustov ballet before and he says yes, many years ago. She asks if this was why he was favored with a special invitation to this performance and he replies, guardedly, “perhaps.” Jessica then notices something written in his program.
I’m not sure why the single number nineteen would be written down in a program when it could be easily worked into conversation, but in any event, the plot thickens. Something is clearly up.
Jessica sees it and tries to ask him about it but he hushes her because the ballet is starting. As the curtain opens we see Alexander and Natalia, so they’re clearly not defecting quite yet.
Backstage, Sergei warns the guy in the argyle sweater to stay away from Irina again, and again to no avail.
A bit later Jessica notices the arts director wandering off and Leo notices too.
Outside, Velma Rodecker, the anti-communist protestor, bangs on a door in an alleyway and demands entry. Presumably no one is actually hearing her.
In my extremely limited experience of theaters, it’s fairly rare to have back entrances manned during a performance, since they’re really only convenient ways of making certain kinds of deliveries. Though down this large a flight of stairs, it’s probably more of a fire escape than anything else.
Anyway, after a while she concludes that this won’t work and starts to leave, but on her way out notices a second floor window being opened.
Inside, this seems to have been done by the arts director, who may have been seen by Sergei.
A moment later, Leo excuses himself to Jessica, saying that he’ll be right back.
He’s still gone when the triumphant finale comes and the lights go down and the curtains close. When they come back up a moment later, as everyone is giving them a standing ovation, the ballerinas are in a line and bow.
Then the ballerinos come out and bow.
The older KGB agent (the one with the silver beard) speaks into a walkie talkie saying that Alexander and Natalia are not on stage, and to check on their dressing room. Sergei answers in the affirmative and goes off to do it.
Just then, Velma runs on stage, calling on the people to wake up because the Russian tour is only an excuse!
An excuse for what? To bring more communists into our midst. I’m not sure, but I think that this is meant to be amusing because, at that very moment, the communists are working hard to not permit two communists to leave and go into America’s midst.
Security guards then rush on stage and drag her off.
Leo then comes in and tells Jessica that they must leave and now. He rushes Jessica off. In the lobby she protests that the parking exit is not the way that they’re going, but he tells her to nevermind.
There’s then a scene of major Karzof looking down, as if having seen them, but he doesn’t look like he’s somewhere he could have seen them. Anyway, another KGB agent rushes in and asks what happened. He tells him to clover the exits and close down the theater, because Alexander and Natalia are missing. They walk off.
The argyle sweater guy then walks in and looks at where Major Karzof was looking and the camera pans out to show us what he was looking at.
Sergei is dead!
Oddly, we don’t fade to black. Instead, we cut to Peter and Jessica rushing off in a hurry to a car.
Somehow, Jessica manages to recognize their chauffeur, despite only having seem him on stage from a distance.
When she gets into the back seat, Natalia is there. Alexander starts the car and drives off, and we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back, after an establishing shot of Chicago, the scene is of the car driving along is Boston in glorious rear projection:
Natalia is reaching across Jessica and saying, “it is wonderful to finally meet you, dear Uncle.” He kisses her hand and replies something in Russian.
Leo asks Jessica to forgive him for involving her; he thought that a single man—with an accent, no less!—at a ballet would arouse too much suspicion, so he invited her. Natalia thanks her, as they’ve been planning this escape since she was a little girl.
After Leo says that they must go to federal authorities to seek asylum for Alexander and Natalia, Jessica says that by now their absence must have been noticed and there might be news, so they have Alexander turn on the radio. Fortunately it’s tuned to a news station which is broadcasting the news of Sergei Berensky’s death (from stabbing) in Natalia and Alexander’s dressing room. They are being sought by federal authorities.
There’s some discussion, including Natalia translating the news into Russian for Alexander (who apparently speaks no English), and Natalia assures Leo and Jessica that they had no part in Sergei’s death. They never even went to their dressing room and never saw Berensky.
Jessica says that they should go to the police right now because if Natalia and Alexander are innocent, they have nothing to fear. For a bright, worldly woman, sometimes Jessica can be a complete idiot.
Leo points out how this is madness and if the KGB gets their hands on Natalia and Alexander they will drag them back to Russia and there is no such thing as a fair trial there.
Jessica says that if it’s a matter of delaying their surrender, she’s willing to be an accomplice to that, and says to take them back to Cabot Cove. She’ll telephone Ethan and explain the situation, then stay here and try to solve the murder (technically, she says, “find out what I can”).
Back at the theater, an FBI agent and Major Karzof are interviewing Argyle Sweater Guy when Jessica comes up and asks who’s in charge and the FBI agent and Major Karzof both reply, “I am.” The FBI guy tells Argyle Sweater Guy that they’ll talk to him later and he leaves.
The FBI guy walks up to Jessica and introduces himself. Chief Agent O’Farell of the FBI.
When he asks what he can do for her, she begins to explain that she was in the audience, and Major Karzof notes that she was with a distinguished gentleman. Anyway, it comes up that she’s J.B. Fletcher the mystery writer and Major Karzof is a huge fan. He’s delighted to meet her and introduces himself in full, Major Anatol Karzof, Committee for State Security. She corrects this to “KGB”, to which he replies “Well, if you prefer.” KGB was just an acronym for the Russian name, Комитет государственной безопасности, which is romanized to Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (note the initial letters in the romanized version), so he was just introducing himself in English.
Anyway, O’Farrell interrupts to say that unless she has some relevant knowledge about what happened, he’s going to have to ask her to leave. Fortunately for Jessica Major Karzof is a huge fan and says that he would welcome her observations in the matter as she has remarkable powers of deduction.
O’Farrell is not pleased by this and says, hotly, that he wouldn’t welcome them and this is his turf. Karzof begins to shout back, “I would—” but then catches himself, moderates his tone, and finishes his sentence, “hope, in the spirit of cooperation, in this instance you might defer to my request, eh?” By the end of the sentence he’s quite friendly and charming.
O’Farrell gives in, says, “suit yourself, major,” and walks off.
This places Jessica in a very interesting position since she clearly doesn’t like the KGB but on the other hand is indebted to Major Karzof for being allowed to investigate. Karzof says to her, “I feel as if I already know you from the many hours I have spent absorbed with your books.”
Jessica says that he’s very kind, but it is unfortunate that Russia doesn’t see fit to pay authors royalties. Karzof laughs and replies, “that is a capitalist invention. Come, shall we investigate the scene of the crime?”
Karzof was the first to find Berensky. He was face down, with a jeweled dagger in his back. The dagger was part of Alexander Mazarov’s costume. He sent Berensky to find Natalia and Alexander, and apparently he found them. There was a struggle with Natalia and Alexander stabbed him. He knows that there was a struggle because there were nail marks on Berensky’s face.
Jessica then says that while that is sound, surely there must be other suspects. The major, for instance. Realizing that the dancers slipped away and nothing short of murder could prevent it, he might have killed his own man to prevent their seeking asylum.
Karzof is deeply amused. It’s wrong, but brilliant, he says. He then asks if she’s staying in the city and she says that she hand’t planned to, but under the circumstances she thinks that she will. He then recommends the hotel where he’s staying, and leads the way out.
In her hotel room, Jessica pleads with Ethan, over the phone, for Ethan to take the young Russians in. Despite having been established as a communist sympathizer—or perhaps, because of it—he’s reluctant, but he never really had a chance of having it his way, and eventually agrees. (Oddly, Ethan is taking this call from a payphone.)
Jessica says goodbye as she hears someone knocking on her door. The knocking is very loud and insistent. When she opens it it’s major Karzof, who apologizes for knocking so loudly and explains it’s an old habit from his days in the militia. Some people were reluctant to answer the buzzer. Jessica replies that she’s glad she opened the door before he kicked it down. He chuckles and this and tells her that the lab reports are in he thought she might like to come with him to police headquarters. Which she would.
At police headquarters, someone dumps out the stuff which Berensky had in his pockets and Major Karzof remarks, pensively, “Isn’t it sad how a man’s whole life can be reduced to a pile of trinkets?” No one replies, but Jessica, looking through the police report, says to him, “Now here’s something interesting, Major. The victim’s handkerchief was found in his pocket, stained with his own blood.”
Jessica notes that this disproves the Major’s theory that Berensky was scratched while struggling with Natalia as Alexander stabbed him in the back. Chief Agent O’Farrell isn’t impressed, but Karzof agrees with Jessica that it’s absurd that Berensky wiped his face with his handkerchief after having been fatally stabbed, so the face scratching must have happened earlier.
Chief Agent O’Farrell does not contradict this, and instead asks if the report mentions green fibers, as from a sweater, caught on the watch band. Jessica points out that Velma Rodecker was wearing a green sweater. She’s currently locked up “upstairs” and so a sergeant is dispatched to see if the fibers caught on the watch that the Chief Agent was inspecting match her sweater. Jessica adds, sotto voce, that the sergeant might as well check under Velma’s fingernails while he’s at it. Major Karzof chuckles approvingly at this.
The scene then shifts to the hotel where Jessica and the Major are staying. While they’re in the elevator, the Major asks Jessica if this will be valuable material for a new novel. Jessica, I think aware that this research is her cover story, says that it certainly has the right ingredients. A murdered Soviet agent and the disappearnce of two world-famous ballet stars. Karzof asks her, smiling and laughing, to not forget the wise and venerable chief of state security who solves the murder and brings to justice the misguided betrayers of the homeland. The elevator stops at his floor and he asks her if she would like a nightcap. Jessica says that she’s had a very long day and needs to get to sleep, but she would like to take a rain-check. Karzof, ever-genial, replies, “You have a rain-check,” and walks off.
Jessica doesn’t go to her room, though; she instead visits Mr Eddington, the president of the arts counsel (the man who handed Leo the brochure from the bottom of the deck).
Jessica tells him about how she saw him deal with the program from the bottom of the deck, and he explains the importance of it not getting out that he was involved in the defection or the Soviets will never cooperate with the arts counsel again. Given her assurance of confidentiality, he explains that his father was the American officer who arranged for Leo’s defection from the Soviet army during the fall of Berlin in World War 2. He was, then, Leonid Petrovich, a dancer with a burgeoning reputation that was cut short by the tragic accident which gave him his limp.
This backstory doesn’t really have anything to do with the mystery, but it’s nice world-building. This kind of thing really helps to flesh out the world and make it feel more real, which helps the mystery to feel important.
His participation in the defection (which is relevant to the mystery) was relatively minor. He opened a window in the musician’s room and Leo was to bring a change of clothes for Natalia and Alexander and leave them in a locker—locker number 19, which was the significance of the number scribbled on Leo’s program. There was one small hitch—when he left the musician’s room, Berensky saw him from the far wing. He remembers because Berensky was holding a handkerchief to his face for some reason.
Jessica bids him adieu and, declining his offer of a lift, walks back to her bus. She’s followed, which she notices, and ducks into a doorway and catches up to the man following her. When he turns around she asks if he’s looking for someone, Major Karzof drives up and tells the agent to leave. He hopes she was not startled, and she replies she wasn’t and thanks him for the bodyguard. She wouldn’t have dared to walk the streets alone if she didn’t know that Mr. Nagy was following her. Karzof then tells her that it was a waste of time to interview Mr. Eddington. The fibers in his watch match those of Velma Rodecker’s sweater and traces of his skin were found under her fingernails, as Mrs. Fletcher suggested.
I don’t know how they could have confirmed it was Berensky’s skin under her fingernails, back in 1984—they didn’t have DNA analysis then. About the best they could say was that the blood types matched, but unless they gave Berensky an extremely rare blood type such as O-, that wouldn’t mean much. This may just be a matter of the writer assuring us of facts to save time over proving them, since he’s only got 48 minutes to work with.
Jessica asks if Velma has been arrested for the murder and Karzof says that she has. He adds that, while he has no sympathy for a neurotic anti-communist, he regards it as a most depressing development.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial we’re in Cabot Cove.
Amos walks over to Alexander, who is in disguise. He asks if Ethan is around, and, after pausing for a moment in obvious panic because he speaks no English, Alexander says, “Ah, yup.”
Amos then introduces himself, and Alexander guardedly answers everything with “yup.” At that moment Ethan spots this and interrupts, explaining that this is his new deck hand, since the cod are biting so well. Ethan navigates the conversation, hinting to Al whether to say “nope” or “yup” for a bit until he’s able to maneuver Amos away by offering him a cup of coffee. There’s a cute bit where Amos remarks that “Al” seems like a nice sort, and Ethan replies, “a might too gabby for my taste.” This is a fun use of the stereotype of Maine fisherman as being very reserved with people they don’t know. Amos also asks if Ethan’s seen any suspicious characters around, and explains about the “Rusky toe dancers” who’ve defected but there’s a warrant on them because they murdered someone. Ethan keeps his reply to saying that he doesn’t know if he’d know a Russian if he saw one. Amos also spots Natalia, who’s helping someone elsewhere at the docks, and gives her a cover story of her being Niels Larsen’s cousin.
I sure hope that Niels is in on this, because in a small town like Cabot Cove news would get around fast if he’s not.
The scene then shifts back to Boston where Jessica is having breakfast with Major Karzof. He jovially reports that Velma Rodecker is deriving intense pleasure from her newfound notoriety. He does think that she is guilty, though. Jessica isn’t so sure—she has reservations about how Velma got the dagger. Karzof explains she had the opportunity because the dagger—part of Alexander’s costume—is not worn in the final scene, so it would have remained in the dressing room.
Jessica notices Irina, who is at a table with some of the other ballerinas, and the Major offers to introduce them. Jessica would like that, so he politely calls her over and she comes very sheepishly—which is, I assume, how most people come when the KGB calls them. She’s very sad about Natalia and Alexander, as well, and Jessica expresses her condolences because she, too, knows what it is to lose a friend. Major Karzof thanks Irina, and she meekly leaves. Jessica then says that, with the crime solved, it’s time for her to head home. Major Karzof says that it is farewell only, not goodbye. After Jessica walks off, a KGB agent comes to Karzof and tells him that Velma Rodecker has decided to talk.
Back in Cabot Cove, Amos meets Jessica at the bus and she gives him the news about Velma. She asks about Ethan and Amos says that he’s showing his new hand the ropes. Amos says that he’s a friendly fellow, who sounds like he’s from around Bangor. (While Cabot Cove’s location was never given, it’s generally depicted as being in the south-west of Maine and certainly on the coast. Bangor is about twenty miles inland in the north-east of Maine.)
Jessica rushes off to find Ethan and after bickering with him about how he hid the Mazurovs—Amos thinks that Natalia is a Swede from Minnesota—she discusses how they have to make new arrangements because The police, the FBI, and the KGB might descend on the town at any moment, since Velma certainly isn’t the killer.
That night at dinner they’re interrupted by a young man who knocked on the door. He was looking for Ethan, as he’d just put into the harbor with a blown gasket and heard that Ethan might have one to sell him.
Ethan doesn’t and suggests that he try Gus Harker over at Rockwater Bay. The young man is disappointed and asks if he can use Jessica’s phone to call over there to make sure that they have one before he starts hitchin’ in that direction. Interestingly, he’s got a Maine accent, unlike about 90% of the inhabitants of Cabot Cove.
He notices the places at table and asks if she’s expecting company. Jessica replies that they are a bit late—you know what babies can be. She points him to the telephone and asks if he’s from Down East. He replies that no, Ma’am, he’s born and bred in Maine, up near Bar Harbor. (Not that it matters, but Bar Harbor is, as the name suggests, on the coast, a little further north-east than Bangor.)
He makes his phone call while Jessica comes out and watches the TV with Ethan. It’s a news program which reviews what we already know, and shows a clip of the curtain call of the ballet where Natalia and Alexander failed to appear. They’ve shown us this clip of the ballerinas taking their bow after the curtain more than once, so it must be important:
I showed that clip before when it was from the audience’s perspective, but it’s interesting to look at it now, as shown on a TV. If you look, you can see how round the screen was. The screen curvature was a function of the distance of the screen from the electron gun in the cathode tube since it was helpful to have every point on the screen equidistant from the electron gun. That said, it distorted things as they were viewed, which you can see pretty well here. It helps to explain the closeups on clues.
A moment later the male dancers come out, but not a single male dancer other than Alexander is a character so it must be the female dancers that hold the clue. Since about the only thing we can see in this clip is the number of dancers, there’s a good chance that that’s the clue. Let’s compare to how many dancers there were at the beginning of the ballet:
It’s not super clear, here, but there aren’t many shots where it is. There are certainly six of them, though, meaning that not every ballerina in white was on stage during the curtain call.
Anyway, the young man comes out, saying that Gus does have the seal, so he better get headed on over there now. Jessica bids him farewell and Leo comes out as soon as the door is closed because this is television and we can’t spend the time to wait a realistic amount of time for him to no longer be within earshot. I think we should assume that, had this been a book, Leo would have waited for Jessica to give a signal that all was clear.
In response to Leo’s question if he’s gone, Jessica says yes, but not to Gus Harker’s. Down East is slang for Maine (or, more specifically, the coast of Maine, at least according to Wikipedia), and someone born and bred in Maine would certainly know that. He’s not who he says he is, so who, then, is he? Jessica says that we’ll soon find out, and she’s got a strong suspicion that he’s done something to her telephone.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back it’s the next day and Jessica is on the phone talking to Letitia (the local operator), saying that she needs to make a call to Boston. She’s interrupted by a heavy knocking at her door. When she opens it, it’s Amos, Major Karzof, and someone else.
(I’m sure it would be more obvious in the blu-ray if they ever make one, but even in the DVD version you can see that the backdrop is a painting. The interior of Jessica’s house is, of course, in a sound stage, so it must be this way, but I don’t think we’d have noticed in broadcast quality.) Amos mentions that it wasn’t him doing the knocking, but I think we all knew that. Major Karzof is not so jovial this time; he and his associate have a warrant to search her house.
While Amos and the KGB agent go on their fruitless search, Karzof explains why he’s searching here. Velma Rodecker had an interesting story to tell. After she struggled with Berensky he threw her out of the theater. She then discovered an open window in the musician’s room. She then saw Leo (though she didn’t know his name) slip in through the window with a viola case and take out of it two costumes which he put into a locker. He matched the description of “Mr Peterson” and a quick check with the soviet embassy revealed Leo Peterson’s real name, history, and relationship to Natalia.
Amos and the KGB agent come back to report that there is no sign of the Mazurovs and Major Karzof asks Jessica to give the Mazurovs a message, should she meet them, unlikely as that may be, that if they turn themselves in the Soviet government will give them a fair and just trial. Leo Peterson walks in at this point and finishes the sentence, saying, “after which they will be executed.” He then announces that he’s prepared to give himself up and make a full confession. He then says that he killed Berensky so that his niece and nephew would have time to escape.
Jessica tells the Major to not listen to him. It’s a noble gesture, but it’s not true. Major Karzof dryly replies, “Obviously. Arrest him anyway, Sheriff. He is guilty of obstructing justice.”
As he goes to leave (he is the last one out the door) Jessica asks him if that was really necessary. He replies, gravely, “Ours is a war of attrition, Mrs. Fletcher. That was a warning shot across your bow. Don’t be deceived by my gentle manner. I beg of you.”
Jessica, alone in the house, then makes her call to Boston, which goes to the argyle sweater guy, now wearing a pink short-sleeve button-down shirt.
Ah, the 1980s. Still not as bad as the 1970s, fashion-wise, but it certainly had its weird choices. He answers the phone, “stage manager,” which is about as close as we’ve gotten to his name. We don’t hear what Jessica says, then he merely answers, “yeah” and calls Irina, who is at the theater for some reason.
We hear the telephone call as an overlay to the young man with the Maine accent who didn’t know that “Down East” was a nickname for Maine in his boat is listening in to it over radio equipment.
This is some fairly sophisticated equipment, by the standards of 1984. Radio was quite advanced by this time, but an easily concealed transmitter powered off of a battery would require fairly sensitive equipment to pick up. Unless they’re meant to be using Soviet super-technology. In 1984 the Cold War was was still almost seven years from over and we had a tendency to over-estimate the state of Soviet technological prowess.
Anyway, Jessica tells her that Natalia asked her to call Irina and tell her that they’re safe. She adds that Alexander also sends a message (in Russian, of course, since Alexander speaks no English). She then tries to pronounce the Russian and adds she hopes that she said it correctly, she doesn’t know what it means. At this Irina perks up quite a bit. She says, “if only I could be there.” Jessica suggests that “Mr Flemming” might be able to be of some assistance. That might possibly be argyle sweater guy, though how Jessica would know his name I do not know.
The next day we get some ominous music as Jessica’s morning run is spied on.
He goes off to report to Major Karzof, who is at the Sheriff’s office becoming increasingly frustrated with, and disappointed in, Amos. Karzof then gets a phone call that Irina has gone missing, to his greater frustration.
That night we get a scene of Irina and Argyle sweater guy in a car. (They save on rear projection by having it be completely dark.) She calls him Mr. Flemming to his face, so that must be what his name is. When they get to Jessica’s house Irina gets out and goes to the door and Mr. Flemming follows. Irina declares that Natalia’s bravery has inspired her and she wants to joint Natalia and Alexander in living in freedom. Jessica says that this is great and that she needs to go make a phone call. Argyle sweater guy (I can’t get used to “Mr. Flemming”) asks what’s wrong with the phone in this room and Jessica answers, “Well, that phone isn’t bugged.”
This phone call is to Ethan. Jessica tells him to take Alexander and Natalia to his boat.
The pretend-Mainer radios to Chief Agent O’Farrell with the opening, “Flotsam to Sand Castle.” So I guess he’s American, not Russian, and the stuff I said about Soviet super-technology doesn’t apply. I guess it was FBI super-technology. (If this was the FBI, I wonder why they didn’t tap her phone at the phone office, since they would have the jurisdiction to do that and it would be easier and cleaner.)
Anyway, as Jessica is setting the table for Irina and Argyle Sweater Guy, the doorbell rings. It turns out to be Amos and Major Karzof. Jessica asks if they forgot to search her fruit cellar and Karzof cuts off Amos who was in the middle of saying “come to think of it—”. He briefly says that he was informed she has visitors from Boston, and goes to talk to Irina.
He asks her what she’s doing here and if she knows what the penalty for shielding a murderer is. Irina protests that Alexander didn’t kill anyone and tries to pin the blame on Argyle Sweater Guy. He killed Berensky out of jealousy because he wanted Irina for himself.
Jessica, however, isn’t buying it. Argyle Sweater Guy had nothing to fear from Berensky because Irina was in love with Alexander Mazurov. Major Karzof says that this is incorrect and that Alexander’s affair with Irina ended when he took up with Natalia. But Irina protests that this is wrong and Alexander still loves her. She then asks Jessica to tell him the message which Alexander gave her. Oddly, she doesn’t give Jessica a chance. She immediately repeats it in Russian, then translates to English. “I will love you always.”
Jessica then apologizes for lying. Alexander didn’t send that message. She only said he did. Leo gave her the words, so she could trick Irina into revealing her true feelings for Alexander.
As you might imagine, Irina is disappointed.
When Major Karzof asks why, Jessica explains that it was her motive for killing Berensky. This dawned on her when she finally realized what was wrong with the curtain call—it was asymmetrical because a ballerina was missing. She sensed that they were going to defect and when she saw them leave the stage, she ran after them. More specifically, she hoped to stop the man she loved from running out of her life. But she found their dressing room empty. Berensky came in shortly after her and told her that they were gone. There was still one way to prevent their escape. In her desperation she picked up Alexander’s dagger and—
“Stop!” cries Irina. “Stop. Please stop.” Through sobs she says that she just wanted Alexander back. She didn’t think and didn’t know what she was doing.
After crying a bit, she composes herself and says, resignedly, that it makes no difference anymore. She then looks at Major Karzof and says, “Take me back.” He merely looks at her, and Jessica says, “Child, he has no jurisdiction here.” She then asks Amos to be gentle with her. Amos gently replies, “Yes Ma’am. I sure will.” He escorts Irina out.
After a moment, Argyle Sweater Guy says, “Well, if no one objects, I’ll just get the hell out of here.” Jessica tartly replies, “I was about to suggest the same thing, Mr. Fleming. Goodnight.”
Major Karzof, who stayed behind, says, “So, J.B. Fletcher has wrapped up another mystery. Rather neatly done, I might say.”
Jessica demurs, since she did leave poor Mr. O’Farrell on an empty boat. But then, he shouldn’t have tapped her phone. Major Karzof laughs at this. And what of Natalia and Alexander Mazurov?
Jessica replies that they’re on their way to Portland to turn themselves in as defectors seeking sanctuary.
Karzof replies, “I thought as much.”
“You could have tried to stop them,” Jessica observes.
Karzof smiles and holds up his hands helplessly. “Well… I did what I could.” He chuckles then adds, “let them live in peace.”
Jessica asks, “and what about you, Major? Have you ever thought of living in peace?”
He looks grim and replies, “As a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, I will pretend that I did not hear that.”
He then lightens his tone and asks, “Tell me, how is the fishing around here?” Jessica tells him that it’s marvelous and asks if he fishes. Of course he does, every chance he gets. Jessica suggests, enthusiastically, that perhaps he could stick around for a few days.
Karzof chuckles at this. “Hm. A few days.” He smiles, then sighs and says, sadly, “Unfortunately, days have a way of growing into years.”
He bids her farewell and says that he’s looking forward to her next novel. She says that she’d like to send him a signed copy, if it won’t compromise him in the Kremlin.
He laughs and says, “Sometimes, a man likes to be compromised. Eh?”
He then kisses her hand and we go to credits.
This was one of the great Murder, She Wrote episodes. A big part of that was William Conrad’s performance as Major Karzof. Conrad has a beautiful, rich, sonorous voice and if his Russian accent isn’t perfect, it’s plenty good enough for 1980s television. His performance is magnificent and he imbues the character with real depth. That said, the writers gave him a good character to play, which should not be overlooked.
Major Karzof is an ambiguous figure in a difficult position. On the one hand, you don’t become a major in the KGB entrusted with guarding performing artists in America without a decent record of being trustworthy. On the other hand, (if you’re not a fool) you don’t become a man in his sixties without developing a certain amount of cynicism of politics and human institutions. And in any event, but especially in the latter case, you don’t last into your sixties in the KGB in the Soviet Union without a reasonable amount of cunning. But, of course, you also can’t be too idealistic.
Major Karzof threads this needle well. His words, especially anywhere they can be overheard, are very officially correct. His manner is very genial, but he is also clear that this is a facade. Well, not precisely a facade. He certainly wants to be pleasant, but will not let that get in the way of doing his duty, however unpleasant that is. This reminds me a bit of Winston Churchill’s famous comment defending his politeness in the declaration of war against Japan he gave to the Japanese ambassador, that if you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
The mystery is good, though not perfect. A dagger is a weapon that can kill a man, and Irina is an athlete, not a sedentary older woman. Ballerinas, though thin, tend to be surprisingly strong for their size, and it’s quite plausible that Irina could actually kill a man with a dagger, provided of course that it was sharp. American prop weapons tend to not be sharp but it’s believable that Soviet props would be sharp. Irina’s motivation is a bit thin, of course—striking out in a moment of blind desperation to keep the man she loved in her life is unlikely, but of course murder is always unlikely. If you exclude organized crime and gang violence, murder is just extremely rare. But it does happen, unfortunately, and so all murder mysteries will be unlikely because they describe very rare events. Incidentally, that’s one reason mystery writers need to move their detectives around a lot. If you want someone to encounter a bunch of rare events, moving him around helps to make it more believable, since these rare events are still rare locally.
The solving of the mystery is done quite well, especially with the interleaving of the solving of the mystery with the hiding of the defectors. Making Major Karzof a fan of Jessica’s worked well, especially because he had his reasons to play this up in order to keep Jessica close in order to keep an eye on her, since he clearly has his suspicions of her friend. You never quite knew where you stood with Major Karzof, and he certainly liked to keep it that way. And so the mystery started off with the Mazurovs as the chief suspects, as it had to. (It’s a nice touch that it had to both because of the needs of the story but also because of the intention of the murderer, even if the intention was confused and panicked.)
Then Jessica visits the director of the arts counsel and gets evidence which she cannot share with anyone. That sets Jessica up in an interesting position because she cannot cooperate with anyone on the official investigation. Of course, at the time she doesn’t really want to, so this is no major inconvenience. But it also sets up the plot to come.
Then Major Karzof tells Jessica about the evidence pointing towards Velma Rodecker, which gives a big twist. But of course we know it can’t be Velma both because it’s way too early in the episode and because of the evidence given to Jessica by the arts counsel director. Jessica clearly knows this, but it makes a perfect excuse for her to go to Cabot Cove without looking suspicious. This is probably partially wasted because Major Karzof is habitually suspicious of everyone, but it still works very nicely.
And it gives Jessica time to prepare for when Major Karzof and his crew descend on Cabot Cove the next day.
When Major Karzof comes to Cabot Cove, we get a very interesting development of his character, and of his relationship with Jessica. Before, he had been purely genial and almost fawning on Jessica. Now, he acknowledges her as an adversary. To be fair, we got a hint of that with Karzof having an agent following Jessica and showing up himself when he said that he was going to bed. Here he becomes explicit, though he always preserves proprieties. I love, for example, his preface of the message he asked Jessica to give to the Mazurovs: “If you should, by some chance, happen to encounter the Mazurovs, as unlikely as that may be,” Of course, he knows full well that she’s taking part in hiding them. Moreover, she knows that he knows, and he’s well aware of that, too.
I also love the warning he gives her a few moments later, when she asks if having Leo arrested was really necessary: “Don’t be deceived by my gentle manner. I beg of you.”
He is a KGB agent who does not like to be cruel. But that does not mean that he will refuse to be cruel if it’s necessary. You don’t become a KGB major by being shy.
It raises the interesting question of why he brought Jessica on, and why he’s treating her as he is. They don’t spell it out—it would not be in the Major’s character to be unambiguous on the point—but my favorite theory is that solving the murder is his primary concern and he knows that he’s at a significant disadvantage in solving it here in America where the KGB is openly hated. Recognizing that Jessica is at least tied to the people hiding the Mazurovs, he knows that she’s in a position to solve the murder and that putting pressure on her about the Mazurovs will motivate her to get the job done.
Another aspect of this episode which interests me is how cruel Jessica is to Irina. Lying to her that Alexander said he still loves her in order to trick her into running to Cabot Cove so she could set her up and confront her. And whether it was her original intent or not, it was crushing Irina with the knowledge that Jessica lied and Alexander didn’t say this that got Irina to confess. She is as hard and willing to be cruel as Major Karzof. Yes, afterwards, she takes a comforting manner to Irina and asks Amos to be gentle with her, but how is this different than the gentle manner of Major Karzof? The two have more in common than Jessica would like to admit. And another point to Major Karzof as a great character, I think he knows it.
Though Jessica might know it; there’s a hint of it in her line, after she said that the Mazurovs are on their way to Portland to turn themselves in as defectors seeking sanctuary and Karzof replied, “I thought as much.” She says, “You could have tried to stop them.” There’s almost a hint of reproach in her voice.
And after this, and after he drops the mask for a moment and says, candidly, “let them live in peace,” she is genuinely affectionate towards the Major. So perhaps she does recognize having more in common with him than she’d care to admit.
Still, I think the best line is right before the end, when Jessica invites him to stay for a few days to enjoy the fishing and he is at first excited, then sadly sighs and says, “Unfortunately, days have a way of growing into years.” He does elaborate, but he has a family back home. He has friends and responsibilities back home. They would all suffer if he chose to stay. It gives Major Karzof an element of nobility and a great deal of depth.
On the ninth day of December in the year of our Lord 1984, the seventh episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. It was called We’re Off to Kill the Wizard. (Last week’s episode was Hit, Run, and Homicide.)
There’s a man inside the car who is on a car phone talking to someone named Horatio.
For those who weren’t alive in the 1980s, a car phone was a cell phone actually build into the car. This worked better than hand-held cell phones for several reasons, but the primary one was that it had a better antenna and could be powered by the car’s generator. Cell phones in this era were analog devices, and not very different than talking over a radio only with private channels. They were also extremely expensive and pretty rare. This means that this guy is rich and important.
Anyway, the guy promises Horatio that he will do whatever it takes to bring Mrs. Fletcher back with him.
The scene then shifts to Jessica working on a bicycle while two kids look on.
The boy’s name is Billy. The girl’s name is Cindy. You can just see their mother in the background. She walks up a moment later, after Billy rides off on the repaired bicycle. (Apparently their father couldn’t figure out how to fix it and was ready to junk it. Jessica has one just like it back home in Maine. Given that this is a BMX-style children’s bicycle, I assume that the similarity is that her bicycle also has two wheels.)
Her name is Carol Donovan and she’s Jessica’s niece (her children share her last name). She says that Jessica’s flight to Kansas City has been confirmed, but won’t she consider staying longer?
Jessica replies that she won’t because a good guest is like Haley’s comet: seen and enjoyed seldom and briefly. Right after her lecture, she goes straight home.
This is interrupted by the car pulling up and the guy on the car phone stepping out of it. His name is Michael Gardner and he’s an ardent admirer of Jessica and her work. His employer, whose name is Horatio Baldwin, who goes by the stage name Horrible Horatio, desperately wants to meet her. Little billy is excited at the mention of Horrible Horatio. He runs theme parks throughout the country and today he’s got an opening of a new venture, Horatio’s House of Horrible Horrors (or words to that effect). Little Billy and his sister are so desperate to go that Jessica relents and accepts, despite obviously hating the idea.
It’s apparently medieval themed.
The scene opens with a monk in a cart being led to a gallows. The monk is Horatio Baldwin, and he protests that it’s all a big mistake. He keeps protesting as he’s led onto the gibbet and the noose is fitted round his neck. His cries for help are eventually answered by a robin-hood like figure standing on the wall.
He swings in on that rope and wrestles with the executioner. Unfortunately for Horatio, in their tussle they knock into the lever which operates the trap door, and Horatio falls. The crowd is aghast, but then Horatio appears, laughing, at the top of the castle and assures everyone that he’s fine. The crowd applauds.
Michael Gardner approaches Jessica and her niece and grand-niece and grand-nephew and asks how they enjoyed the show. Jessica says that she found it appalling, I think because she’s morally opposed to fun. Or perhaps it pains her to see children enjoying themselves at something other than a founder’s day picnic. Anyway, Michael says that Horatio is ready to meet her and he’ll arrange for the rest of the family to tour the park.
Horatio meets her in an underground office.
He looked better in the robes, but then most people do. He also has a kind of British accent, which is never explained. He tells her that it was good of her to come and she replies, “How could I not? I had two loaded children pointed at my head.” She says that she doesn’t want to be rude but wants to get away as soon as possible.
When he says that it must seem odd to have an office complex beneath the park, she says, “perhaps you have an aversion to sunshine.”
Jessica isn’t usually this rude and I don’t know why she’s so desperate to get away from her niece, Horatio, and the entire city. It’s an odd choice for the writers because it’s just unpleasant without adding anything. I think this may be because of the idea many screenwriters had that there must be “conflict” which they took to mean everyone hating each other, rather than somebody having some goal that they can’t easily achieve.
Horatio is then accosted by Nils Highlander.
He doesn’t care that Baldwin is busy; he’s been busy for weeks but won’t be so busy if the city shuts him down for safety violations. This upsets Nils because it’s his name on the building permits and his reputation that’s at stake. I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works unless Nils is in charge of the safety situation and directly responsible for it, making the safety violations his fault. I suppose that they’re trying to set it up that Horatio personally intervened and forced the people who report to Nils to introduce safety violations in the rides in spite of what their boss was telling them. You know, like highly successful businessmen do. Because that benefits them somehow. They enjoy micromanaging operations in order to create fodder for lawsuits.
Horatio yells at Nils and he leaves. Horatio then directs Jessica to his office and she pauses and asks if he’s lured her here in order to offer her some kind of job. Why she thinks this I can’t image unless it’s because she’s read the script. Anyway, Horatio responds, “Mrs. Fletcher. Please allow me the seduction before you cry rape.” Jessica smiles at this and they walk off to his office.
Somebody sticks his head out of the door this was said next to.
The name on the door is “Arnold Megrim” so perhaps that’s this character’s name. I’m sure we’re going to see more of him later.
The way to Horatio’s office is through an antechamber with Horatio’s secretary.
Her name is Laurie Bascomb. Horatio instructs her to see that they’re not interrupted, though before they go into Horatio’s office she mentions that he had an important call from “Mr. Carlson”.
He replies, “I’ll be the judge of which calls are important, Miss Bascomb.”
The dialog isn’t realistic, of course; the goal is to paint the characters as efficiently as possible, not to scenes in which it’s possible to suspend disbelief. That’s a pity because it’s possible to do both and many Murder, She Wrote episodes do, but at least we’ve learned that Horatio is the scum of the earth.
Before they go in, Jessica spots one of her books on Laurie’s desk and offers to sign it for her. Laurie says she’d be honored if Jessica did and mentions that she’s trying to write a book herself. Horatio is impatient at this, of course, because his success up til now has been achieved by alienating everyone he wants something from. Or because we’re supposed to hate him. One of those two. Probably the first one.
The scene then shifts to a different office where we meet another character.
His name is Phil Carlson. Arnold (the guy who stuck his head into the hallway before) comes in and says that J.B. Fletcher actually came, but Phil is unimpressed. Arnold turns out to be worried, not impressed. This means another park, more red ink, and more falsified accounts. Phil tells him that if he doesn’t like the job, he should quit. Arnold says that he can’t quit, anymore than Phil can. Phil says that he doesn’t want to quit, though, since he’s going to be made a vice president tomorrow. Arnold replies that he was promised a vice presidency two years ago, before Horatio snatched it away.
This is definitely how businesses work, especially successful businesses.
To be fair, people do sometimes cheat and do illegal things, and murder mysteries will, by their nature, tend to focus on those cases because it provides more suspects (as the above was meant to do) and more intrigue. That said, the hurried pace and frank discussions where people are entirely open about doing illegal things feels cartoonish.
Anyway, as Arnold leaves he says, “he’ll do the same to you, Phil, just watch.” Given that Phil will find this out tomorrow, this seems unnecessary. Phil will certainly find out soon enough, one way or another. Phil considers this after Arnold leaves, though, and then we go back to Jessica in Horatio’s office.
Horatio’s idea is “Horatio Baldwin Presents: J.B. Fletcher’s Mansion of Murder and Mayhem.” He promises her a panoply of blood and gore, chills and thrills. The kids will love it!
Obviously, Jessica hates this because she’s a schoolmarm scold whenever it comes to physical violence, but I find this weird because it’s a complete misunderstanding of the murder mystery genre. Jessica may be a literary titan who’s work is known to three quarters of humanity and is to (almost) everyone’s taste, but the among the one quarter who doesn’t know her work is the majority of people who want to go to haunted houses for fake gore and jump scares. It just makes no sense at all to try to base a haunted house theme park on a mystery writer’s books. Horatio should be even more against this idea than Jessica is, since he has better reason.
There’s an interesting bit of conversation in which Horatio says that violence is money in the bank and Jessica is appalled. He asks her where she gets her moral outrage from. He’s read her books and they’re in the same business. She replies that she writes her books for people who read, while he stages his bloodbaths for tots who have not yet learned to differentiate his sordid charades from the real world.
This is idiotic, of course, but I’ve finally remembered that back in the 1980s there was a kind of woman (whom Jessica is meant to portray) that was deeply upset by portrayals of violence in the media, thinking that it would destroy civilization and debase everyone into barbarians. Tipper Gore comes to mind as one of the champions of this line of thinking. They were wrong, especially in their expectation that graphic violence would become pervasive. Graphic violence is not interesting to most people; even to the people who find it interesting it doesn’t tap into any strong instincts in the way that explicitly sexual content does. And that’s where I have a real antipathy to the people who were only against graphic violence. A particularly stupid catchphrase for this kind of idiocy was, “I’d rather a child watch two people making love than two people trying to kill each other.” Jessica never said it, but she might have; this is one of those aspects of Jessica’s character which I didn’t notice when I was a child but notice all too well now—Jessica wasn’t a good woman. She was a shrewish scold with no real principles except for a strong dislike of unpleasantness. It’s a real pity, but on the plus side it only ruins the occasional episode.
Anyway, this speech by Jessica is idiotic, in particular, because children so young they can’t tell that fake blood is fake don’t buy tickets to parks. In fact, Horatio’s parks almost guaranteedly have a minimum age for admission without a parent for simple practical reasons. He’s running amusement parks, not daycares.
This stupid exchange goes on for a bit longer, giving us an excuse to find out that Horatio has a button on his desk that locks his door. He had it installed to keep people out but uses it to lock Jessica in when she tries to storm off, but relents when she threatens legal action. This is obviously only here in order to establish its existence for later. I really wish that the writer for this episode, Peter S. Fisher, had tried on this one. He wrote Lovers and Other Killers and (aside from the scene with Jessica, the baby, and the nuns) it was much better written.
After he unlocks the door Jessica leaves and Horatio calls someone by the name of “Mickey” on the phone, telling him that they’re going to need his special brand of research in order to convince Jessica to agree to the mystery-novel-blood-and-gore theme park. This is so dumb I had trouble typing it.
Fortunately things pick up in the next scene, which is that night. A security guard at the park hears a gunshot and runs off to investigate. He’s joined by another security guard and they go into the anteroom to Horatio’s office. They wonder what Horatio is doing there this late at night and where Laurie Bascomb is because she never leaves until he does.
They check the door and Horatio has it bolted from the inside. They knock, but no one answers. The security guards wonder what to do and one recalls that (Phil) Carlson is still here and so they give him a call on the phone in Laurie’s office. Why they’re consulting the architect, I don’t know, but he directs them to break down the door, using the fire ax if necessary, and he’s on his way.
The guard does as he is bid and breaks down the door with the fire ax, then enters through it.
They don’t enter very far, though, when they see Horatio.
The camera zooms in so we can see the gun in his hand. The guards then walk up and take a look.
The one asks the other if he’s dead, and the other simply replies, “I don’t know.”
As they start to lean in to take a pulse, Phil calls to them from the door.
Phil walks in, looks at Horatio, then we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial break, little Billy is talking to his father about how great a day he had at Horrible Horatio’s Medieval House of Horrible Horrors. He’s telling his father about how everyone thought that the guy really got hung when Jessica interrupts to correct Billy that the correct word is “hanged.” Drapes are hung, people are hanged.
(The father’s name is Bert, btw.) This important lesson over, the phone rings and it’s for Bert. Apparently he’s been assigned to the investigation of Horrible Horatio’s Suspicious Suicide. Also, the Captain wants to talk to Jessica. Jessica expresses her conviction that it’s not a suicide since Horatio was not the kind of man to kill himself, and they’re off.
When we get to the scene of the crime we meet the Captain.
Played by delightful character actor John Shuck, the character’s full name is Captain Davis (he never gets a first name).
Anyway, while the physical evidence rules out murder, Horrible Horatio took a blow to the back of the head which was the cause of death, not the gunshot. So we’ve got ourselves a locked room mystery!
The Captain wants Jessica’s opinion on it because she creates such ingenious plots in her books. She has a way of creating “impossible” murders that are not really impossible. So he’s hoping that creativity will help here.
I don’t know why, but Jessica always responds negatively to this kind of request for help. Approximately as negatively as she does to police detectives who don’t want her to stick her nose in when she offers help unasked. I don’t know why the writers thought that this was a good idea, because it was a bad idea.
In this case Jessica isn’t as bad as she was in Hooray for Homicide; all she says is, “I’m sorry to disappoint you but I don’t have a clue.” No offers of help or anything, or even an expression of interest.
The next morning as Jessica comes back from her morning run in a full body sweat suit she finds the newspaper at the door and looks at it.
(The full headline is “Mystery Surrounds Baldwin Death.” I can’t really make out the text of the article but from the words I can make out it’s clearly got nothing to do with the episode. Presumably this was just stuff pasted over a real newspaper. Also, it’s curious that they used the actress’s head shot rather than taking a picture of her with the haircut she had in this episode.)
As an amusing bit of scenery inspection, here’s the front of the house as Jessica runs up to it:
Now, here’s what we can see out the door when Jessica walks in:
Let’s do that computer-enhance stuff of what’s over Jessica’s shoulder:
Not as good as in the movies, but it will do. We can clearly see that the interior, if it’s not just a sound stage, is very much not of the building that the exterior was of. If this is a sound stage, I’m impressed with how much they were able to make it look like there’s a real outdoors outside that door.
Anyway, when Jessica comes in, she immediately picks up the phone and calls the airport reschedule her airplane flight to a later one and then get a flight returning in the evening.
We then cut to the inside of one of Horrible Horatio’s rides.
The lips move a bit as a recording of Horrible Horatio’s voice plays, telling guests that they’ll have some moments of panic but they were warned. I’m not sure whether it’s Horrible Horatio’s face and voice because he was that much of a megalomaniac/celebrity or because it saves money on casting. Maybe a bit of both.
After a few lines, it begins to slow down and eventually stops. Phil and Nils come up to it and Nils says that it’s not the relays, he’s already checked that on another machine. They open it and begin to look into its guts when Jessica walks up looking for Phil.
Jessica asks Nils if he got his problem from yesterday solved and he sourly replies that he’s got no problems, he just does his job the best he can. A phone rings and he excuses himself, explaining that he programmed his phone to forward his calls here.
Jessica talks with Phil a bit and they discuss how literally everyone who’d ever met Horatio is a suspect, at least as far as motive goes. Phil concludes by saying that, personally, he thinks that Horatio did the world a big favor, but if not, let him know who to thank. He then excuses himself as having work to do.
Jessica then goes to the airport, where Michael Gardner intercepts Jessica. He’s armed and shows her his gun by way of persuading her to come with him. Jessica does, though she protests it’s not because of the gun but because her curiosity was piqued. This is weird because she says it insincerely, but it’s completely implausible that Gardner would actually shoot Jessica in front of dozens of witnesses, so it kind of has to be true.
They board a private airplane, where Jessica meets Horatio’s widow, Erica Baldwin.
There’s some small talk in which Jessica mentions that Erica has buried four husbands so far, according to her nephew, Bert. It also comes up that she used to be a showgirl. There’s also a bit where she asks if it would surprise Jessica if she said that she loved Horatio very much, and when Jessica assures her that it would, she replies, “then I won’t say it.”
Jessica asks about Michael’s attachment to her and she explains, “for the past two years, Horatio chose a celibate life. With Michael’s cooperation, I didn’t.”
Technically “celibate” means unmarried. What she actually meant was “continent” or “abstinent.” For some reason Jessica doesn’t correct her on this point of English.
Anyway, the conversation turns to the police suspecting murder and Jessica says that she’s concerned for Laurie Bascomb, and they’re very mistaken if they think that they can get her to stop investigating. On the contrary, though, Erica so much doesn’t want her to stop that she’s prepared to offer Jessica $100k ($297,766.38 in 2024 dollars) if she can prove that Horatio didn’t commit suicide. Eleven months ago he took out a life insurance policy worth two million dollars. This won’t pay if it’s suicide. He hardly seems the kind to have paid money which would only benefit other people, but life insurance policies are necessary to murder mysteries, so it’s fine.
Oh, and when Jessica says that she neither needs nor wants Erica’s money, Erica replies, “then give it to the starving orphans. They do.”
As everyone buckles up for takeoff, Jessica says that she doesn’t have the faintest idea how she can prove Horatio didn’t kill himself.
In the next scene Jessica returns to her Niece’s house via a taxi. After some apologies about them being worried and Jessica saying she tried to call the house which explains nothing that we saw, it turns out that they have company—Laurie Bascomb. She comes up to Jessica and says that she wanted to call her and doesn’t know what to do. Jessica tells her that it’s alright, but Laurie says that it’s not alright. “Horatio Baldwin is dead and I killed him.”
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial break.
When we get back, Jessica is pouring coffee for Laurie as we clear up that it’s not actually true that she killed Horatio Baldwin, she just feels responsible because she left her desk early. This absurd justification for the cliffhanger before commercial break feebly explained, we then get a flashback as to what happened.
Laurie wanted to quit because she couldn’t stand how Horatio used people, but he threatened her. He would reveal certain things about her past if she quit. She followed him into his office, then ran out back into hers and he followed her. He told her that she’d never work again but she didn’t care, she just wanted to get away. He laughed at her and went back into his office, shutting the door behind him. She heard the bolt slam into place at a quarter to seven.
Bert picks up on the blackmail and Jessica points out that if he was blackmailing her, he might have been blackmailing others. Laurie says that he had files on Phil, Arnold, Nils—all his key people. Laurie didn’t know where they were kept, though.
Jessica suggests in his office, given all of his security precautions. This is ridiculous, of course, since he has theme parks and consequently offices throughout the country—this one is only his latest—and that doesn’t even matter because the best place to keep something like incriminating evidence you probably won’t have to use would be in a safe deposit box in a bank, not in the office of your latest theme park. That’s not very convenient for a TV episode, though, so he will have kept it here as a character quirk.
Bert and Jessica go to Horatio’s office to search for a secret compartment for the blackmail files. Captain Davis comes in and asks why Bert didn’t arrest Laurie Bascomb. Before Bert can answer, Phil comes in and asks what’s going on.
The blocking of this is kind of interesting. I’m not sure why they’d arrange these people like this, especially with Phil coming between Bert and the Captain. It feels like it suggests something, but I’m not sure what.
Anyway, Bert answers and says that they’re searching for a hiding place. Phil says that no one could have hidden in here, but Bert says that they’re searching for files. The Captain asks what files and Bert explains about the blackmail. While this is going on, Jessica examines Horatio’s desk and finds the hiding place.
Well, not quite, but she’s on the trail. She wonders why Horatio has a builtin thermostat on his desk. She then notices that it is covered in soot. Jessica then strikes a match on the strange match-holder on Horatio’s desk right next to the thermometer…
…and holds it up next to the thermostat. When the thermostat reads hot enough, his desk slides open, revealing an empty compartment. Horatio was an inveterate gadgeteer, so this is in character! Also, the compartment is empty and the files are gone!
Phil is deeply skeptical of the murder theory, then excuses himself. No one asked him to be there so there was no need to excuse himself, of course.
When he’s gone, Jessica remarks, “for a man whose career has been steeped in illusion, Mr. Carlson has a very closed mind.” Jessica then suggests that they should find whoever did the research for Horatio, since Horatio was unlikely to do his own dirty work.
The scene then shifts to the airport where Arnold Migram is trying to board a flight to Mexico City. There is apparently a sting operation to catch him, for some reason, as the woman at the desk presses a special button to signal the guards that Arnold is there. The guards then apprehend Arnold, though not without a minor chase. As part of that chase, Arnold trips and his briefcase falls, opens, and an enormous number of bills pop out and start blowing in the wind. Some onlookers come to help, but Arnold rushes to it and starts scooping up bills, saying, “This is my money!” over and over again.
Back at police headquarters he swears at the money is his because Horatio owed it to him for ten years of servitude. In the briefcase there’s also the blackmail documentation of him embezzling money, though he says he never took it, it was his associate, Wanda Perlstein. Also, he has no idea how the blackmail documentation got there.
Jessica asks why he ran. He ran because he received a phone call saying that the police had Horatio’s files on him and would be around to pick him up. Bert notes that it was also a phone call that alerted airport security to pick Arnold up. He says this as if it being a phone call suggests it’s the same person, since normally you’d expect the airport to be told by a registered letter or by someone having rented an airplane that does skywriting. This, at least, explains the sting operation to get Migram, at least if we’re willing to believe that airports in the 1980s arrested people on the say-so of anonymous phone calls.
Migram asks if he can go because he’s worried about his cat, and Bert says that’s fine but he shouldn’t go anywhere they can’t find him. You know, like he just tried to do. But Migram says that he can’t anymore because they have all of his money.
After Migram leaves, Jessica looks through the blackmail documentation and wonders if it’s accurate. For example, the dirt on Phil is that he fled to Canada during the Vietnam Crisis, which is hardly a devastating revelation. Also, there’s one person who’s conspicuously absent—Michael Gardner, the business manager.
That night Michael Gardner, wearing a bright red robe over his pajamas, in hotel room on a high floor, hears a cat mewing from his balcony and goes to investigate. When he finds that it’s a tape recorder a figure dressed in black grabs him from behind and throws him off the balcony.
The figure then retrieves the tape recorder and leaves. We fade to black and go to commercial.
The next day Bert talks it over with Carol. As a curious bit of character development, they begin their conversation with him saying that she’s sexy in the morning and her saying that he’s finally noticed. She asks whether Michael Gardner really killed himself and Bert says that there’s no way to know. Interestingly (to Bert), his real name was Mickey Baumgardner, and he was a former private investigator who worked for Horatio digging up dirt. (I’d always thought that “Mickey” was a nickname for Michael, making this not much of an alias.) Also, he was apparently trying to dig up dirt on Jessica, which amuses Carol to no end. Bert asks where Jessica is and Carol says she went over to the house of horrors.
He wants to talk to Jessica so he’s sorry to miss her. There’s a private line into the office so he calls it. It actually goes to Laurie’s desk, and the security guard who had stopped in picks it up and transfers the line in to Horatio’s office where Jessica is.
After Jessica is done with the call she’s about to leave but then gets an idea and picks up the phone, takes off the back cover, and looks at it.
One of the red wires has been cut. Jessica then gets an idea. Talking with the security guard, she establishes that there are two lines, 1998 and 1999, and if 1998 is busy, the call is automatically kicked over to 1999. Like if you use 1998 to call 1999. She demonstrates, and on Laurie’s phone 1998 doesn’t light up and in Horatio’s office the phone doesn’t ring for 1999.
Ned (the security guard) asks what this is all about and Jessica says that she just figured out who killed Horatio and how it was done.
Ned then goes and visits Phil, giving him a note saying that Mrs. Fletcher stopped by and wants him to call her at her Niece’s house. He obligingly does so. She tells him that Michael Gardner had some microfilm that he had hidden. Her nephew thinks she’s bonkers but she knows exactly where it is and so does he—in the attraction that’s not quite working right. She asks if they can meet in forty minutes with the blueprints? It will take that long to get across town. Phil says sure.
This is silly, but since it’s clearly just a setup, it’s fine.
Phil then immediately goes to the ghoulish head of Horatio and turns it on for atmosphere, because when you’re trying to find hidden microfilm you want all of the circuits to be live. Anyway, he finds something he takes to be microfilm and as he does, Jessica, off to the side, says, “How wonderful, Mr. Carlson. You’ve found our prize.”
Jessica then explains that Phil killed Horatio because Horatio didn’t make him a vice president and also had some sort of really bad dirt on him which he replaced before planting the blackmail files in Arnold Migram’s briefcase. He used call forwarding to make it seem like Horatio was killed in a locked room, as Jessica had to seem forty minutes away. That and some misdirection.
Phil says that she’s clever and pulls out a gun. Jessica tells him that he can’t expect to get away with murder and he replies, “But I already have.”
He then shoots and a sheet of glass shatters. It turns out that it was just a mirror and Jessica was safely out of harm’s way. Bert, after cocking his pistol, tells Carlson to freeze and drop the gun. There’s an entire crowd who was watching, apparently, including armed backup.
Phil complies.
Jessica walks up and, after thanking Nils because the illusion was perfect, Phil says that she got lucky that he didn’t know about the microfilm. Jessica takes it from him and says, “Oh, this? No, this is just a roll of negatives from my trip last year to Spain.”
Back in Horatio’s office, Bert explains Jessica’s theory (he gives her credit).
After Laurie left, Phil came to Horatio’s office and Horatio and he quarreled because Horatio reneged on the promotion. Somehow Horatio was struck on the head, possibly when he fell. Carlson thought quickly. He got the gun he kept in his own office, then forwarded his phone to Horatio’s office. He disconnected the light under the line in Laurie’s office. He went into the office and bolted the door. He also disconnected the bell on Horatio’s phone. He then put the gun in Horatio’s hand and shot him in the head.
When the security guards called Phil, the call was forwarded to Horatio’s office where Phil took it. He then moved to the shadows next to the bolted door (there’s a cabinet there which is quite concealing) and pulled the black turtleneck sweater he had been wearing up over his head. There isn’t a great picture of this area of the room; the best one I can find is actually from a flashback when Laurie is telling the story of her fight with Horatio when she quit:
The cabinet is big enough and that corner of the room dark enough to make concealment plausible. When the guards broke in they were focused on Horatio. After they walked up to the desk and while their attention was on Horatio he quietly left the room behind them. In the corridor he got rid of his sweater (for some reason) and rushed back towards the office, calling as he did so.
Jessica remarks that it might have worked, had it not been for their medical examiner.
Later at the airport Bert and Laurie are dropping off Jessica. (Apparently, Jessica forbade Bert from bringing Carol and the kids to say goodbye to Jessica because she hates public goodbyes.)
Laurie tries to thank her and Jessica says that the best way to do that is to start writing that book she’s wanted to write. Laurie says that unfortunately she needs to find a job, and Jessica gives her the check that Erica Baldwin gave her for proving her husband’s death wasn’t suicide. Jessica has already endorsed it over to Laurie.
Jessica then tells Bert, “see you next year” and walks off to her flight.
There’s then a very weird scene where Laurie opens the check as Jessica leaves and is overwhelmed. She hugs Bert for some reason, and mouths “thank you” to Jessica, who is a bit far away to shout to. Jessica smiles and waves back, and we go to credits.
The mystery in this episode was pretty neat. Locked room mysteries only ever have so many solutions, of course—either the room wasn’t really locked, the victim wasn’t dead until after people broke in, or the murderer hid out and left after people broke in. Each of these has variants, though, and it’s in these variations that people can be clever, which this episode was.
It did play a little unfairly with us by not really showing the part of the room that could hide the murderer until late in the episode, but it did show us the guards being focused on the body in a way that might have let someone slip out behind them, so I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it cheated.
In terms of locked-room solutions, I would say that this one is decent, though not brilliant. They do a fairly good job of piling on the evidence that Horatio was alone, or at least that Phil wasn’t in the room. In general they don’t stretch plausibility too much to do it. Phil’s hiding place was pretty concealing and if he chose his time well, he probably could have snuck out behind the guards. He was taking a big risk that they both came in but he didn’t have many options since he had never intended to kill Horatio. Probably the biggest risk was in firing the shot with no clear indication of where it came from. In an underground complex with neither of the guards nearby they’d have no way of knowing which office it came from and with Phil being the only person known to be working late one would expect them to check on him first. Him not being in his office would certainly be a problem. (And you can’t solve this by having the guards nearby since then you’d have expected them to hear Horatio and Phil fighting.) That said, since this wasn’t planned it works for him to take his best chance and the only reason that there’s a mystery is because it happened to work out. It’s fine for the murderer to be audacious and lucky… at first.
It’s also interesting that we’re seven episodes into Murder, She Wrote and have met two nieces and a (female, niece-aged) cousin of Jessica’s. (I didn’t start with the pilot, but that has Jessica’s favorite nephew, Grady, so we can bring the relatives up to four at the expense of considering this the eighth episode.) Throughout the twelve seasons of the show we would only get about twenty relatives of Jessica’s, which is an average of 1.67 relatives per season. We’re currently averaging just under one relative per two episodes. I think that this may have contributed to the perception that Jessica had hundreds of nephews and nieces, since with (around) 260 episodes, the current rate would give us almost 110 relatives. Obviously, the rate of new relatives will go down pretty quickly.
There are a few odd choices in this episode, such as having Horatio’s widow offer Jessica one hundred large to do what she was going to do anyway. It didn’t make her a suspect and I don’t know that else it was supposed to add to the story otherwise.
There’s also the ridiculous business stuff. I really don’t know what to make of it; it’s so absurd that it’s tempting to think it was meant as comedy, except that the serious part of the plot depends on it. A businessman who runs his business by hiring key people at reduced salaries because he’s blackmailing them is not, strictly speaking, impossible. But how much money could he save this way? If he pays his top people $50k instead of $100k, this isn’t much of a savings when you take into account the fifty people making $10k each for each person at the top. Amusement parks are labor-intensive, especially when you include maintenance, security guards, etc. And what sort of quality of employee will you get if you only hire people who’ve done blackmail-worthy things in their life? It would be one thing if Horatio took over a business he didn’t know how to run and was basically managing its decline, but that’s not what’s portrayed. Horrible Horatio is a celebrity who built an empire. Again, anyone can do any evil, but this is just not in character. Someone making money hand-over-fist on his way up would very believably over-extend himself then be desperate to try to cover things, but that’s not what was depicted. Horatio, as we saw him, was still on his way up.
Also, if Horrible Horatio was in financial trouble to the point of cutting corners on safety for his slow-moving flat rides past barely-moving animatronics, why did he go to the expense of building an underground office complex? Excavating enough ground to fit a dozen large offices and then putting a roof on top of it which can hold an uncovered dirt floor (that gets really heavy in the rain) and multi-story buildings would cost a fortune.
And getting back to the issue of character consistency, Horatio was simultaneously charming and went out of his way to pointlessly antagonize people. It is generally good advice to “never make enemies for free” and Horatio gave out being his enemy like he was Santa Claus, if you’ll pardon me mixing my metaphors. It was helpful in establishing suspects, but it felt very much at odds with the charming bits.
This episode was a bit rushed and a bit silly, but at least it was not wacky, so I think that we’re starting to see Murder, She Wrote settle in to what it would be for the main part of its run. It was common for TV shows to need a half dozen episodes or so to find its footing, so we’re not doing too bad.
Next week we’re in both Boston and Cabot Cove for Death Takes a Curtain Call.
On the fourth day of November in the year of our Lord 1983, the fourth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled It’s a Dog’s Life, it’s set in Tennessee, or at least some Tennessee-like place. (Last week’s episode was Hooray for Homicide.)
It’s set on a horse farm, specifically, as an establishing shot of horses frolicking on rolling fields, well… establishes. We also get an establishing shot of a grand house where I assume most of the action will take place.
Though I am a mite suspicious, given this camera angle, that the house is not in fact all that big and is just wide but narrow. Not that it matters; uneducated actors play professors, so there’s no reason that houses can’t play mansions.
We then get an establishing shot of some stables which I believe are actually big and ominous music plays. A figure clad all in black, including wearing black gloves, sneaks up and feeds a horse named Sawdust some kind of pill.
Sawdust eats it as ominous music plays.
When the horse has completely finished eating the pill, the camera cuts to inside the house and a string quartet is playing classic music as a large, expensive party takes place.
There are so many servants that two maids just stand around. They’ve spent something like four different shots establishing that there is a lot of money here, so that will, presumably, be important.
As the camera pans around we see that most of the people are in fox-hunting clothes. We then meet some characters. First is Trish and Anthony.
Then comes in her brother, Spence.
He tells Anthony that the family is sorry that his wife couldn’t make it.
Both Trish and Spence speak their lines like they hate each other, which is impressively poor manners in front of guests, especially for the South. We then get another relative who walks up and asks if they’re having a good fight.
Her name is, apparently, “Echo,” or at least her nickname is. She’s Trish’s niece, not sure whether Spence is her father, but I can guess how much hair spray she uses a day. Boy is it ever the 80s. She and Trish are extremely catty at each other then Spence asks for peace, if not for his sake, than for the sake of his father. At this, Trish leaves.
We then meet another of Spence’s sisters.
Her name is Morgana, and she’s very fond of her astral projectionist. Spence is appropriately rude, by which I mean he makes a gratuitous and unnecessarily mean-spirited comment which is carefully calculated to accomplish nothing whatever, then he walks off.
And then we come to the main characters.
His name is Denton and he’s a famous lady’s man about whom Jessica has been warned. They move on and Denton introduces a friend of his—the owner of a nearby horse farm, and Denton’s old drinking buddy. His name is Tom Cassidy.
His small talk explains why Jessica is here—she’s visiting her cousin, Abby, who works on Denton’s horse farm. It also comes up that he owns a neighboring 600 acres, which is described as small, though in a tongue-in-cheek way. Tom leaves to get Jessica a refill on her coffee, and we meet Jessica’s cousin.
They make a little small talk; she tells Denton, in an English accent, to not be “an old lech.” Tom returns and interrupts the banter by saying “how about a toast?” Before he can propose one, though, Spence interrupts from across the room to say that a toast is a marvelous idea.
I find the blocking of this shot interesting. The characters are in a line to be easily seen by the camera, but it makes no sense at all as a grouping of people who had been talking to each other, and not much more as a group of people who hate each other’s company and are standing next to each other in embarrassed silence for no reason.
He proposes a toast to his father, on his 80th birthday, and many more. Morgana adds a note of affection. Denton rudely takes no notice and merely looks about and asks, “where’s that damn dog of mine?” That damn dog of his is a beagle named Teddy, who comes running from across the house. Spence and his siblings look crestfallen. I guess we can see where Denton’s children got their bad manners from. Oddly, no one else in the crowd seems to have noticed any of this, despite everyone having spoken in a loud, clear voice, to be heard.
Then a man comes in and announces, Ladies and Gentlemen: to horse.
Outside as people are getting on, Trish walks up to her horse with a champagne glass in land, takes a sip, then throws the partially full glass on the ground and mounts her horse. Abby runs over, grabs the bridle, and says, “Trish, you shouldn’t be riding in your condition. It’s dangerous to the horse.”
Trish merely tells her to go away and kiss up to Father while she has the chance. “The day he goes, Honey, so do you.”
Denton calls out to Jessica and Abby, telling him that he’s picked out their horses for them. Jessica thinks that Sawdust is for her, but he tells her that Sawdust is only fit for him; he hasn’t broken out of a trot for years (the horse). He then presses a button and tells Barnes, a security guard, that they’re ready to go and he should open the gates. Barnes, who is sitting in a room filled with monitors and controls, obliged by pressing the Gate 1 button (there are four) which opens the main gates, which we can see on video camera from two different angles.
We then get scenes of the fox hunt over beautiful countryside with swelling music. At one point Denton tells Abby, who is riding next to him, to go on because it can’t be much fun to ride next to an old slowpoke like him. Right after he says this, Trish comes up right next to Denton spurring her horse into a gallop with loud cries, which alarms Sawdust, causing him to bolt. Denton tries to reign sawdust in, but to no effect. Sawdust eventually runs at a bench in front of a hedge and jumps over it. Denton does his best during this, shouting “Tally Ho!”
The camera then cuts away during the landing.
Many people run up, deeply concerned, because this kind of thing can be easily fatal to an eighty year old man.
As, indeed, it proves to be. We cut to Denton lying dead on the ground and a moment later we screen wipe to a police deputy covering the corpse with his jacket.
After a bit of mourning, Jessica, Abby, and Tom go talk to the Sheriff, who says that it was a terrible accident but Denton led a full life. Jessica says that she thinks that Denton didn’t want to take the jump and Tom agrees, saying that Denton was under Doctor’s Orders to take it easy.
The vet is standing next to the Sheriff and Jessica asks if there’s a test he can perform on the horse. He understandably has no idea what Jessica is talking about, so Abby explains that a calm old horse like Sawdust doesn’t suddenly go wild. The Sheriff asks if Jessica is suggesting foul play and instead of answer we cut to Denton’s children getting into a police car (presumably to drive them home) and then we then cut to the cottage where Abby is staying.
Jessica is looking over papers saying to Abby, “I was so certain that there was something wrong with that horse. I feel so foolish. But, tests don’t lie.”
Abby asks, “Don’t they?” She points out that it was hours before they found the horse and there are drugs which leave no trace. Jessica acts like Abby is just being emotional, but of course she’s right. In fact, we know she’s right since we saw somebody give Sawdust a pill shortly before the hunt. This is an interesting choice, both in the showing us and in having Jessica act contrary to what we know to be true. She was wrong when she felt foolish, but we know that she’s now being foolish. Perhaps this is meant to make Jessica relatable by “not being too perfect”? Another possible explanation is putting the investigation on hold in order to get the episode to last the approximately 47 minutes it needs to.
Abby then goes on about what a great man Denton was, but underneath it all he was unhappy because of his selfish relatives.
Which brings up an uncomfortable issue: if Denton’s children are all awful, why didn’t he raise them better? I know that children are their own people and make their own decisions. Great sinners can be the children of great saints, and great saints can be the children of great sinners. That said, being raised well helps and being raised badly does make being a saint harder, and if all of a man’s children are terrible, it’s only fair to ask whether he raised them in a way that made being good, hard.
Anyway, there’s a bit of odd dialog which implies that Abby was in love with Denton and Jessica offers to stay with her for a few days. Abby asks her to stay until the will is read.
Which is necessary to keep Jessica around for the investigation, of course, but it’s really weird. Why would Abby be sticking around for the reading of the will?
We then cut to the day of the reading of the will, or maybe it’s the hour. The exact amount of time that’s passed isn’t specified, and all we get by way of that is an establishing shot of the front door with a black wreath on it.
Spence and Trish fight a bit, but they do establish that “Boswell,” presumably the family lawyer, is expected any minute. After some more bickering, he comes.
Denton’s will is done on video. This was quite a new technology in 1983. The first VHS player came to the United States in the summer of 1977 and they would become popular pretty quickly, but consumer video cameras that recorded onto VHS took longer. The first consumer ones actually came out in 1983. A rich man like Denton could afford to rent professional video equipment to make his will, but the thing would have felt very cutting edge at the time. Boswell describes it as “cutting edge will technology.”
Denton starts out by saying that it’s all legal as hell, so don’t get any ideas. This sets the tone. He then has a hate message for each of his children and grand daughter (it turns out that Morgana is Echo’s mother). That parting spite finished, he gets down to brass tacks.
He gives a shotgun that Tom admired to Tom (his old drinking buddy) and there are cash gifts to each of the servants with something extra for the guard. All of the paintings in the house go to the national gallery. He then says, gleefully, “that’s right, Children, a fast three million in oils now on the way to Washington.” Bosley looks remarkably smug at this.
There’s so much wrong here, but I don’t think that we’re supposed to notice.
Anyway, the rest of his estate comes to about fifteen millions dollars and, except for a modest family trust, goes to his dog, Teddy. Denton’s descendants are upset at this but Boswell assures them that they won’t be able to break the will and if Teddy dies of anything but natural causes, the entire fortune (including the family trust) goes to the SPCA.
And on that bombshell, we go to commercial break.
When we get back, Jessica is on the phone with Ethan, telling him she’ll be gone for a few more days, and adds that Abby is convinced that somebody murdered Denton. And Jessica is afraid that she just might be right.
We then move to a scene where Abby has a pointless fight with Trish, but it is at least established that Teddy is her employer and as such only Marcus Bosley can fire her, and she’s not going anywhere until she finds out who killed Denton.
Interestingly, Morgana warns Abby to be careful of Trish. She does it with some astrological mumbo jumbo, though, so Abby takes no notice. (I say mumbo jumbo because really doubt that the writers got the astrology right, quite apart from my belief that there is nothing to astrology.)
Then there’s yelling, a horse runs out, and Spence is in a horse stall defending himself from Teddy. The scene shifts to the vet examining Teddy and holding up a test tube of clear liquid and saying, “giving this stuff to a dog is like giving loco weed to a horse,” though when asked he didn’t find any in Sawdust. The vest asks who Teddy bit, since he found blood on his collar. The Sheriff then pulls up with a man in the passenger seat who identifies Teddy as his assailant.
In the next scene Marcus Boswell is on the phone with Abby, telling her that Teddy has been released on his own recognizance and she can pick him up from the Sheriff at any time.
Jessica and Abby talk about the situation and Jessica thinks that they need to talk to Marcus to get more information. The shot of them waiting in his office is interesting, especially with how large and posh the office is.
To drive the point home, Jessica remarks that Marcus has done very well working for the Langley estate.
After a minute, Marcus and another lawyer come out. The lawyer says that he could drive a freight train through “that loophole” and Marcus replies that his clients need to consider the costs; it could be a long and bloody battle. Then Morgana walks out of Marcus’ office and says goodbye.
To highlight just how much of a suspect Marcus is, as Jessica and Abby enter the office, his secretary tells him, in an exasperated tone, that it’s his broker and it’s the third time he’s called today. That could, of course, mean anything—and in real life would most likely mean that the broker was trying very hard to sell something to Marcus. In Murder, She Wrote, though, it almost certainly means that Marcus is in financial trouble.
Marcus’ office is even more impressive than his waiting room:
They get down to business. Jessica asks about whether the man who Teddy bit has filed a lawsuit and Marcus says that while he’s made noises, he hasn’t yet and Marcus intends to head him off (whatever that means). They then switch subjects to the will, and the fancy lawyer’s supposed loophole is the question of “sound mind.” Not Denton’s mind, but the dog’s. If a court rules Teddy mentally incompetent…
He doesn’t finish his sentence and I can’t imagine what the end of it might be. You don’t need to be of sound mind to inherit under a will. If Teddy was ruled not of sound mind, he’d require a guardian appointed for him. But he’s a dog, so he needs a guardian anyway. This could only be an issue of the dog literally, rather than figuratively, inherited the money. But that would be nonsense. Animals can’t own property. I assumed that what Denton meant was that a trust was set up with Marcus as the administrator for the benefit of Teddy. That would certainly be, in colloquial English, Teddy inheriting, but it would make legal sense and the fact that Teddy requires a guardian would be irrelevant. I can’t believe that the episode is trying to claim that a dog has literally inherited money and land. You don’t need a loophole, that would be simply impossible. You can only give your property, in your will, to some kind of legal entity capable of owning it. (It can be a fictional person, as in the case of giving it to a corporation, but it has to be some kind of legal person.) I wouldn’t bring this up except that they’re actually making a plot point of it having been done in an impossible way.
Anyway, Marcus says that Denton’s descendants won’t win, but it might take long years and a lot of legal feels to win the battle. He leaves off how much this would benefit him and also explain away the missing money he’d embezzled. (I’m just guessing about that last part, of course.)
He’s interrupted by yet another call from his broker, who insists on speaking to him. Why his secretary seems to work for the broker and not for her employer is not explained. Anyway, he takes the call and after some embarrassing half-phrases, he promises his broker that he’ll send a check today and even put a stamp on the envelope this time.
After hanging up, Marcus tells the women to never, ever buy stock touted by Spencer Langley. His only consolation is that Spencer bought more of it than Marcus did.
This can, in no way, explain why his broker needs a check. No matter how badly a stock does, you’ve paid all of the money when you bought it and can only recoup some money, even if far less, after its sale. Between the purchase and the sale, you do not use money for anything. The only possible way for stock transactions to need cash quickly is if you sold futures and need to buy the stock to cover the future. There’s no way that’s what happened, though.
Jessica only picks up that Spencer is in debt, and Marcus replies, “right up to his Adam’s apple.”
This is not even slightly how stocks work. The only way for a stock doing badly to sink you into debt is… well, there is no direct way. You simply have to take on the debt separately. But you can take on debt in order to buy stock, which you intend to pay off and get profits from when you sell the stock at a higher price. But in that case it would be your banker, not your broker, who is calling you demanding money.
I’m really not sure which is more ridiculous: a dog literally inheriting property or a broker calling demanding money because a stock you bought is doing badly.
Oh well.
We then get a shot of the moon at night to establish that it’s nighttime. Since all pictures of the moon are basically the same, I’ll use one that I took instead of a screenshot. It’s not exactly the same, but you get the idea, and I only use screenshots when they’re necessary for my commentary on the episode:
We then cut to Barnes, the security guard, sitting in front of his collection of monitors. I wonder if the idea is that he lives here in the cave of security cameras on twenty four hour duty. No wonder he got something extra from Denton’s will.
He then hears a sound and the door and goes to open it. It’s Teddy. Barnes says something about “like clockwork,” implying that Teddy always comes to be with Barnes at this time. “I guess you know you’re safe in here,” Barnes explains.
He then notices Trish’s car pulled up to the front gate. He comments that she shouldn’t be allowed to drive. On the security camera she stumbles out of her car and buzzes for Barnes to open the gate. He presses the button and as the gate begins to open she falls down with her head between the gates that just opened.
Barnes puts Teddy down saying that he needs to go check that she’s OK. He leaves, with Teddy remaining behind on his chair.
When Barnes gets near, the gates start to close. Barnes runs to try to save her but he’s too late. The gates crush her head (off camera, of course). We then cut back to Teddy in the guard room, partially standing on the console, wagging his tail.
And on that bombshell, we go to commercial break. (I think that the implication is that Teddy pressed the button and killed Trish.)
When we get back from commercial break, we’re outside by the gate while a bunch of police cars are in the area, presumably investigating. Inside the guard room, someone is dusting for fingerprints on the gate button.
Then in a large room with the Sheriff and the family gathered, Morgana says that she saw her sister’s ghost rising from her earthly form and crying like a morning dove. We get some other backstory about her aura thriving on moonlight and such-like, but we also learn that her bedroom has the only clear view of the gate, and she looked out because she heard a car’s horn.
The doorbell rings and it’s Marcus. He’s come as soon as he heard, for some reason.
Then the Sheriff’s deputy comes in and tells him that they found a print on the gate button, but not a fingerprint—a paw print.
Given that they found it by dusting, blowing away the dust and then using tape to pick up the dust which remained after being blown away, I guess we’re supposed to believe that the digital pads on a dog’s paws leave oil residue? I can’t easily find out whether dogs even have oil pores in their digital pads (they do have sweat pores) but my experience of dog feet is that they are very, very dry. I really doubt that they have sufficient skin oil as to leave enough residue to be able to lift a paw print. It’s not impossible, so far as I know, but it’s still a bit… far fetched. And even so would leave entirely open the possibility that someone used Teddy’s paw to press the gate button so as to leave no fingerprints. It can’t be supposed that Teddy understood that pressing the button would hurt Trish as a human could.
Anyway, there’s some arguing and bickering over how this gets rid of the will—I guess everyone has forgotten that if Teddy dies of anything but natural causes, all of Denton’s money goes to the SPCA. Though I don’t see how that would come into play since the dog would likely just be put into prison for life—even if he got sentenced to death, it takes so long to work through the appeals and so on that he would die of natural causes anyway.
I can’t believe I’m actually thinking that through. Why is this episode demanding that we take a dog seriously as a human being?
Anyway, Marcus shouts, “Sheriff, you cannot possibly believe that a dog is capable of murder!” At that, Abby says, “of course not. He’d have to be trained.” Then everyone stairs at her since she’s an animal trainer.
The scene shifts to Jessica going down to the front gate. She runs into Tom driving up in an old blue pickup truck. He asks how the family is doing then says he came as soon as he heard on the police band on his CB radio. He then drives on up to see what he can do to help.
Jessica wanders on down and meets Will, who’s trying to get the victim’s coat into a large plastic bag. Jessica offers to help and examines the coat in the process. Will gratefully accepts the help because he feels that the coat requires a “lady’s touch” to fold.
As you can see, the deputy is a young man and Jessica comes on with a matronly tone. This part actually feels quite realistic. Also, Jessica’s examination shows that the coat is quite new but the seams are split, just like her “car coat.”
After a bit of small talk, Jessica then walks around, examining the ground. After that she goes and interviews Barnes in the security room.
He left Teddy alone and the door automatically locks when it’s closed. He’s got the only key, and Teddy was left alone in the room. When he asks Jessica if she really thinks that Teddy pushed the button, she replies that she’s quite sure of it. She asks if he heard anything unusual while he was on his way to the gate and he replies no, just the usual. Crickets and a night bird calling.
She then asks the way to Morgana’s room.
Morgana’s room does, indeed, have a decent view of the gate. While Jessica is looking, we also hear some music which suggests that this is an important clue.
Jessica then joins Abby in the kitchen for tea. (When stressed, the English always go for tea.) When Marcus comes in to fetch ice because everyone in the main room needs a drink, Jessica notices that he has a nasty grease mark on his trousers. It’s important to the plot because we get the kind of closeup necessary in 1980s televsion to make sure we can see the clue even if there’s interference in the signal.
He says that he had a flat tire on the way over and he supposed that he got some grease off of the jack. A jack is a device for lifting the car up so that one can put the wheel on and take it off, which a human could not possibly do if the weight of the car is still on the tire. They look something like this:
(Not shown is a bar that goes through the hole and is used to give the mechanical advantage necessary to turn the screw.)
There is no realistic way those grease marks came from a jack. Given that this episode has several impossible things already, I’d have figured that this was yet one more unrealistic thing, but the fact that they gave us a close-up suggests that it’s meant to be a clue and not a plot hole.
Jessica then asks where he got it and how long he stopped. He figured about half a mile away and he stopped for about twenty minutes. Jessica asks if that means that anyone who left the house would have had to pass by him.
Marcus says that Jessica is right, but that no one passed by him. Abby says that that means that the killer had to be someone in the house, and Marcus concurs.
After he leaves, Jessica asks Abby how one would go about training a dog to press a button. The answer is endless repetition, and the command could be anything. A voice, snapping your fingers, a whistle—at that Jessica perks up. A whistle was just the kind of thing she had in mind.
Some bickering later, Jessica is forced to explain her theory to everyone, including the Sheriff. Basically, it’s that someone impersonated Trish—whoever got out of the car never spoke on the intercom. At this point Trish was inside the car. After a minute the person impersonating Trish got up, dragged Trish (who was drunk or unconscious) to the spot where her head was in the way of the gate, then gave Teddy the signal over the intercom.
The Sheriff then asks if a whistle like the one he’s holding would do it. When Jessica says that it’s possible, the Sheriff asks if anyone in the house has the initials A.B.F. and Abby replies “Abigail Benton Freestone.” The Sheriff adds that they found the whistle down by the driveway.
The scene then shifts to the Sheriff’s office, where both Abby and Teddy are in jail.
I really don’t know what, if anything, we’re expected to take seriously anymore.
We cut from Abby bemoaning her fate to Teddy to Jessica being angry at the Sheriff. After she insults him and complains at him, he says that the inquest is on Friday and until then Teddy is going to be held as an accessory after the fact. Which is not what he would be. An accessory after the fact is somebody who did not take part in the crime but did take part in trying to help the person who committed the crime to evade justice. Even if you ignore the fact that Teddy is a dog, that’s not what he did. He took part in the commission of the crime, which would make him an plain old accessory. At this point I’m starting to wonder if they’re just getting things wrong on purpose. I guess we should count our blessings that on the fox hunt they rode the horses and followed the hounds, rather than riding the hounds and having the horses follow the scent trail.
In the next scene Jessica is given a lift back to the house by Marcus. She has him drop her off about a half mile away from the house, saying that she needs some exercise. He drives off and she looks at his tire tracks.
I’m going to guess that the issue is that both tires are bald, or else both tires are the same size, meaning that Marcus did not, in fact, have a flat tire recently. It’s a bit of a problem for this clue to show us that because we’re only seeing the marks of two tires (kind of next to each other, from when the car was turning slightly to get back onto the road). The flat could have been on the other side of the car, which stayed on the road and whose tracks we don’t see. Marcus never said which tire went flat. However, the fact that they’re showing this to us pretty much means that the flat tire had to be disproved. Things are not looking good for Marcus; we’ve had two close-ups on clues related to him.
As Jessica is looking around, the nice young deputy Will shows up and asks her what’s up. He asks if she’s looking for something and she said just a hunch. She asks if he has one of the Sheriff’s new metal detectors and he says that he can get it. She’s looking for a bicycle clip. A plain, ordinary bicycle clip. He doesn’t know what she means and she says that he’ll know it when he sees it.
Later on Jessica is mounted on a horse when Echo comes up. She asks where Jessica is going, and she says that she’s going to see a man about a dog bite. (Jessica asks about Spencer, whose horse is missing.)
We cut to Potts operating a chainsaw while his arm bandage is on a shotgun. Jessica rides up the horse then sneaks up and steals Potts’ arm bandage. When she gets back to her horse it’s actually Spencer’s horse, he took the liberty of putting her horse in the stable. He then calls Potts.
Potts and Spencer interrogate Jessica at gunpoint. Potts is in favor of killing her and hiding the body, but she talks him out of it, saying that his little scheme of fraud will hardly be noticed once she reveals who killed Trish. There’s a bit of bickering, but then we cut to a court house. Well, some kind of building in which court is in session. It feels more like a gymnasium.
I’m not sure what it’s supposed to actually be. When the deputy brings in a speaker on a long wire, the judge—or whoever he is—asks what’s going on and Jessica says that this is part of her presentation. I suppose that this is actually supposed to be an inquest, and I must confess that I need to do more research on them to get a sense of whether this set makes any sense. It doesn’t feel like it, and from the rest of this episode I would guess that it doesn’t.
The judge indicates that the proceeding is going to begin with Mrs. Fletcher acting as an amicus curiae. He then says that, for the yahoos in the back, that’s a friend of the court.
Jessica get up, makes an introductory remark, and then says that to keep this short she’s only going to call one witness: Teddy.
Sure. Whatever. I don’t see any way to care at this point that an Amicus Curiae presenter (they’re more normally written briefs, but this is TV) would have no right to call witnesses. She’s calling a dog as a witness and everyone is OK with it, so I guess we’re just in clown world.
Teddy is carried in by a deputy and put in the chair next to the small table. Jessica then has the deputy blow on the whistle that was found by the gate. No one hears it but Teddy because it’s an ultrasonic whistle. She then has the deputy go into the other room and blow the whistle over the speaker. After he says that he blue the whistle, Jessica notes that Teddy didn’t react, because the whistle is above the range of the speaker. She actually says “any loudspeaker” which is probably wrong, but it probably would be above the range of a speaker system used in a security system, even back in the 1980s when they were all analog. (Most modern digital systems have a hard cutoff at either 22.05 or 24KHz, while according to Wikipedia most dog whistles are in the 23-54KHz range, so for most dog whistles it would be impossible to record or transmit them over normal digital systems. I only bring this up because it relates to adapting this kind of idea to modern stories.)
Jessica then explains that it was Marcus—he desperately needed the money years of litigation would bring him. He persuaded Trish to drug Denton’s horse by lying to her about whether she would inherit under Denton’s will. Trish was, of course, furious when she found out the truth, but he had prepared for this and trained Teddy long in advance.
She then starts interrogating him. Does he own a bicycle, does he ride out by the Langley manor, etc. When he denies having ridden by the Langley manner on the night of Trish’s death, Jessica then confronts him with the bicycle clip. While he quite reasonably points out that the bicycle clip could have belonged to anyone, she counters with her observation of the characteristic grease stains of a bicycle chain being on his pants that night. When he claims it came from changing a tire as he said that night, she counters that all four of his tires had identical tread, while a spare tire should have had deep, new tread. She then suggests settling the matter by looking in his trunk.
Before he can answer, she calls out to Will to “go ahead, please” and places the gate button next to Teddy. When a mockingbird whistle plays over the loudspeaker, Teddy presses the button several times, then goes over to Marcus and looks to him for a treat.
Jessica in fact asks him, “why don’t you feed him his treat? Just like you did when you trained him to help you murder Trish.” Marcus looks around and seeing no way out sinks into a chair, crying, his face in his hands.
Back at the Langley manner Jessica and Abby are talking. Abby confesses that she doesn’t understand why Marcus did it and Jessica points out the obvious that he would have found a hundred ways to bleed off as much money as he needed from Teddy.
Then Tom drives up and takes Teddy, while Abby and Jessica say that Teddy will be very happy in his new home. After a bit of small talk in which he promises to do absolutely nothing for Denton’s children, he drives off with Teddy in the back of his pickup truck and we go to credits.
What an episode.
I have no idea what to make of this—is it supposed to be a parody? It’s early enough in the first season that they may well have tried several different kinds of episodes to see what felt right or hit it off with fans. If this wasn’t meant to be a campy parody-type episode, a lá the 1960s Batman series starring Adam West, then this was a really stupid episode. If it was supposed to be a campy parody, it wasn’t very funny.
I really don’t know what to say about it.
If we ignore all of the asinine stuff about the dog actually inheriting the money directly, being charged with murder, etc. we do have the skeleton of a decent murder mystery. The family lawyer needed money and convinced one of the millionaire’s heirs to murder him, then when she found out she wasn’t inheriting, he murdered her. That’s pretty solid. Training a dog to do it isn’t wonderful, but it does have a bit of a golden-age “clever twist” feel to it.
Unfortunately, the dog training doesn’t really make sense in this story. For one thing, how on earth did Boswell train Toby to scratch on the door every night? He’d have to be there to do it, and are we really to believe that the security guard didn’t notice Boswell there giving Toby treats every time he scratched on the door? For another, dog training isn’t a context-independent thing. When you train a dog to a command in a place, it mostly only responds to the command in that place. This is why police dogs get trained to a command in about twenty different contexts—that’s what’s necessary to get them to respond to a command in any context. And the specificity of pressing a specific button out of a collection of buttons—that’s doable, but it would basically require training Toby in the security guard’s office. All of which might possibly be a stretch of the imagination if Boswell lived on the grounds and had constant access to the contexts necessary to train Toby. As somebody who did not have regular access either to Toby or to the grounds? That’s just not how dog training works.
Of course, I don’t know why I’m bothering with that because this is an episode where a dog inherits money and is arrested for murder.
Ultimately, I’m inclined to write this episode off as an early episode where the writers hadn’t decided on the tone for Murder, She Wrote yet. It had some nice visuals and the hint of a decent mystery, but if this was what Murder, She Wrote was generally like, well, I don’t think I’d be writing these reviews, forty years later.
Next week we go to Virginia for Lovers and Other Killers.
A topic I keep coming back to is the changing focus of detective fiction. Murders on the Rue Morgue (generally held to be the start of the genre) was, in the original sense of the term, empirical. That is, Dupin reasoned to the solution only from the direct evidence of his senses. By the time of Sherlock Holmes, though, when the genre really comes alive, Holmes uses all manner of scientific investigation to supplement the evidence of his senses.
Starting only fifteen years later and still very much in the early days of the golden age of detective stories, Dr. Thorndyke barely looks at things except through a microscope or camera. Most of his analyses are chemical analyses. He was wildly popular and his whole shtick was being on the cutting edge of technology.
Even where this was pushed back against, as it would start to be in the 1910s, the alternatives were still presented as something new. Father Brown did not use a microscope, but he used human psychology in a way no one had before. Poirot did not get down on all fours with a magnifying glass, but he emphasized order and method as no one had yet done.
I’ve heard the claim often enough I’m willing to believe it that part of the detective craze of the late 1800s was a series of highly publicized failures by the police in the early and mid-1800s. Scotland Yard was founded in 1829. (More accurately, the Metropolitan Police were; they only expanded their buildings to address on Scotland Yard and thus gained the name later on.) While they, like the Sûreté they were based on, reduced crime, they far from got rid of it. Being organized for that purpose, their failures would be all the more noticeable. Another possible factor is the rise of newspapers. Already popular in the 1700s, in the 1800s technological progress made them cheaper and easier to run than ever, as well as cheaper to distribute. I don’t have hard facts, so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe that newspapers proliferated and became more popular throughout the 1800s. Newspapers hungered for news, the more sensational the better, and were not shy of publicizing police failures.
A history of prominent police failure produced an appetite for stories of people with greater abilities. This worked together with the improvements of technology (in which I include greater availability) such as magnifying lenses and refined chemicals for chemical analysis to produce a hope for improvements.
In this environment, detective stories emerged with fictional accounts of people who used new methods of logic and deduction as well as the latest advances in forensic science. This makes sense; it also makes sense of how little interest there seems to be at present for fictional depictions of people using the latest technology to catch criminals. Thrill as the police detective sends a sample off to the lab for the latest and most advanced test and waits for a month for the results to come back!
I do not know who could thrill to that.
Which puts us, now, in the curious position of the art of detection being something of a throwback, or even an anti-technological genre. In the twenty first century, what is interesting about detection is what anyone can do with the resources of an ordinary person. This does not exclude technology, but if a modern detective takes a photograph and zooms in on it to show a detail, the interesting part is the detail that they noticed, not the photograph itself. In the days of Dr. Thorndyke, the photograph fascinated readers and the loving care with which he set up the apparatus and took the photographs was the focus of the tale. In court, he provided transparent photographs of footprints to be super-imposed over each other to show that they could not match; this was described in detail. He then mentioned off-handedly that the number of nails in the two footprints was different, though the patterns of the nail was indeed similar. In a modern detective story, this kind of attention to detail is far more interesting than the fact of photographs.
I don’t think that this is primarily about relatability, though. The most interesting part of the detective story is not the clues, but the investigation. A detective solving a puzzle in complete isolation would really just be the story of a lab technician doing his job, even if he does it creatively. The investigation involves the people principally concerned in the crime. For these people, the crime, until it is solved, creates a strange, liminal state. The investigation takes advantage of this liminal state and exposes it, allowing the revelation of character and human nature that would stay veiled under normal circumstances. Modern technology can be used to create this, though only by its conclusions. It is not interesting to discuss a detective taking dozens of samples with q-tips and carefully putting them into sterile plastic bags. It is not interesting to discuss a lab technician unsealing the plastic bags and swirling the q-tip in a solvent, adding reagents, then putting it on a shelf with a label for the next day to look at it, or placing it in a PCR machine and hitting the “start” button. But it is interesting when the results come back and it shows that the DNA of someone descended from the victim was found at the scene of the crime. (As long as there’s more than one person descended from the victim, or the only person who is has an unbreakable alibi, or the detective is convinced that the only person known to be descended from the victim is innocent.) They’re interesting because they create a liminal space where things can’t go on as they had (someone is going to get hanged or go to jail) but we don’t know what’s on the other side of that threshold and it’s important to find out.
There is, however, a genre, or perhaps a sub-genre, or perhaps it would be better to say a thread, of detective fiction which is definitely anti-technological. I think that this is mostly accidental, but one of the great sins of modern technology, or more accurately modern man’s use of modern technology, is hubris. Modern forensic technology is claimed to be infallible, or at least is generally regarded as infallible. Modern science is often spelled with a capital ‘S’ and claims unquestioning authority. More often, people who are not scientists and who are doing no science spell it with the capital ‘S’, say that it must be unquestioningly believed, and also state firmly that it says whatever it is they want it to say. Against this hubris, sane people have an instinct to rebel and one such outlet is in detective stories. Teams of experts come in with their fancy machines and high tech laboratories an a human being using nothing but the eyes and wits God gave him is able to figure out what they missed. It’s only one kind of detective story, but if you want to see the proud humbled, detective fiction is eminently fit for the purpose.
I talk about the concept of fictional “canon” and how there really is no such thing, so it’s not worth worrying about. You can also watch this on YouTube:
I had the pleasure of having the always-interesting science fiction author Mr. John C Wright (who blogs at scifiwright.com) on my show. It was a somewhat wide-ranging conversation, though it stuck (in my mind) surprisingly closely to the topic we set out to talk about throughout. It’s also available on YouTube:
God’s blessings to you on this the second day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.
I watched part of an interesting discussion of why other people than the lady making the video liked the movie Rogue One:
There was a point she came back to several times which I found interesting: that the characters had no arc. I don’t know whether she has a rule that all good fiction has character arcs where the characters grow and develop; certainly that would rule out short fiction which usually is about revealing interesting things about a character, not about developing that character in the sense of the character themselves changing. (And, as a side note, I generally contend that in structure movies are far more like short stories than they are like novels, but that’s a conversation for another day.) There’s also the possibility that her problem with Rogue One was something else—such as boring characters with no personalities—and she is merely describing that as them not having an arc. I’ve read the advice from more than one screenwriter that feedback from non-writers tends to be correct about where the problems are and wrong about what the solutions are. This is, I think, a more general issue that people who are complaining about something will often reach for the most ready description to hand which might fit even a little bit, rather than give a truly accurate complaint. It results in a lot of complaints which at the same time—but in different senses—are correct, but also wrong. This is especially true whenever anyone’s real complaint is that another person’s displaying of a group identity which isn’t shared made the speaker feel out-group, and their complaint is either that or the person in question didn’t do enough to make them feel in-group anyway. Such complaints are almost never of that form, I think in part because people would feel childish saying, “I felt excluded because there are things we don’t have in common.” Unfortunately there’s no way to say that which isn’t childish because it is a childish feeling. Best to control one’s feelings (or rather, how much one pays attention to them and how one acts or doesn’t based on them), but at the very least accurately describing problems would be a step forward. But alas we live in a very fallen world and so such feelings are usually placed on the other person (“she’s trying too hard”, “she doesn’t care about her appearance”, “no one needs an 80# bow”, etc.) in order to preserve the dignity of the person acting in an undignified manner.
Anyway, if we assume for the moment that what might be imprecise passing comments describing a feeling are in fact carefully thought out critiques of story construction, Ms. Nicholson’s comments bring up an interesting question about whether and to what degree we really want the characters in a story to change (or “grow,” which usually means, “become morally better”). Certainly we don’t want all of the characters to change. This is especially the case in one of my favorite genres—detective fiction. I want the detective unraveling the mystery, not personally growing. If he still has significant amounts of growth to do, he shouldn’t be the detective at all. The same is true of wise old men. I want them to be wise and old, not learning and growing. Some people in life should be growing, and ideally they should be young. Others should have already grown. Star Wars wouldn’t have been half as good if Obi Wan had lots of room for character growth. If he had, there would have been no one to make Han Solo and Luke grow up. I don’t know whether stories need characters who are effectively—if not chronologically—children in them, but they certainly need some adults in them, or the children in them have no way of growing.
This only scratches the surface of the topic, which I will certainly revisit later as time permits.
Chris Lansdown 
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