On the twenty ninth day of September in the year of our Lord 1985, the first episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in the tropics, it’s titled Widow, Weep For Me. (Last season’s finale was Funeral At Fifty Mile.)

This must have been very exciting for the cast and crew of Murder, She Wrote because a second season means that you’re a success. Of course, a second season in no way guarantees a third, and they would have no way of knowing, at this point, that Murder, She Wrote would run for a total of twelve seasons. It’s also an interesting time for viewers because TV shows would often change fairly substantially between the first and second seasons. The lead-up to the second season was a time to take stock of what worked and what didn’t, what could be improved, and what needed to be streamlined. So now we find out whether all of that made it better or worse.

After the establishing shot of someplace that’s supposed to be the tropics but could be California with a few tiki torches in the foreground, we then get an opening scene of a wealthy woman who writes a letter to Jessica, posts it in the hotel post box, then gets murdered.

We then see the figure wearing all-black raise a knife that he had previously used to jimmy open the door from the balcony:

I love how often burglars in Murder, She Wrote wear all black clothing, including black gloves. I suppose it would, actually, help one to hide in shadows, though I can’t help but think that it would look a bit odd while you’re on your way to those shadows.

The hand plunges down and we smash-cut to a wave crashing on the rocks at Cabot Cove:

Instead of seeing Cabot Cove, though, we then cut to a white limousine pulling up to the same hotel. A moment later, Jessica gets out, speaking in her best rich-woman accent:

She asks the man in the uniform to see to her matched luggage. They’re unmarked, and she’d like to leave with them in the same condition.

At the desk, she lays it on quite thick. Evidently, she’s trying to give the impression of a rich, self-important woman.

A woman named Myrna Montclair then approaches Jessica and introduces herself.

Jessica (who is going by the name Mrs. Canfeld, from Nebraska) asks if they’ve met before and is sure that they have. Myrna suggests that Jessica might be recognizing her from her previous career—the movies.

(The actress playing Myrna is Cyd Charisse, who was, perhaps, most famous for being the leading lady opposite Fred Astair in two MGM movies, though she did a lot of other things too and I’m not very familiar with her career. Here’s a clip of her dancing with Fred Astaire in the movie 1953 The Bandwagon🙂

It’s very interesting that they lamp-shade the fact that Cyd Charisse would have been recognizable by having the character be a former movie star.

Anyway, Jessica continues to lay on the “self-important rich woman” shtick. She lays it on quite thick; this shot gives a sense of just how thick Jessica is laying it on:

Up in her hotel room, Jessica takes off the ridiculous turban and reads the letter we saw the woman in the opening write. Before I get to that, I have to say that the outfit looks better without the turban:

I really wonder why those were a thing.

Anyway, the letter says:

Jessica,
I’m in trouble. Desperately need your help and advice. I sense a terrible danger, but I can’t leave the island. Will explain when you arrive.
–Antoinette

Jessica’s thinking about what she just read is interrupted by a man who calls her “Madam Fletcher” in a French accent:

His name is Chief Inspector Claude Rensselaer, of the Island Police. He then reminds her that they spoke on the phone. (He warned her to not come.)

He’s concerned for her safety as she’s showed up in a manner designed to invite trouble. Jessica explains that Antoinette’s last act was to ask for her help and she’s not going to ignore that request. The two were very close—like sisters—until five years ago when Antoinette’s husband died and Antoinette tried to lose herself in travel, parties, love affairs, and drink.

The Chief Inspector tells her that she was killed by a thief—he’s been operating in the area recently—but Jessica cannot accept that. He says that it is widely known that the victim wrote Jessica a letter right before she died and this might put Jessica in danger. Oddly, Jessica doesn’t point out that this would only be true if the inspector is wrong and it wasn’t just a thief after jewelry who snuck into the room after the letter was posted. Instead, she just explains that’s why she came under the assumed name of Marguerite Canfield (who the Chief Inspector remarks is a famous recluse).

He also asks if she realizes that all of the gaudy jewelry makes her a target for the thief and Jessica replies that she certainly hopes so. Then she asks what they have actually found out.

He says that they have no physical evidence and those who knew Antoinette best all have alibis. Jessica then gets a list from the Chief Inspector of who those people are.

We then meet the first person on the list, Eric Brahm, the hotel manager:

He tried to put the moves on “Mrs. Canfield,” though according to the Chief Inspector he tries that on all unattached ladies in the hotel.

Speaking of unattached ladies, Jessica meets Alva Crane at the roulette table:

Shortly after they introduce themselves, a timer goes off and Alva says that she needs to take her blood pressure medication. As she fumbles in her purse for the medication, we get a closeup of a key in her purse:

I’ve no idea what this is supposed to be a clue for, but they never show us a closeup in Murder, She Wrote without it being important. This one is a bit odd because this was during the time when hotels would use keys rather than disposable key-cards, so we would expect her to have a key in her purse.

After she gives a bit of chatter, a couple comes up, the woman obviously drunk.

She places a bet on number seventeen, as seventeen is the number on her classroom door in Curtis Road Elementary School in Davenport, Iowa. (She loses, of course. It comes up number twenty two.)

When she tries to place another bet the man tells her that it’s time to go to bed and she marvels to the older women that this beautiful man is with her.

After they depart, a middle-aged man with an Irish accent walks up and introduces himself as Michael Haggerty.

There’s a bit of witty dialog—she asks if they’ve been introduced and he says that he believes he just accomplished that formality—then he invites Jessica (as Maggie Canfield) to join him on the terrace and for some reason she accepts. He’s charming and claims to be a man of independent means, saying something vague about the British police thinking that he and some friends of his robbed the bank of England of a million pounds.

Later on, as they’re walking, Jessica asks about the man with the schoolteacher and Michael says that he is “Sven Torvald”. A few years ago he won two gold medals for skiing. These days he a member of the international jet set. A bit of conversation later, as Michael is inviting Jessica to go tour a waterfall with him, a thief grabs Jessica’s purse and runs. Michael gives chase but is knocked down by another man who claims that it was an accident.

The man who knocked Michael down, allowing the thief to get away, turns out to be Sheldon Greenberg, the head of hotel security. When Jessica asks why he’s been watching her all evening, he says that it was because he was worried that something like this might happen because she wears her jewelry so conspicuously. He then excuses himself to go report the theft to the police.

Oddly, we don’t fade to black when going to commercial, but, regardless, had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:

When we get back, Jessica calls Inspector Rensselaer. She asks him if Sheldon Greenberg really did report the theft of her purse, and he tells her that Greenberg has not. She asks what he knows about Greenberg and Rensselaer says that he doesn’t know much, but his credentials check out. He had been a New York City policeman for twenty years with a good record.

After this phone call Jessica spies the drunk woman from the night before running along, stops her, and introduces herself. The woman’s name is Veronica Harrold. She’s on the trip because she won it at a supermarket giveaway. The funny thing is that she doesn’t even remember entering. Also, it was a vacation for one—she met Sven here.

Veronica gets on to reminiscing. The woman who died—Antoinette—was super nice to her on the first day she got here. When Jessica (still posing as Maggie Canfeld) remarks that this was very nice of her, Veronica replies that it was, but also a little strange—it was as if Antoinette had singled her out. Antoinette didn’t get along well with Sven, though.

Veronica then notices Miss Montclair standing by the tennis courts in a tennis outfit and talks about how beautiful she is and how much she (Veronica) loved her (Miss Montclair) in her movies. She saw The Sin of Andrea Crown six times. (Miss Montclair played a woman whose husband is cheating on her so she systematically kills all of his mistresses. This is invented for this episode; it has nothing to do with the movies Cyd Charisse was in, so far as I can tell.)

This is interupted by Sven coming up. He’s rented a boat at the marina and thought they might do some scuba diving. Veronica thinks this is a great idea and excuses herself to Jessica.

The scene then shifts to the hotel manager’s office, where the hotel manager tells Michael Haggerty that he’s checked and there is no Michael Haggerty associated with the whiskey importing business, which puts him in a distressing position since Michael has run up a casino obligation of more than ten thousand pounds under false credentials.

Michael replies that he won’t explain; his using an alias is a personal quirk. However, he hands the hotel manger a cashier’s check for twenty five thousand pounds and tells him that it should ease his misgivings.

It’s a bit odd that he’s made it out to the hotel manager personally, rather than to the hotel, but in any event this does ease the hotel manager’s misgivings and the scene ends.

In the next scene Jessica notices the hotel security man talking, in the lobby of the hotel, with the man who stole her purse the night before.

After the man in the striped shirt leaves and Greenberg goes into her office, Jessica goes in and confronts him. He claims that he found it (full of cash, no less) after scouring the grounds for a few hours, but Jessica asks about him talking with the thief.

Instead of answering, he shows Jessica one of her books with her picture on the back. (I love how in Murder, She Wrote all of Jessica’s books have a large picture of her on the back cover instead of a blurb or book reviews. This wasn’t super-common, though it did happen in the 1980s, perhaps most prominently with Danielle Steele.)

He had her purse stolen because he wasn’t certain she wasn’t Marguerite Canfeld and wanted to look at her passport to be sure.

The conversation then takes a strange turn as he seems to take her presence personally—that she came to make him look bad. Jessica responds by flattering him and even suggesting that she would make him a character in her next book. He takes this well, saying that he’s read all of her books and they’re good, so he offers to help her if there’s anything he can do.

Jessica then calls Inspector Rensselaer and asks if they can meet someplace where they won’t be seen. He says he will meet her in a private place in Turtle Bay in 30 minutes. (Why she can’t just say what she wants to say over the phone, which is not much less private, she does not say. Also, it’s a bit odd that he says he knows where it is but doesn’t tell her where it is.)

There’s then a scene where the hotel manager has a conversation with miss Myrna Montclair, who turns out to be his wife but they’re keeping it secret because of company policy. He tells her that they will be able to go public in few months at the most, suggesting, I think, that he’s supposed to be a suspect for the robberies. Which, of course, guarantees that he’s innocent.

We then cut to Jessica waiting for a cab but Michael Haggerty drives up and insists on giving her a ride, which for some reason she accepts. After Michael passes the correct turn, Jessica asks him to stop the car but he says that he needs a minute to lose the person following them, first. After some evasive maneuvers, he does.

He then pulls up to an overlook and talks with Jessica. She asks if he knew Antoinette and he did, including that she had two marriages, the first of which her father paid to have annulled. When Jessica says it’s curious that he knows that because her marriage to Leon Savitch was a secret she shared with no one, he remarks that it’s interesting that she knows the first husband’s name and asks who the hell she is, adding that he once met Marguerite Canfeld many years ago, and unless she’s grown five inches in the intervening time, Jessica is definitely not Marguerite Canfeld.

And on this bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.

When we get back, Sergeant D’arcy (who was the one following them) pulls up and asks Jessica, by her real name, if she’s fine, to which she replies that she is. Haggerty takes note of the name. D’arcy shows Jessica his badge and asks her to come with him immediately. The Inspector wants to see her at the hotel—there’s been another murder.

Back at the hotel, Jessica meets up with Rensselaer, who mentions that it wasn’t luck that Sergeant D’arcy caught up with them—he took the precaution of having a homing device put into Michael Haggerty’s car before they drove off. (When Jessica replies, “of course, the doorman,” Rensselaer replies, “let’s keep that our little secret”.)

The victim is a Alva Crane, who was murdered at around six in the morning.

Jessica disagrees that this is the work of a professional thief—Alva Crane’s jewels were good fakes, but they were fakes. And if Jessica could spot that they were fakes, surely a professional thief could, too.

They then check out whether Alva Crane was merely wearing fake jewels to keep the real ones safe or if she actually had little worth stealing. They do this by taking the key which was in her purse, but now is on her dresser, which turns out to be the key for her hotel safe deposit box.

When they open the safe deposit box they don’t find anything of value—only about $1,000 in American money. Greenberg disagrees with Jessica about Alva Crane’s jewels being fakes, though. He thinks that they were real—unlike the jewels that Jessica was wearing.

The subject of fake jewels that someone can spot with the naked eye is rather interesting, because it was somewhat iffy in 1985 and certainly didn’t last much beyond it. In the late 1970s, cubic zirconia became commercially available and high quality cubic zirconia is exceedingly difficult to distinguish from real diamonds with the naked eye—and almost impossible to tell while someone is wearing them, where you can’t control the lighting and angles to see the subtle differences with diamonds. (Synthetic sapphires, rubies, and emeralds were all widely available by the 1960s and the only way to distinguish them from their natural variants is by their lack of flaws—but a lack of flaws is also what you find in more expensive natural gemstones.)

Prior to the 1970s, it was the case that glass might be used as fake diamonds and the trained eye might spot them. If you’ve seen references to “paste” jewels, by the way, it was to this. “Paste” referred to heavily leaded crystal because of the way in which it was made—the ingredients in the leaded glass were mixed as a paste prior to firing in order to ensure uniform mixing. By 1985 leaded crystal glass had largely been replaced by cubic zirconia as fake diamonds, though one might plausibly stretch this that an older lady might have fake jewels she bought at least five or six years before, and hasn’t seen the need to upgrade.

I should add, because most people’s experience with cubic zirconia is with low-grade cubic zirconia, that there are 5 basic grades which are related to the quality of manufacturing (zirconium oxide tends to be monocrystaline a room temperature, not cubic structured; dopants such as yttrium or calcium oxide are used to stabilize the cubic structure at room temperature, each manufacturer having their own recipe). The lowest grade might be sold at prices that teenagers shopping in malls could afford, and consequently his is often what people think of when they think of cubic zirconia. Not only was the recipe used in making these grades chosen for economic efficiency rather than clarify of the resulting gemstone, they were generally machine cut and received only some polishing. The stuff sold in jewelry stores as fake diamonds would be the highest grade, hand-cut, and thoroughly polished. It’s this high-end cubic zirconia that is difficult to distinguish from diamond with the naked eye. It’s also the kind that a rich woman getting a cheap copy made of real jewelry would get when she asked her jeweler to make the copy.

Considering mysteries written today: this is a plot point that isn’t plausible since the widespread commercial availability of moissanite—which simply cannot be distinguished from diamonds by the visible light spectrum, even with tools. Moissanite can be distinguished from diamond, but the tools to do so use electrical and fluorescent properties, not visible light. (Moissanite cost around 10% what diamonds did by the early 2000s and have come down even more significantly in cost since the patents on their manufacture expired in 2018.) In a mystery written today, a person would only be able to spot fake jewels if the fake jewelry was an heirloom piece, made decades before.

Getting back to the episode, Jessica asks Greenberg to explain his theory of the case and he obliges. He suspects the hotel manager, Eric Brahm. He was sucking up to both of the women who died and he’s always on the lookout to make money—always trying to put together some scheme or other.

Jessica then goes and interviews Eric Brahm, the hotel manager. He reveals that everyone knows who she really is, now, so Jessica drops the act and asks forgiveness for having been deceitful. Brahms is understanding, saying that it was probably a wise precaution. She then denies helping the police, but does have one question—could Alva Crane have been wearing paste jewels because she was in financial trouble? Brahm assures her that Alva was extremely solvent—her security holdings are worth millions. And, not only that, her checks were good.

When Jessica gets back to her room, Michael Haggerty is waiting for her. When she asks how he got in, he replies that it’s another of his talents that are best left unexplained. He asks why she was hiding letters from Antoinette and Jessica asks how he knew Antoinette. He explains that didn’t know her, he only knew of her, and says that they should go elsewhere to talk. Which turns out to be a golf course:

There is, I think, a certain wisdom in going to wide open places to have a private conversation. It would be very unlikely for people who want to listen in to have planted microphones in the grass. They are, perhaps, a bit close to the shrubbery, but then they’re moving, so no one hiding in a shrub will overhear much.

He then reveals that Antoinette gave birth to a child six months after the annulment of her marriage to the poet Leon Savitch. Her very wealthy father was furious and refused to recognize the issue of a non-marriage. He threatened to cut her off without a cent unless she gave the child up for adoption. Michael then explains that now, with “the hot breath of his maker warming down the back of his neck” he’s seeking to atone for past sins and searching for the grandchild.

Jessica says that the grandchild would be Veronica Harrold, and Michael praises her deductive skill. The contest idea was the old man’s idea. He’s dying, but still has his wits about him. When Jessica asks how long he’s been working for the old man, Michael replies, “off and on for ten years or more.” He’s done odd jobs that required discretion or involved risk.

Jessica asks, “like robbing the Bank of England?”

Haggerty replies, “You may well laugh, Ma’am, but I actually had to do that once, some years back, by order of the Prime Minister. I was attached to MI5.” (MI5 is the domestic counterpart to MI6, Britain’s more famous intelligence service.)

After thinking some things through, Jessica says that they must go to the marina at once. (Clearly, she suspects Sven, though what danger Veronica could be in I’ve no idea since Sven couldn’t inherit anything from her as a boyfriend and she’d have had no time to make out a will in his favor.)

On the way, Jessica mentions to Michael that several of the letters were mailed from alpine ski resorts. And one of the letters mentions having met a delightful young man there. They’ve spent nights sharing secrets and shutting out the rest of the world. Jessica explains that if this was Sven and Antoinette in a drunken moment told him about her daughter, this would certainly explain Sven suddenly becoming romantically involved with an Iowa school teacher and also why Antoinette and Sven didn’t get along.

When Michael points out that Sven has no reason to kill Veronica, Jessica says that it might be something worse than that. (You don’t see many references to “a fate worse than death” in the 1980s.)

They get to the docks just as Sven and Veronica’s boat is pulling in, and Veronica announces that she and Sven are going to be married in the morning.

Michael and Jessica confront Sven with his acquaintance with Antoinette. Michael adds that the wedding will have to wait until after Sven has had a chat with the police about a murder. At this, Sven tries to run. Michael heads him off and they both end up in the water with Michael holding Sven by the shirt.

And on this bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.

When we get back, Sven is being interrogated in Inspector Rensselaer’s office, along with Michael Haggerty (Jessica is off comforting Veronica). Sven confirms that Antoinette did tell him about her daughter one night, while she was drunk. He ran into her again on this island, saw Antoinette with Veronica, and put two and two together. However, he denies killing Antoinette, and the scene ends with that.

As Jessica is comforting Veronica, Veronica recalls some useful information that Sven couldn’t have committed the first robbery as he showed up two days after it (the robbery was the day after Veronica arrived).

Jessica goes to see Eric Brahm and interrupts the ending of a meeting with an investigator from the company which insured Alva Crane’s missing jewels. This conclusively proves that the jewels were real, or at least that she owned real jewels. It does make me wonder who contacted the insurance company to file the claim, but it’s usually best not to ask after trifles like this in Murder, She Wrote. After the investigator leaves, Jessica lets Eric know that they won’t find Alva’s jewels in Sven Torvald’s room, as he didn’t arrive until three days after the first robbery.

Brahm then suspects that Jessica suspects him and tells her that he’s planning to fire Sheldon Greenberg—not only is he a total incompetent, but his accuastions against Brahm are beyond the pale. Myrna then shows up and tells Jessica that Brahm was sharing her bed and her affections at the time that Alva Crane was murdered. There’s a really funny bit where she says, “If you’re shocked, Mrs. Fletcher” and Jessica interrupts to say, emphatically, “Oh, I’m not.” Myrna goes on to say that they’re married and have been for nearly a year, which Jessica responds to with “My congratulations to you both, belatedly,” which shows she hadn’t deduced that they were married, which means that, clearly, she thought that Myrna was a loose woman. Fortunately, Myrna doesn’t seem to notice the implication.

When Myrna says that Eric has been trying to put together a hotel on the Mexican Riviera, Eric adds that it may take longer, now. The thing that’s holding it up is money—they key to everything. At the mention of a key, Jessica realizes the solution to the murders, and hurriedly excuses herself to go call Inspector Rensselaer.

She then drops in on Sheldon Greenberg, who is packing up his things—Brahm already fired him. Jessica asks if Eric Brahm had a master key to the safe deposit boxes but Greenberg says no, there’s only one and it never leaves his possession.

Jessica then reveals that it was Greenberg who killed the women, in order to steal their jewelry. Her proof is that Alva kept the key to her safe deposit box inside of a small change purse in her larger purse, but when her body was discovered the key was lying on her dresser, in plain sight. And since Greenberg hadn’t mentioned it, the user must have been him, since no one could have gotten into the box without both Alva and Greenberg’s key at the same time.

As Greenberg reaches for a gun in his desk drawer, Michael Haggerty walks in with a small cloth bag and tells him that the authorities got a search warrant and went through his luggage. Even removed from their settings, the gems will be easy enough to trace to their owners.

Why they authorities let Michael hold the jewels for this confrontation, he does not say.

As Greenberg starts reaching for his gun again, Jessica cautions him not to, and the camera pulls up to Inspector Rensselaer, holding a gun:

This is dramatic but a bit silly, as he’s directly between Jessica and Michael, it would have been impossible for Greenberg to not see him as he was reaching for the gun in his drawer.

Greenberg gives up and says, “A million bucks. Thanks, lady. I could have lived like a king.”

I can’t help but mention that his math is a bit off. If he tried to live off of this for ten years, that would mean he’d have to make due on $100,000 per year (just under $302,000 in 2025 dollars). If he was staying at hotels the entire time, he’d be able to afford one that cost $273/day ($834 in 2025 dollars)—assuming he could photosynthesize or otherwise do without food. That’s hardly living like a king. To live like a king, he’d need to blow it all in one year, or perhaps in an even shorter time span.

Anyway, the next morning Jessica bids farewell to Veronica. After that, Michael bids Jessica a fond farewell, and we go to credits.

This was a curious episode to start off the second season with. On the one hand, I can see how they could have thought of it as pulling out all the stops. We have an interesting exotic location. We have Jessica pretending to be a rich recluse to solve the murder of a friend who wrote to her right before being murdered. We have the intrigue of a long-lost child. We have a jewel thief who has killed multiple times. We have a charming and mysterious Irishman. We even have a dapper police inspector with a delightful accent.

And yet, the impression I have when it’s over is not that this was a special episode. I’m not entirely sure why.

I think part of it is that I found the character of Marguerite Canfeld insufferable. To be fair, she was probably intended to be insufferable. But pretend-insufferable is still insufferable. Jessica dropped the character roughly halfway through the episode, but that was, really, far too late.

Thinking it over, though, I think that the biggest problem with this episode is that its parts do not relate to each other. Antoinette was murdered for her jewels and it was a complete coincidence that she was meeting her long-lost daughter, that her former boyfriend was now wooing her daughter, and that she sent a letter to Jessica moments before she was murdered. While it is true that red herrings are a staple of murder mysteries, they’re not supposed to be the majority of the story and they’re certainly not supposed to be the most interesting parts.

It’s even worse that this makes Jessica wrong without ever acknowledging it. Jessica repeatedly told Inspector Rensselaer that she can’t accept that Antoinette’s murder was just a coincidence after sending Jessica that the letter saying that she sensed danger. Her being convinced that the motive for Alva Crane’s murder was more than simple robbery is pretty iffy, too. About the only defense possible for it is that the motive was mildly complex robbery rather than simple robbery; that’s not an impressive defense. But Jessica goes on to say that the robbery was a cover for another motive, and here she was simply wrong. She never acknowledges either mistake, I think because it would highlight how much the solution turned out to be uninteresting. (Also, Jessica’s mistakes were not the result of the murderer being clever but simply because the unbelievable coincidences turned out to be true anyway.)

Now that I write that, it occurs to me that that may well be as big a problem as is most of the episode being a red herring. When you get down to it, the solution to the murders is that a person in a position of trust is abusing this trust to steal jewels. This is ordinary crime, and not very interesting. The only mildly clever thing about it was that the guy with the master key to the safe deposit boxes had to kill his victims in order to cover that he was using the master key. But this problem only cropped up immediately before the solution—and if you blinked, you’d miss that it even was a problem. For a mystery to be satisfying, you need to puzzle over the mystery throughout the story then receive a satisfying explanation to it. The puzzle should not be why the solution made sense, requiring you to remember seemingly unimportant bits of dialog to figure out that there was even a problem that the solution solved.

As far as characters go, there’s really only two: Michael Haggerty and Veronica Harrold, and Veronica is only barely more than a rural schoolteacher stereotype, which leaves us with Michael Haggerty. He’s a fun enough character; he does the “man of mystery” fairly well. Interestingly, Len Cariou, the actor who played him, played Sweeney Todd in the same production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street that Angela Lansbury played Nellie Lovett in, and reportedly the two actors became friends. It would be interesting to know if this had anything to do with Len Cariou’s casting.

Inspector Rensselaer is played by an extremely charismatic actor, but there isn’t much to the part. It feels like half his lines are “Madam Fletcher!” Shelley Greenberg is mostly annoying. Eric Brahm and Myrna Montclair are tolerable, though the attempt to use them as suspects falls flat, at least to me. “The hotel manager was seen talking to a guest” is remarkably poor evidence of… anything. And their secret marriage because of company policy couldn’t motivate anything that happened other than, perhaps, motivating robbery, but since the episode spends all of its time insisting that robbery was not the motive, they’re simply not plausible as suspects until after the real murderer has been caught. Alva Crane was fun for the one scene she was in, but all of her lines could have been cut and nothing about the episode would need to be changed, which is to say that she was just there, she wasn’t a part of the story. At least not when alive. Oh, and I nearly forgot that, technically, Sven Torvald was in this. He’s very structurally important, but he’s practically a non-entity in all of the scenes he’s in.

Which reminds me, why on earth did Sven try to run away before the last commercial break? The only thing he had to hide was his relationship to Antoinette, but the only person he had to hide that from was Veronica and running away, if anything, confirmed it to her. I mean, I get that the reason it’s in the episode was to go to commercial break on an exciting cliff hanger, but there was no payoff because, with him not being guilty of any crime, there couldn’t have been a payoff. It made life worse for Sven, and I don’t see how it could have seemed like a good idea to him at the time.

Oh well. Next week we’re back in Cabot Cove for Joshua Peabody Died Here…Possibly.

On the twenty fourth day of Feburary in the year of our Lord 1985, the fifteenth episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Tough Guys Don’t Die, set in Boston. Mostly. It was also Murder, She Wrote‘s first foray into the hard-boiled American detective genre. (Last week’s episode was Paint Me a Murder.)

The scene opens with a hard-boiled private detective named Archie Miles talking on the phone. He’s telling someone about a doctor.

He’s interrupted by Alma, the agency’s secretary.

She tells him that she has to leave because she’s got a date and she’ll see him tomorrow.

He goes back to giving facts, including about a hospital administrator and a cop who worked a case. We then see who’s on the other end of the phone call: Jessica.

Unfortunately, it’s a very cold case. Archie tells her that the “Danbury Scalpel Murder” is a fine idea for a book, but the case was 25 years ago and there just isn’t much information. The only possible lead is a nurse, Martha Clay, who was on duty “that night.” The only thing is that it means driving to a small town in Vermont and he’s got two other cases. Jessica says that anything he can do would be greatly appreciated and Archie says that if it’s that important to her, he’ll do it.

I don’t know if the cold case is going to be relevant to the murder—someone killing the victim in order to stop the investigation—but if it is, this is a cool setup for that. It doesn’t make much sense for it to be Jessica’s investigation, though. She’s a fiction writer. What would she do with the details of a real case? First off, for excellent reasons of liability, all fictional works start off with a short notice saying something to the effect of “this work is fictional and any coincidence to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.” If you base your work on the real life of recognizable people who are still alive, you open yourself up to all manner of liability. Not to mention that by potentially harming innocent people’s reputations, you’d be quite irresponsible.

On top of that, real life is almost never as entertaining as fiction. That is, after all, why we like to read fiction. The actual details of a real murder are going to be messy, with most of them not meaning anything interesting. Trying to stick overly closely to the events of real life would really hobble a good mystery writer. (True Crime, while it does exist, is a very different genre, and frankly Jessica, for all her faults, is probably too honest to write in it.)

They hang up and Archie starts dictating into a recording device about what he was doing (presumably for billing, later). He pauses when he hears the sound of keys at the door. Archie calls out to ask who’s there but gets no answer. When he goes to investigate, whoever it was shoots him twice.

After some credits, we then got an establishing shot of a construction site with a sign saying “This Building Under Construction By Santini Developers” and then the camera pans over to a small booth where Santini himself picks up a phone call. (In TV fashion, he answers a phone call with his own name rather than “hello.” While not realistic, this is very helpful to the audience.)

On the advice of the person on the other end of the phone line, Santini picks up his newspaper and thumbs through several pages to find the one he was told to look at:

He tells the person on the phone, “I think this was the guy who was following me. Whadaya know? Guess we don’t have to worry about him anymore, huh?”

The scene then cuts to a plane landing.

It’s not just any plane, it’s a Concorde. They were the first super-sonic passenger liner. They stopped being flown back in 2003, but they didn’t have a terrible run, their first commercial flight being in 1976. In 1985 they looked like they were going strong and were quite a status symbol—a ticket on a Concorde might cost two to three times as much as a first class ticket on a sub-sonic airplane. Whoever just got off of this thing is very important.

Moments later, we find out who is so important.

The woman on the right is Priscilla, and she’s the one who just got off the Concorde. She just arrived from Paris, where she made a deal for the Duvalier group to publish a French edition of her magazine, Femininity. The woman on the left is Erin Carey. She’s the magazine’s designer.

A man walks up and greets Priscilla.

His name is Gavin and Priscilla acts like he’s even more important than she is. She introduces him to Erin.

Gavin says that they need to talk. Erin goes off to wait in the limo. Gavin then explains that, a week ago, a private detective came around the university asking questions about him, her, and their marriage. He then shows her a clipping from “yesterday’s newspaper” which is the same story that the construction guy read.

He says that they need to do something—he doesn’t want all that dredged up—and she asks what? He’s got no idea since there’s nothing obvious to do, and she suggests that they just wait and see, then invites him to dinner. For old time’s sake?

He declines, saying he has to get back for a faculty meeting, but perhaps next time.

Back in Cabot Cove, Jessica spots a car conspicuously parked opposite her house with Jerry Orbach parked in it.

I’m sure we’ll learn the character’s name soon enough.

Jessica decides to go for a bike ride and slowly rides past the car. He holds his newspaper up to his face to hide it. Once she’s sufficiently gone he gets out of the car and walks into her house and starts looking around.

Jessica then asks him from another room if he’s looking for anything special.

He sighs and identifies himself as Harry McGraw, and that she’s one of his clients.

Harry fills her in on Archie’s death. He doesn’t think that Jessica killed Archie, but someone involved in her case might have. (Archie was “bird dogging” three cases.)

Harry McGraw talks in a staccato style; he’s every bit the American hard boiled detective of the kind that’s been parodied a thousand times, perhaps best by Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes:

“I’ve got eight slugs in me, one’s head and the rest are bourbon” is one of the all-time great hard-boiled detective lines. Of course, another is “dead men are heavier than broken hearts” and it’s not much of a line, so the competition isn’t very fierce.

Anyway, Jessica objects that if he wanted information from her, all he had to do was to call her and ask. He replies that that’s not his style.

There’s a bunch more to the conversation and Harry is tough and blunt and staccato, but it doesn’t add much besides the fact that Harry plans to get even with whoever killed his partner, which we could already assume from his presence. That’s one of the things I don’t like about American hard-boiled detective stories—it’s mostly atmosphere without substance.

Jessica then visits Archie’s widow, wherever in the world she is. (I assume a suburb of Boston, but they don’t say.)

She doesn’t want to talk to Jessica when Jessica expresses her condolences, to the point of rudeness. Did she murder her husband, perhaps?

We then meet another character, who’s performing surveillance on the construction site:

His name is Ray and he works for Harry, who just pulled up behind him,. Ray gets out and walks over to Harry’s car. They make some smalltalk about Santini (who is still in his tiny little office). We’re never given a shot with both the car and Santini’s shack, but when we’re shown Santini’s office from Harry’s perspective its oddly close, making me question how competent these guys are at surveillance.

Right after Ray drives off, Santini leaves his office and gets into his car. Harry follows him oddly close. He turns into an alley and Harry follows him with about three car-lengths between them into what seems exceedingly likely to be a trap.

And what turns out to be a trap, moments later. After several cars box him, construction workers (they’re wearing hard hats) pull Harry out of his car and beat him up.

The next morning Harry goes to his office where Jessica is waiting for him with all of the files on the Danbury Scalpel murder case. She wants to go through them with Harry but he’s not interested. The chit-chat does give us a little bit of backstory as to what the Danbury Scalpel murder case was: “Rich lawyer acquitted of hospital murder by sharp lawyer. Was he really innocent?” Harry answers his own question with “Who cares?” The doctor in question died nine years ago.

They also go through the other cases. Harry thinks that Santini is high on the suspect list but Jessica doesn’t buy it. Had Santini shot Archie, he’d hardly have stopped at only punching Harry.

The other case is a background investigation of Priscilla Daniels. Jessica recognizes the name because, for the past two years, she’s been asking Jessica to write an article for her magazine.

The scene then shifts to someplace that’s supposed to be a police station but vaguely reminds me of a living room in an upscale trailer park.

Jessica listens to the tape of Archie’s recording that he made when he died. We already heard this live, so there’s nothing new for us.

Lt. Starkey is the one who played the tape for her.

Jessica asks why the police investigation isn’t going more actively if Archie was as beloved as she’s been led to believe (he used to be a cop and taught at the police academy). Lt. Starkey closes the door and tells her, in words he will deny if she repeats, that everyone loved Archie and that’s precisely why they’re going to stay out of Harry McGraw’s way.

And on that bombshell 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, we get an establishing shot of a big city that zooms in on one of the top floors of a skyscraper, then we cut to Harry McGraw coming out of an elevator disguised as a Texan:

He puts on some sunglasses to hide the large bruise around his eye then walks up to a secretary. In a Texan accent he claims to be a business magnate from Texas with an appointment to see Priscilla. The secretary says that an underling will meet with him because Priscilla is tied up in an important meeting.

That important meeting turns out to be with Jessica. Priscilla is delighted that she’s finally accepted the idea of an article, which she says will be “a major coup.” I assume that this is against her rival magazines; I don’t know how much an article by J.B. Fletcher would really appeal to the sort of people who read a magazine called Femininity, but I suspect that the more important part of this is that it burnishes Jessica’s credentials in our eyes. (On the other hand, it might be such a coup. Women seem to be generally interested in other women just for being women in a way that males aren’t interested in other males.)

Priscilla then launches into a pitch for the article she wants Jessica to write. But before I describe that, I just want to mention that I love Priscilla’s office.

I don’t mean that I want this office for myself. Rather, it’s fascinating as a piece of characterization. It’s so big that it has two large oriental area rugs on top of its wall-to-wall carpet. You could subdivide it into two offices and they would both be luxuriously large. Her desk is an old fashioned writing desk with no computer on it but plenty of stationary. She has an enormous potted plant that looks lush and tropical and exotic. The other half of her cavernous room has a right-angle sofa and an armchair around an antique-looking coffee table. The large painting above the sofa seems to be abstract, and there are floor-length paintings or painted screens against one wall. The main part of the room has at least ten-foot ceilings. This is quite the room to have at the top of a skyscraper. They’re certainly laying on Priscilla’s status and success—and her desire to show it off—quite thick.

Anyway, the piece that Priscilla wants is a major piece about how a woman past forty can fend of the sharks infesting the literary waters, relying solely on her guts and her sense of identity as a woman. (I think that this is meant to be parody.)

Jessica replies that that sounds very colorful, but what she had in mind was a remembrance of her marriage. Jessica then goes on about how great Frank was. It will be interesting to find out what Jessica’s angle is, because a blind man could see this article makes no sense for the magazine she’s pitching it to.

Priscilla is, as you might imagine, unenthusiastic about Jessica’s idea for the piece. “Fem is a now magazine aimed at the now woman trying to cope in a man’s world.”

Jessica apologizes for wasting Priscilla’s time and Priscilla folds and accepts the article Jessica wants. Perhaps Jessica just wanted the article to be one she would enjoy writing, if she had to write it in order to conduct the investigation. It being such a terrible fit doesn’t seem to have had any practical consequence.

The meeting is interrupted by Priscilla’s secretary, who buzzes in and says that “Davis Randolph” is on the line and says that it’s urgent. Priscilla looks confused for a moment, then says she’ll call him back. (I’m not sure who Davis Randolph is, but I assume we’ll find out, since the only reason to have this call in the scene is to let Jessica know about him.)

Priscilla then invites Jessica to the fifth anniversary celebration the next day and she accepts.

On the way out to the elevator (Priscilla walks her) they run into Harry in his Texan disguise walking with the underling he was foisted off on. Jessica recognizes him, of course, but goes along with the act and takes her leave. This scene is a comedy bit, I believe. Pricilla asks about his black eye and he replies, “Oh, just a minor disagreement about my parentage, ma’am. Nothin’ serious.”

When Jessica gets back to her hotel room that night, Harry is waiting for her in the dark.

When Jessica asks how he got in, he replies that a two year old with a paperclip could jimmy the lock on her door. Jessica takes this in stride, remarking that breaking in is a very bad habit of his.

This is some curious characterization—somewhat at odds with Jessica’s normal dislike of people entering her private spaces without permission—but I think it’s mostly to set the tone as American Hard Boiled.

Anyway, they then have a (verbal) fight where Harry demands that Jessica stop investigating the case because she is getting in his way. How she’s getting in his way is unspecified, because she isn’t, but I guess American Hard Boiled stories need lots of shouting and disagreement.

Anyway, the upshot is that Jessica stands up to him enough that he invites her to come over to the office the next day and they’ll look over the files together.

The next day in the office, Jessica remarks that there’s nothing in the file to say who the client is that paid for them to investigate Priscilla. Harry says that’s because they don’t know who the client is. Archie accepted a $1000 retainer in cash and all the rest of them know is that the client’s initials were “EPF”.

Jessica then mentions the call from Davis Randolph. Harry identifies him as a “political finance chairman.” (This would be somebody in charge of raising money for political campaigns.) Jessica then recalls some rumors she’s heard about Priscilla considering running for a senate seat which is coming free next year. Harry suggests that the “EPF” hired them to scrape up dirt to head off her potential senate run.

(Of course, the most probable thing is that Priscilla hired them to see what could be found out about her in order to make sure that there was a point into going to the trouble and expense of running. If the private detectives could find whatever her dark secret is, then surely the opposition could, too. If not, then she might be able to run safely.)

Ray then comes into the office and Harry introduces him to Jessica. Ray gives some info on Santini’s bank accounts and then says that they need to get another guy because they haven’t been able to run down Santini’s girl and he and Harry need some sleep.

The scene then shifts to nighttime, at the fifth anniversary party for Femininity magazine. There, Jessica is talking with Gavin, who says that he’s still in love with Priscilla and always has been, which is why they’ve enjoyed such a marvelous divorce. The problem is that he’s wedded to the halls of academia and she’s totally committed to the magazine. Jessica says she heard a rumor that Priscilla was considering running for public office and this is the first that Gavin’s heard of it.

The camera pans over to Priscilla, who was standing oddly close to this conversation, when a Judge Carter Lambert comes over and greets Priscilla.

She must know him well because she refers to him as “Carter, you old fox.”

She then introduces Judge Lambert to Jessica, and he turns cold. “Oh yes, the writer.” Jessica replies, enthusiastically, “You can’t imagine how much I’ve wanted to meet you, Judge Lambert.” It turns out that he was the defense attorney in the Danbury Scalpel murder trial. He’s got zero interest in discussing the case. She says that it was one of the highlights of his career, securing the aquittal of a prominent physician, but he replies, “while the world whispered about perjured testimony and manufactured evidence.” Which explains why he’s uninterested in discussing it. He adds, “if you go ahead with this book of yours, be sure you clearly understand our libel laws.”

I can’t help but note that this is still rather strange since Jessica is a fiction writer, not a historian. Is she going to write a fictionalization of it with some of the people still living? That sounds irresponsible, to say nothing of being legally dangerous. Is she venturing out of her normal genre to write history? Either way, I can’t help but think that this is just a red herring. His response is perfectly reasonable—who doesn’t have entirely innocent episodes in their life that they’d rather forget—and with everyone else dead, it’s hard to believe that there’s a motive. Plus, it just feels off. Jessica is spending too much time on it, and Murder, She Wrote prefers twists.

Priscilla notices the way that Judge Lambert walked off and asks what it was about. Jessica explains, then tells Priscilla about the detective and asks if he might have been hired by someone who wanted to thwart her political ambitions. Priscilla replies that she doesn’t know anything about the murdered detective. Jessica points out that she didn’t say that the detective was murdered and on that bombshell we go to commercial.

When we come back, we’re at Harry’s office. Jessica tells Harry that she knows who hired him to investigate Priscilla: Priscilla did. Jessica explains that she clearly new Archie and that EPF probably stands for “Editor and Publisher of Femininity.” Harry thinks this is plausible, since it clearly is. Well, except that “EPF” business. That would be a ridiculous way to make an acronym. Harry suggests that Jessica follow the lead on the Danbury Scalpel murder while he retraces Archie’s footsteps in the college town.

In the next scene Jessica is helping Archie’s widow to move boxes of stuff—she’s going to stay with her sister for a while until she gets her bearings—but is in a better mood and shows Jessica a note that Archie had in his jacket.

The scene then shifts to Jessica arriving by bus in Vermont to follow up on the lead. She meets a woman named Miss Cargill in an office right next to the bus stop.

Jessica asks if she ever knew Martha Clay (the nurse that Archie mentioned). At the name, Miss Cargill becomes agitated and says that she never heard the name. Jessica says that she’d be about sixty and Miss Cargill shouts that she said she doesn’t know her and wants to be left alone. She then runs off. A man comes out and asks what’s wrong.

He’s Milt Sudberry. He says that Leora (Miss Cargill) just lost both of her parents a month ago and is still grieving. They both died in a fire—they ran a nursing home. They died trying to save the others. Jessica asks if the Mrs. Cargill who died was named Martha, and she was.

When she leaves the building she runs into Judge Lambert.

Since she won’t let sleeping dogs lie, he offers to drive her back to Boston and explain the case to her. Tom Cargill was the real killer in the Danbury Scalpel murder.

When they pull up to Harry’s office in Boston, Judge Lambert asks if he’s going to see this story on the best seller list and Jessica replies that the writer in her wants to say yes, but it’s probably best if it remains an unresolved mystery. Judge Lambert takes her hand and gently says, “you’re quite a lady.”

In the office, Jessica tells Harry about the Danbury Scalpel murder and why they can cross it off. Tom Cargill was in the hospital visiting his girlfriend and recognized the victim as the man who’d rape his sister the year before but was acquitted on a technicality. The sister committed suicide a few months later. When Cargill saw the rapist he snapped and stabbed the rapist. Circumstantial evidence pointed to the physician, who was innocent. Tom Cargill had told then-just-a-lawyer Lambert, who was in a quandry because, during the War, Tom had saved his life. Which is why he faked the evidence to get the physician aquitted. Harry asks if, abbreviating the saying, “all’s fair” and Jessica replies, “Well, in this case, perhaps so.”

I’d say that this is out of character for Jessica, but since Tom Cargill is dead, I think Jessica is enough of a consequentialist that her Kantian categorical-imperative leanings can overlook something as relatively minor as faking evidence to get a definitely innocent man acquitted. And while she would probably insist that Tom Cargill turn himself into the authorities and throw himself on the mercy of the court, he’s dead so it’s a moot point.

Harry actually brings this up, asking why it’s fine for Tom Cargill to kill the rapist but not for him to kill the guy who murdered Archie. Jessica answers that Tom Cargill is now dead and beyond punishment, so it’s a moot point. So my guess was right.

After Harry mentions that Priscilla held a press conference at 6pm to deny all rumors that she’s running for political office, he gets a phone call from Ray to say that someone tried to shoot him while he was doing surveillance on Santini.

And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.

When we get back from commercial, Harry and Jessica meet up with Ray at Lt. Starkey’s office.

There’s some quick back-and-forths but the upshot is that a car pulled up, a guy got out who Ray didn’t see because he was blinded by the headlights, and he ducked just in time when he saw the guy’s arm come up in a threatening way. He thought Santini was in his office but there was a window in the back of the shed which was wide open, so Santini could have gotten out at any time. (That said, Santini doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to do his own dirty work.) Ballistics on the slugs match the ones that killed Archie.

When Harry leaves, Starkey tells him to not do anything stupid. Harry asks if that’s official or just friendly advice. Starkey replies, “both.”

Harry answers, “You know me, Starkey. I never shot a rattlesnake that didn’t bite me first,” and leaves.

Something bothers Jessica and she has Ray take her back to the office. He calls Alma, but when they get to the office she’s not there, so Ray takes his keys out and opens the door. They jangle rather conspicuously as he finds the right key.

As she asks for all three files, Alma comes in. Ray leaves to catch up with Harry as Alma offers to put on some coffee, which Jessica gratefully accepts.

As Jessica is looking through one of the files she notices something strange.

Jessica runs over to Priscilla’s apartment. Jessica asks her why she decided against seeking political office and she denies everything. When Jessica asks if she’d received a blackmail threat within the last twenty four hours, Gavin walks down the stairs and answers yes.

Priscilla’s apartment is even more remarkable than her office, by the way.

I can’t even begin to imagine living somewhere like this. I can only assume the set designers laughed the entire time they built this stage.

Gavin explains the story. Seventeen years ago Priscilla became pregnant with his child while she was a grad student and he was a young professor married to someone else. Priscilla had an abortion. The timing would place this in 1968, when abortion was still illegal in Massachusetts (and many of the surrounding states). Later, after his divorce, they were married, but complications associated with the abortion made her sterile, so they couldn’t have any more children together.

Archie did find this out and this morning a man who didn’t identify himself called her saying he had a copy of the hospital records and wanted a quarter of a million dollars to keep quiet. So she decided to not run.

Jessica goes to the police station where she runs into Lt. Starkey. Just as he’s asking if it can wait because he’s tired, Santini drives up, pulls a barely-conscious Harry out of his back seat, pushes him towards Starkey, and says “I’m pressing assault charges against this gum ball.”

In Lt. Starkey’s office, Santini explains that he just found out that his wife hired the detective agency because she worries about everything—she worries if the morning newspaper is late. He explains why he’s been disappearing a lot. Three years ago they had a sailboat down at the marina. It got destroyed in a storm. He’s been working with a boat guy to build a duplicate to surprise her with for their twentieth wedding anniversary.

When Santini leaves, Starkey notes that they just lost their best suspect in Archie’s murder. Jessica says that actually, she has an idea. Jessica borrows Harry’s keys to go back to the office and says that she’ll need some help to prove it.

Back at the office, Jessica is reading files when Ray comes in. She locked the door, forcing him to unlock it, causing the same key jangling as before. After a bit of discussion of the events with Mr. Santini, Jessica accuses him of killing Archie. He killed Archie in order to use the material in Priscilla’s file for blackmail, which Archie would never have gone along with.

When he asks if Jessica can prove it, she plays the tape of Ray coming in just now, and also the tape of Archie being killed. The sound of the keys jangling before the door is unlocked is identical. Jessica points out that Alma locked the door after leaving, as she always did, meaning that the killer had to be someone with a key.

Ray replies, “You’re a clever lady, but you’re also pretty dumb,” and pulls his gun on her.

From off-screen Harry replies, “You’re not so smart yourself, Ray.”

Ray lays down his gun and Harry says, “You better pray you get convicted, Ray, because that’s the only way you’re going to see your next birthday.”

In the final scene Harry offers to drive Jessica home to Cabot Cove rather than let her take the bus. He also suggests that she give up writing books and take up being a private detective. “McGraw & Fletcher. Your brains, my knuckles.”

Jessica says that it sounds nice, but she declines anyway. Harry then says that it’s 124 miles to Cabot Cove and he can be very persuasive. Jessica laughs and we go to credits.

I have a very hard time being objective about this episode because I really don’t like the American hard-boiled detective genre, except in brief parodies like the Calvin & Hobbes strip I quoted above. Even Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was a bit much for me, funny as it was. The Maltese Falcon was my favorite in the genre (the book; I haven’t seen the movie except for clips) but even that I didn’t love and this episode is far more in the style of Raymond Chandler than Dashiell Hammett. It’s all atmosphere without substance.

Take Raymond Chandler’s most famous line, “dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” (They even put it on his tombstone.) It sounds good but in context it’s just an argument for why someone had to have a good reason to move a corpse. But obviously someone has to have a good reason to move a corpse; it’s not the kind of thing you do for fun. More important than the physical exertion is the fact that you might leave traces of yourself on the corpse or get traces of the corpse on yourself and even without that it will be more than a little awkward if anyone walks in on you while you’re moving the corpse. So, yes, it does require a bit of physical exertion to move corpses around, but that’s hardly the most important observation to make about moving corpses. It’s all style without substance.

Style without substance does describe the episode, too. Take the plotline about Jessica researching a twenty five year old murder: this kind of thing can be an interesting premise for why murders are happening in the present. But Jessica researching a book makes no sense. Obscure details of the case would be useless for a work of fiction based on the real events, not the least of which reason being that they’re probably boring. The “True Crime” genre mostly deals with this by sprucing details up with interesting speculation but a work of fiction is composed of a sequence of events, not a bunch of speculation. (I don’t mean that true crime presents a single narrative as speculatively true, I mean that it indulges in a great deal of “here’s this thing where we don’t know what it means, but maybe it means X. Could it be that Y?” etc. The speculative nature is what makes it interesting.)

It’s worth noting that this is not the case because real life is boring. Real life is not boring at all. What real life is, is extremely complex. Murder mysteries, for all that their plots are complex in comparison to simpler forms of fiction like drama and comedy, are enormously simplified in comparison to everyday life. This is nowhere so evident as in how, aside from a few red herrings, most of the evidence relates in some way to the actual crime. Real life is far more complicated than that; people who single-mindedly pursue a task do a hundred unrelated things a day because no one actually pursues a single goal. They have breakfast because they’re hungry. They blow their nose because it’s stuffed. They scratch an itch because it is itchy. The multiplicity of our actions are related to the multitude of our goals.

Anyway, it’s in keeping with style-over-substance that the episode never gives the slightest consideration to Jessica being a fiction writer and this plotline making no sense.

There’s also the curious issue of Ray murdering Archie in order to blackmail Priscilla then blackmailing her at the worst possible time (from his perspective). The correct time to blackmail Priscilla would be when she’s declared her candidacy and is deeply committed and close to winning the election. When she hasn’t even announced her candidacy makes it far cheaper and easier for her to decide that politics isn’t for her and just never declare rather than pay the blackmail. (Which, in fact, she did.) And they didn’t even use this to give Ray a minute to lament that he did it all for nothing, since the blackmail didn’t even work.

Next week we’re some undisclosed not-Cabot-Cove location where Jessica inherits shares of a football team, in Sudden Death.

On the thirteenth day of November in the year of our Lord 1988, the Murder, She Wrote episode Snow White, Blood Red aired. It was the fourth episode of the fifth season, and it’s one of my all-time favorites. (Last week’s episode was Mr. Penroy’s Vacation.)

Jessica has come to the mountains in order to enjoy a ski vacation with her nephew, Grady, who has not yet arrived. (This is merely a setup; Grady is not in this episode.)

The episode starts out on a foreboding note. A figure in a red ski jacket (who turns out to be Jessica) is skiing down the slopes as opening credits and ominous music play, then another skier in a white jacket begins to follow her.

At the bottom we discover that it was only a friend of hers named Johnny.

They joke a bit about Jessica being out of practice. (Johnny said she skied rather well, and, indeed, the stunt double we watched ski down the slopes did look to be in good practice.) It then comes up that there’s a big snowstorm expected the next day which will prevent all skiing, which Jessica takes relief at as she expects to pay for her heightened activity today. It’s a decent working-in of the upcoming plot point of the storm, but I’m not sure it’s really necessary. Storms, as acts of God, do not require foreshadowing in a mystery story.

It comes out that Johnny, as well as many other people present, are hopefuls for the US world cup ski team. There is one person present who has already made it, a fellow by the name of Gunnar Tilstrom. Johnny then excuses himself to help a cute young woman having trouble attaching her boots to her skis and the scene shifts to inside the pro shop.

The woman on the left is Anne. The man is Mike. They’re married and own the place. Mike is reminding Anne that she has to keep track of the inventory and she angrily replies that she made a mistake and asks how long he’s going to keep berating her. It’s an overreaction to his gentle tone, which suggests that she’s over-sensitive for some reason.

Jessica then walks in and witnesses a bit of the fight. She’s there to pick up something she ordered, which came in about an hour ago. As Anne gets the box, Jessica notices the crossbow on the wall:

Jessica remarks on it and Anne jokes that they use it to shoot beginners who clog up the expert course.

Jessica’s order turns out to be a blue ski suit she’s bought for Grady as a present, and remarks that the entire vacation is a present to him as she hasn’t seen him for three months.

The phone rings and Anne acts about as guilty as humanly possible, saying it would be better if the caller called back later. Mike comes over and takes the phone and asks if it’s Gunnar, but the person on the other end hangs up. Jessica asks if the coat can be put on her bill and high-tails it out of there, while Anne asks Mike how he could humiliate her like that and he replies that he was about to ask her the same thing. I guess we’ve found out why she’s over-sensitive to criticism.

We then cut to the bar, where we see Gunnar returning a landline telephone he borrowed to make the call.

We then cut over to a young woman named Pamela who is about to join Gunnar, having watched his disappointment as he handed back the telephone.

“Pitty, Gunnar. The old Swedish charm’s beginning to fail you,” she purrs in a delightful posh British accent.

There is some banter, but it turns out that she represents a ski product company which has an endorsement deal with Gunnar that she negotiated, and she remonstrates with him because she’s heard rumors that he won’t compete in the world cup. He explains that he’s won plenty of things before now and is pushing thirty years old and could end up crippled like Mike and have to spend the rest of his years running a ski resort like Mike. (Interestingly, the actor, Eric Allan Cramer, was 26 at the time the episode aired, making this a rare case of playing older. Fun fact: five years later Cramer would play Little John in the Mel Brooks movie Robin Hood: Men In Tights)

Meanwhile, Gunnar still has some skills, such as attracting women, and he sees himself marrying a rich widow who hasn’t been too ravished by the passage of time. Pamela counters that she heard he doesn’t confine himself to widows, and offers as evidence the rumor that a month ago he had an adventure in Tahoe was with the wife of a vindictive gangster.

Gunnar tells Pamela, basically, that he’s sorry for her that she was enough of a sucker to believe in him but that doesn’t alter his plans. Pamela leaves, disappointed, while Gunnar smiles.

Next, after an establishing shot of the ski slopes, we meet Gunnar’s coach, Karl.

He just spoke to Pamela and is concerned that Gunnar isn’t going to enter the world cup. They’ve worked together for two years on this! Gunnar says that he hasn’t decided what he’s going to do, but whatever it is, it will be without Karl. Karl grabs Gunnar’s arm and says, “You need me!” Gunnar shoves him to the ground and replies, “I need no one, least of all, you.”

I think we’ve got a decent number of suspects planted, now.

We now shift to evening in the hotel restaurant. Pamela is talking to a young skier named Larry McIvor.

He’d love to endorse her products, but he wonders what she needs him for since she has a contract with Gunnar. She likens the business world to a downhill course laced with rocks. He’s her insurance policy in case something goes wrong. He golly gosh sure could use the money ma’am, and proposes that they sleep on it. When Pamela raises her eyebrows, he’s deeply embarrassed and tries to assure her that’s not what he meant. Pamela smiles at his naive wholesomeness and says that he really is a delight, and offers her hand. They shake and the camera moves on to a new couple who Jessica runs into.

They’re husband and wife. His name is Ed McMasters, hers is Sylvia, and they’re from New York City. He invites Jessica to join them for dinner, “if you don’t mind eating with a cop.” She replies, “Not at all. They’re some of my favorite people.”

They talk over dinner for a bit, then at the end of the song that was playing the lead singer welcomes everyone to the Sable Mountain lodge and then calls out some of the world-class skiers present. “I don’t have to tell you, they stand to win a few gold medals at the next world-cup meet.” I wonder if they would have had to pay money to be able to say, “the winter Olympics.”

Anyway, they put the spotlight on the various people that he calls out for applause, and this results in everyone seeing who Gunnar was having dinner with.

Anne makes the best of this, then the camera gives a closeup of Anne picking up a highly distinctive gold lighter. These kind of closeups tell us that the thing in the center of the camera is important, so take a good look.

She looks around and here eye catches her husband staring at her from right behind Jessica, who looks and sees it. He walks off and the scene changes to outside, in the morning at first light. The storm has started and the snow is falling, but Gunnar is going for a ski.

As he’s going down on the slopes we see a crossbow raised. We then see the view through the crossbow’s scope and the crosshairs take aim at Gunnar. Right as he jumps a small rise the bolt finds its way home and Gunnar falls. He rolls to a stop, dead.

The camera fades to black and we go to our first commercial break.

When we come back from commercial break, Jessica is looking outside as a weather report says that the storm is looking to be far worse than feared and roads are becoming impassible. She walks down into the crowded lobby with her suitcases and meets Pamela, who says, “welcome to Bedlam. They say it’s going to be an hour but I suspect it’s going to be a lot longer than that.”

They’re not explicit but I suspect that everyone wants to leave because the storm has made skiing too dangerous. I’m not sure if that’s really a thing at mountain ski resorts, but it is at this one.

The van to drive people down the mountain and into town has temporarily broken, btw, and the scene shifts to Larry trying to help Mike with it. He pronounced the fuel line frozen and it is possible that the pump has gone bad too. (I’m a bit suspicious of this diagnosis since since the freezing point of gasoline is around -100F.) Mike asks Larry if he can fix it and Larry isn’t sure. Then Johnny walks in and brings the news that Gunnar has been found, dead, by some dumb teenagers who were skiing in the storm.

The scene shifts to the pro shop where the crossbow and all of its bolts is missing. The glass was shattered and a uniformed security guard reports that the back door was smashed in. Mike says that they need to get the cops up here but Anne walks in and says that there’s no way that’s going to happen. All of the roads are closed and will be until the storm lets up.

The scene shifts to Jessica’s room, where Mike and Anne ask her to investigate the death. People are beginning to panic and the appearance of something being done will help keep them calm. Jessica points out that they have a policeman staying with them—Lt. McMasters. Anne shakes her heard. The McMasters left early this morning, driving off before the storm hit.

Jessica doesn’t know what she can do but to the great relief of Mike and Anne, she agrees that whatever it is, she will do it.

The scene shifts to her taking a look at the body.

The man standing with her is a doctor. Dr. Lewis. He objects that he is a gynecologist, not a forensic pathologist, but Jessica merely answers that necessity creates strange bedfellows.

Ed McMasters then walks in through the curtain and explains that they ran into a snow bank “about the size of the Chrysler building” and turned around. He looks at the body and asks Jessica for her opinion. Jessica tries to turn the case over to him but he demurs and agrees only that he will help her. He leaves, then Dr. Lewis asks if he can go and Jessica gives him permission.

She then begins to look through Gunnar’s jacket. She finds a room key, specifically room 301. She ponders the meaning of this as a mournful clarinet considers the question with her.

The scene then shifts to Jessica coming into the main room from outside. One of the things that’s done very well in this episode is visually suggesting the strength of the storm.

Still images only partially convey how inhospitable it is outside. Part of it is the difficulty people have in opening doors and the speed with which they come in and get the door closed again. The episode does a good job of showing how much everyone is at the mercy of the storm.

Anne stops Jessica and gives her a clue. After he left a phone message came in for Gunnar. “Urgent. Call me. (702) 555-0980. Vicki.” Jessica recognizes 702 as a Nevada number. She goes to her room and calls the number. A tough-sounding male voice answers and says, “Tartaglia residence.” Jessica asks to speak to Vicki and the voice replies, “Mrs. Tartaglia isn’t here at the moment. Who’s calling?” The tough voice is insistent on asking the question, “Who is this?” when Jessica doesn’t answer. Instead, she just hangs up the phone and picks up the room key that had been in Gunnar’s pocket.

We then see Mike go into a dark room and begin looking for something.

Jessica walks out and shows him Anne’s golden cat lighter. Mike assures Jessica that Anne didn’t kill Gunnar. He left around 6am and Anne left around 7am. Mike knows because he was in an empty room at the end of the corridor watching.

These are the facts salient to the mystery; there is some interesting characterization where Mike explains that he and Ann were engaged prior to the accident which crippled him and while Anne went through with the marriage, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that she really loved him for him, rather than for the athlete he had been. This drove them apart, and you can see that he regrets it, giving some hope for the couple.

The scene shifts to a bunch of young men who are all, I assume, hopefuls for the world cup team who are drinking and sharing raucous memories of Gunnar. Larry gets up and excuses himself because he can’t drink and be merry with Gunnar dead.

Jessica walks up to Lt. McMasters, who watched the scene, and asks him what just happened (she saw Larry walking off looking upset). He replies, “I don’t know. I think it’s an Irish wake.”

Jessica then asks him if he’s made any progress on the murder weapon, but he hasn’t. Anne isn’t keen on a room-by-room search since everyone is already on edge. Neither of them point it out, but it would be a bit far-fetched for the crossbow to be in someone’s room, anyway. When you have the great outdoors to hide something in, it’s a far more sensible choice than storing it in a place which is tied to oneself.

Jessica then spies Pamela and joins her.

Pamela wastes little time in saying that she barely knew Gunnar and had no reason to kill him. Backing off from the abruptness, this turns into a conversation about Gunnar and how the list of people who wanted to kill him was long, though he could turn on the charm when he wanted to. She runs off a list of Gunnar’s flirtations with women that made the tabloids, including the one where he took up with the wife of a mobster and barely made it out of town with his life. This catches Jessica’s attention. She then asks Pamela why she sounds so bitter and Pamela admits that Gunnar was about to ruin the $3M endorsement contract with his womanizing.

Then scene then changes to a storage room where ominous music plays as gloved hands uncover the crossbow and pick up an arrow, showing it off to the camera.

Then we fade to black and go to the midpoint commercial break.

When we come back from commercial break, pamela is working out on an exercise bicycle while larry is doing overhead press on a weight machine. After a few seconds of introductory noises to let people hurry back from the bathroom, Larry says, “Maybe I’m just a dumb farm boy, but where I come from people have respect for the dead.”

Pamela tries to comfort him, saying that they didn’t mean harm and tragedy affects people differently. He’s in no mood for it, though, an accuses her of being there to make sure he will sign the contract. She denies it and he walks off to the locker room. Then Karl the trainer walks in and drunkenly accuses her of murdering Gunnar and threatens to kill her if he finds out he’s right.

After this threat session, Pamela goes to the woman’s locker room where, to her surprise, she hears the shower running. She sees clothes on the ground and, going to inspect them, finds them soaked with blood. She then goes into the shower room and finds Larry’s corpse, dripping blood, hung by the neck with a rope tied to the shower head, the water running over him. As you might imagine, the music is extremely tense. This is probably the most dramatically tense scene that’s been in a Murder, She Wrote episode. The tension is especially heightened by the fact that the murderer had to be close by since there wasn’t much time for the crime to be committed.

Pamela does the sensible thing and screams as loud as she possibly can. (That’s not a joke. This is a situation for attracting as much attention as humanly possible.)

The scene changes to her in her bedroom with Jessica. She is distraught, wondering who could possibly want to have killed such a nice kid. Lt. McMasters then walks in and says that, as near as they can figure—the gynecologist is a bit outside of his field of expertise—Larry was knocked unconscious in the men’s locker room, dragged to the women’s locker room, stabbed with an arrow, stripped, and hung up in the shower. Jessica says that this makes no sense and McMasters replies that (of course it makes no sense) they’re dealing with a luny, a certified hazel nut.

Anne comes into the room to say that there’s more bad news—the phone lines are down. They can keep up internal communications with their generator, but they are completely cut off from the civilized world.

Jessica asks if Sylvia (Lt McMasters’ wife) can stay with Pamela for the time being. She saw a vehicle with a CB radio in it—red, with a Massachusetts license plate—and she thinks that they should try very hard to get in touch with the police. Anne says that she’ll try to find out who owns it. McMasters says that he’s going to talk to the Norwegian ski coach, who seems not entirely right in the head.

In the next scene Jessica and Mike Lowry go to the red vehicle and call the Sheriff. They manage to report the second murder, but the Sheriff says that the roads are impossible and the helicopter can’t fly in this storm. They’ve got to hang on. Then everything goes to static for some reason which isn’t obvious but doies at least get us out of the conversation.

Mike and Jessica retreat to the pro shop, where Mike laments that this could destroy their business, into which they invested every cent they had.

Jessica then notices the photograph of the last US World Cup team and asks if it was Mike’s idea to invite everyone up. The people in the picture are Gunnar, Larry, Johnny, and Mike (before his accident). Now two of the men in the photograph are dead. Jessica doesn’t know what it means, but there must be some reason for these killings.

Then they hear a crash and begin to investigate. As they do, Johnny comes through the door, his left arm bleeding.

In the next scene Johnny is in bed, the gynecologist tending to his wound.

At first blush the wound looks a bit low, but it could possiby be an attempt to stab Jonny in the heart. Johnny says that he was grabbed from behind and stabbed. Lt. McMasters says that they found another arrow nearby on the floor. Johnny didn’t see who it was, not even a sleeve. He fell to the ground and passed out, then woke up when he heard Jessica and Mike.

In the hall the gynecologist remarks that he used to think his practice was dull and repetitive, but has never been so eager to get back to his dull, boring routine in his life. He then quickly walks off.

Lt. McMasters remarks that he can’t blame the good doctor. It’s not much of a vacation to have some screwball going around trying to knock off the next world cup ski team.

Jessica is not so sure. The doctor said that the wound was superficial. Perhaps Johnny stabbed himself to divert suspicion?

McMasters thinks it unlikely. Jessica has done some checking up and Johnny is good but not that good; with Gunnar and Larry out of the way he’s got a much better chance of making the team. McMasters says that it’s a flimsy motive for murder, but Jessica counters that she’s heard worse.

Jessica then says that there is a third possibility—that Gunnar was the only real target. The killer probably planned to hit and run but got stuck in the snowstorm and had to create a smoke screen. McMasters says that this third one is a hell of a theory. Jessica replies that theories are easy to come by, the truth is much harder. She then says that they better hope that the weather clears up so that the police can come in the morning and take the investigation over from them.

The storm, however, rages through the night.

A few hours later Jessica, in bed, receives a call from a panicked Sylvia McMasters. With the sound of sleigh bells jingling in the background she asks if Ed is there with Jessica. Jessica, who was nearly asleep, says that he isn’t. Ed got a call a few minutes ago and rushed out. She doesn’t know who the call was from, but Ed took his gun. Jessica tells her to stay calm and that she’ll try to find Ed.

Jessica puts on her coat and braves the storm, looking for Ed.

She checks the ski shop but it’s locked. As she does Ed pops out from behind the building with his gun pointed at her and tells her to freeze. After she identifies herself he explains that some guy with a muffled voice called him and said to meet him outside the ski shop because he had information about the case. It sounded like a trap to him so he hid himself and waited.

As they talk a crossbow aims at them from the car barn and then fires, but misses, hitting the wall behind them. As they try to spot where the shot came from, the sound of a motor roars and a ski-mobile drives out of the car barn. McMasters orders the driver to stop, then fires three shots at him. The driver runs up a snow bank and topples over. They rush up and it’s Karl, the ski instructor, dead. Beside him lays the crossbow with two arrows left in its quiver.

The scene fades to black and we go to the final commercial break.

When we come back, Jessica is examining Karl’s ski jacket while Ed is telling Mike and Anne that he got the feeling, when Gunnar was pushing Karl around, that something was going to snap in the big trainer.

Mike says that it’s hard to believe, since Karl was like a father to them.

A phone call comes in with the news that the phone lines are back in operation. Ed is delighted by the news and looks forward to going home to NY. He says he’s going back to the lodge and asks Jessica if she’s coiming, but she’s nowhere to be found.

Outside Jessica is standing with Karl’s coat as the gynecologist comes running up. He begs her to promise that this is the last time she will press him into service as an amateur coroner. She asks if he got “them”, and he replies that he did. While surgery on corpses is not his long suit, he does believe that he extracted the bullets with a minimum of damage. Jessica looks at the bag he handed her and proclaims them two .38 caliber bullets, but did they come from the same gun?

The gynecologist doesn’t understand. He thought it was known that Karl was shot by Lt. McMasters. Jessica replies, “yes, but was he also shot by someone else?” The gynecologist looks confused, then horrified, then says, “You know, I’m afraid that if I ask you what you mean by that, you’re liable to tell me.” Without giving her the opportunity to say anything, he then very politely wishers her a good day and leaves, saying that he’s giving up skiing for something less rigorous, such as needle-point.

Jessica smiles, then goes into the car-barn and looks around. She then notices the jingle-bells on the wall next ot the telephone by the door.

Jessica then catches Sylvia on her way to meet Ed, who is warming up the car. Jessica says that they need to talk. Jessica is surprised that Ed wants to go home so soon and Sylvia explains that she’s anxious to get back to her cat. Ed then walks up and says that they have a busted fuel line, so will be stuck for a while. Jessica then invites Ed to have a seat, saying that there’s been a development.

Jessica then reveals that Karl didn’t kill anyone, he was murdered like the rest. There were two bullets in Karl, but only one of them struck him when he was alive. (If you recall the picture of his jacket, there was only one bullet hole with blood on it. Jessica then shows a second bullet hole in the jacket which we couldn’t see earlier because there’s no blood on it.) When the police check the ballistics, they’re going to find that both bullets came from the same gun. Moreover, they’re going to find that there is no Ed McMasters who works for the NYPD. Also, it was Sylvia who fired the crossbow at them; Jessica heard the sleigh bells in the background of the telephone call and didn’t think about it until she saw the sleigh bells hanging up next to the phone in the barn, but they place Sylvia not in her room, but in the barn. Also, another question is why, having killed Gunnar, didn’t the killer leave? The only people who tried to leave were the McMasters, who only came back because the road was impassable.

Jessica surmises that he was hired by Tartaglia to take vengeance on Gunnar and got trapped by the snowstorm. The rest of the killings were a cover-up when they couldn’t get away.

As the McMasters indignantly rise to leave we can hear the sound of a helicopter overhead and two security guards come out and detain the McMasters at gunpoint. When they clearly give up trying to escape, Jessica turns to Anne, who had just announced that the police have arrived, and we go to credits.

As I said at the outset, this is one of my favorite episodes. It’s tightly plotted with good characters and an intriguing mystery. By means of a powerful act of nature we have a closed cast of characters. The ongoing murders adds tension and makes the threat of the killer being loose present, while it also creates new clues as well as new things for them to fit into, creating satisfying complexity.

That is not to say that this episode is perfect. Like all the works of man it does have mistakes. For example, we see Jessica packed and ready to leave before Grady even shows up. It’s also a bit weird that Vicki left a message for Gunnar asking him to call her at a phone number that could easily get her husband. I’m not sure what her alternative would be since this was long before cell phones and she probably didn’t have a private phone line, but it’s still a bit unlikely. Also… actually, that’s about the only mistakes which comes to mind, and the first one doesn’t even matter because the plot only needed her to be in the lobby, which required no excuse anyway, and the second one could have been a slightly different message and serve the same purpose. This may be one of the reasons I like this episode so much.

Getting back to what this episode does well, we have a good setup which introduces a large but manageable cast of characters. I think that part of what keeps the large cast manageable is that they fall into several categories. We have the owners, the adjuncts to the ski team (the business woman and trainer), and some fellow guests. This is not the only approach, of course. The best alternative I know of is to give every character a hook to make remembering them easy. That said, this is an excellent approach and gives us manageable complexity.

Another great point is the economy of the setup. We get introduced to everyone, but we also have our corpse before we go to the first commercial break. This balance maximizes the mystery involved. If we were introduced to fewer people, we would have no scope for speculation. If we waited too much longer, we would need some kind of story that would compete for time with the mystery. This point is probably specific to the short-story form (which TV resembles more than it does novels), but it’s worth bearing in mind.

Next on the list of great things about this episode is the snow storm. It is a wonderful complication in the story, both helping and hindering the murderer and the detective alike. It brings in the eternal theme of how man is subject to nature, for all of our technological mastery. It also removes the possibility for modern forensic evidence, turning the mystery into more of a classic and making it more accessible. We all have wits, we do not all have forensic tools.

The gynecologist who is brought in to do the medical work has a real function but also brings in a touch of comic relief which balances out the threat of a killer on the loose who is willing to kill again. This is part of the general excellent pacing, where moments of examination and detection alternate with moments of tension and the killer acting.

The murderer is also well done in this episode. “Ed McMasters” pretending to be a New York City cop is a good way to divert suspicion from himself, but if you pay attention he does play it in a way that’s cagey and not comfortable with the role. He will happily drop the name of recognizable places (like the Major Deegan Expressway), but he mostly refuses to actually do anything that would require the knowledge of how to do real policework. Even when he does, he makes his actions ineffective. Tasked with finding the crossbow, he proposes a room-to-room search which he knows that Anne and Mike will object to and which wouldn’t do any good anyway, while looking like he’s trying.

The one part where he really slipped up in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense to have slipped up was in actually shooting Karl’s corpse on the snowmobile. There was no reason for him to actually aim at the corpse and he had to know that a bullet which didn’t cause any bleeding would have had to be suspicious. There are two reasonable ways to explain this, though. The first is that he had to be aiming at approximately the right place because Jessica was watching him and he got unlucky and hit the corpse when he meant to miss it. It is not easy to put your bullets where you mean to with a handgun, so this could simply have been, as the kids these days would say, a “skill issue.” The other explanation is that he thought that the most convincing thing to Jessica would be method acting—to actually try to do the thing he was pretending to do—and he expected to fool her long enough to drive away once the roads were clear and then “Ed McMasters” would disappear and it wouldn’t matter that the coroner would discover that Karl was shot after he was dead. And to be fair to this second possibility, the only reason he didn’t escape was because Jessica was quick witted enough to examine the corpse and figure out what it meant.

This episode was just great from start to finish.

In next week’s episode we’re off to the mountains of West Virginia for Coal Miner’s Slaughter.

The final episode of the third season of Murder, She Wrote is titled Murder, She Spoke and for some odd reason is one of the episodes that stands out in my memory most from when I saw it as a kid (explaining why will involve spoilers, so I’m leaving that to later in this discussion of the episode).

The episode opens with a band recording a country song.

They sing for a bit about a fellow named Lucky who has a silver dollar in his pocket but doesn’t have a woman to his name. As a side note, having a silver dollar in his pocket is pretty unusual for any recent historical time. The last silver dollar coins that were in general circulation were minted in 1935.

The singer’s name is Stony Carmichael, and he’s played by Charlie Daniels, perhaps most famous for his song The Devil Went Down to Georgia. If you’ve never heard it, here’s Charlie and his band playing it in a concert:

I’ve no idea how they got Charlie Daniels to do this but he’s great in the part and it explains why Stony’s band sounds so good. Anyway, we then discover why we’re here. In another booth in the studio, Jessica is recording an audio book version of one of her books.

The body was discovered by Edie Babbage on November 2nd, at 3:30 in the afternoon. She knew it was 3:30 because she was late returning from her marketing. She checked her watch in the elevator, bothered the dinner wouldn’t be ready. Nothing fancy, just her husband’s favorite stuffed cabbage. But it took at least four hours. She was equally certain about the location of the body—the man’s throat had been slit and he was making a dreadful mess all over her freshly scrubbed kitchen floor. It had not been Edie’s day…

The sound engineer interrupts and asks her to take two steps back because her voice is too authoritative. She does, but then can’t read the manuscript. The woman who seems to be directing her from within the recording studio, where her breathing and every moment would be caught on the microphone, moves the stand for her and calls that “emergency procedure number 483.” The sound engineer says that they’re ready to roll, but she says that she wants to give someone another minute, he should have been here by now. I’ve no idea why it was OK to roll before, but not now, or why they didn’t figure out where Jessica was supposed to stand before recording.

The scene moves back to Stony, who just finishes up. The sound engineer says that it’s pure gold, but Stony says that Al would say that the partridge family was platinum if it would get them out of the recording studio. This, by the way, is Al:

Stony wants him to play the recording back. Al is reluctant, but Stony insists and Al acquiesces. We then go back to the studio with Jessica, where the woman has finally given up on the man coming and tells the sound engineer to start recording, then instructs Jessica to forget that there’s a microphone in front of her. Just then the man she was waiting for walks in. He introduces himself as Greg Dalton. He’s the producer of the audio book.

He doesn’t wear sunglasses indoors because he’s cool, though. It turns out he’s blind. We find this out by him bumping into the music stand that Jessica’s manuscript is on. Somebody, he concludes, must have moved the stand. The camera pans over to show his cane. He doesn’t need it in places that he’s familiar with, except when people move things on him. They kind of got this wrong because he went to where Jessica was now, rather than where she would have been had the music stand not been moved. And it would have been a bit weird for him to try to walk between where the music stand had been and Jessica, standing (what he thought was) several feet behind it. It would have made more sense to walk around it.

The woman turns out to be Greg’s wife, by the way. There’s then a weird joke where he reaches out to take his wife’s hand and she takes his, then he kisses the music stand as if he didn’t have her hand in his. He then makes a joke about it. I’m not sure why, but they’re really doing a bad job with setting up the blind jokes. (These are actually a setup for character development later, they’re not here to make fun of him for being blind. It would probably be more accurate to call them blindness-related mistakes.)

We then get a few more characters introduced.

The guy in the white jacket walked in from an outside door and just ran into the woman in denim. Her name is Cheryl and she seems to be the executive assistant to the head of the studio, which seems to be him. She relays several messages he missed while he was at dinner.

We then get a bit of character development on the young woman with the band. She turns out to be Stony’s niece. She tells him to stop treating her like a kid, but replies, “Honey, you are a kid.” He then tells her that the first rule of being a musician is to take care of your band and orders her to go get them some sodas.

Stony walks into the sound engineering room where the head of the studio stopped in to listen. He shows them a bootleg cassette tape which he found at a “swap meet” for $20. They’re even using the official cover.

Granted, covers aren’t always complicated, but this cover is just some words on white over a picture of Stony (from what I can only assume is a long time ago). That’s actually about the quality I would expect of a bootleg-original cassette cover. The only thing even slightly difficult about it in 1987 would be the lettering. I’m so used to doing that sort of thing on a computer that I’m not even sure how one would have done it back then. Other than that, it could easily be made on the photocopy machine at the library by having two strips of paper with the words on them over the photo of Stony.

The studio head says that he told Stony that there was a risk in pushing back the release date, and that he’s equally mad about them since it’s money out of his pocket, too. Stony replies that he talked to a fancy uptown lawyer who said that if he can prove that the bootleg cassettes are coming out of the studio, it will nullify his contract with them. The studio head says that he’s Stony’s friend and if Stony wants out of the contract, all he has to do is say so. Stony points out that according to the contract he signed if he does that he’ll be liable for all expenses the studio incurred, plus fifty percent of any future contract he comes up with. The studio head replies that no one held a gun to Stony’s head to sign the contract when he found him “in that dive in Waco”. Stony replies maybe not, but somebody got him mighty drunk. “I guess I’ll even be billed for the liquor, too, huh?”

It’s pretty well established that these two are not on good terms. Odds are pretty good that one of them will be a corpse before the episode is over.

The studio head then asks Al what he knows about it and Al replies that the place used to be very loose before security was beefed up—anybody could have come in and dubbed the masters. Something not said is how all of this happened while the album is still being recorded. Even lax security won’t let people dub master tapes that weren’t recorded yet.

The studio head then notices a monitor of a different room in which Jessica is recording and remarks that no one would mistake her for a rhythm and blues girl. “That’s the last book for the bleeding blind you’re gonna catch outa here.”

In the next scene the studio head is in the recording studio telling Jessica, “Thanks for being here, Mrs. Fletcher. This is such an important series.” He then ignores Jessica’s reply as he talks to the sound engineer.

Greg then gives them the news that this is the last of the Mystery Books For the Blind series that will be recorded in this studio. That was why the studio head had taken him out to dinner—to tell him.

Both his wife and Jessica are aghast. Jessica says, “but can’t you take the series to another company?” He replies, “That’ll be tough. This isn’t exactly a money-making proposition. I can’t say I blame him.”

At this point we can be pretty confident that it’s the studio head who’s going to end up dead, given how many people have been established to have motives to hate him. This one is a bit weird, though. By 1987, audio books were being regularly made. The Sony Walkman—which helped in no small part to create demand for audiobooks because of the many places they could now be played such as when going for walks, commuting to and from work, etc.—had been released in 1979. Eight years later, there was a real and growing market for audio books. Moreover, mysteries are popular and Jessica’s mysteries, which were best sellers, would almost certainly have been financially worthwhile to any company to do. This feels like someone had taken a plot for a different show, written about ten years before, and just recycled it to Murder, She Wrote. It’s the plot we’ve got, though, so we’re going to have to run with it.

As they discuss what to do, Jessica notices the studio head having an argument with the sound engineer. (“Perhaps this isn’t the best time to approach Mr. Witworth.”) The studio head, whose name turns out to be Randy Witworth, then goes back to his office. It turns out his wife is waiting for him there:

Her name is Margaret Witworth, and if you’re wondering about the apparent age disparity, she’s rich. That said, the actors are only six years apart. Constance Towers, who played Margret, was born in 1933 while Patrick Wayne (second son of the legendary John Wayne) was born in 1939. This would have made them fifty-four and forty-eight, respectively. It’s atypical, but not a huge gap at their ages. They were recently married, by the way.

She expresses some jealousy over how late his secretary works and he assures her that she has nothing to worry about. She drops her purse while they kiss and he picks it up for her (odds are good that something will have fallen out of her purse that will be a clue, later). He tells her to go home and start one of her special bubble baths and he’ll join her at 10 O’Clock. He’s got a business appointment with a “Carl” in a few minutes.

We next go to Jessica continuing her reading.

But what really bothered Mrs. Babage was, the body was dressed in her only fromal gown…

They then laugh over the typo and Greg excuses himself to go get a drink. I really don’t get why both and he his wife are in the recording studio with Jessica. The only things they can add are unwanted noises. That’s why there’s a room that can see in and talk over microphones to the sound room, but normally is isolated from it, where the sound engineer sits.

We move over to the other recording studio, with Stony, and Al places a call to Randy. Then we cut to outside where the businessman that Randy is waiting for arrives.

If audio books not being profitable was an anachronism, that car is a straight-up antique. Lord Peter Wimsey might have owned it at one point.

The lights on the recording studio go off just as he’s walking up to the door. The scene cuts to complete blackness and we hear Al complaining to Randy that this is the third time this month and that he and “Carl” have to get some people in who know what they’re doing. Randy replies that the electricians were just in. Curiously, during this conversation, Al doesn’t let Randy interrupt him and just keeps on talking.

Various people talk to each other. Greg’s wife tells Jessica that this has happened before and she knows her way around so she’s going to go look for the circuit breaker. The businessman who came up walks in and asks what happened to the lights. Then the lights come back up.

Al, on the phone, asks Randy if he’s OK, and Randy replies that he’s hurt. Somebody…

Sally Ann starts screaming, and the camera moves over to her. It pans out as the Texan businessman comes in and holds her to comfort her and Al is just getting to the room.

Randy, it turns out, has been stabbed to death. Actually, that’s not quite right, since he isn’t dead yet. He’s able to say “help me,” “stabbed me,” and “somebody stabbed me. in the dark.” He’s rushed off in an ambulance. He doesn’t make it, though, so it’s close enough.

The police arrive, including Lieutenant Farady, played by G.W. Bailey. He had, only three short years before, played Lieutenant Harris in the slapstick comedy, Police Academy.

Bailey played a straight man in Police Academy, and seems to play a different sort of straight-man here. In Police Academy he was a rigid disciplinarian. Here is is a rigid misogynist. That’s not quite the right word; he doesn’t hate women, he merely regards them as children. He has a Kinder, Küche, Kirche attitude, except without any respect for these things. Why he was written this way, I have no idea. I imagine that it’s supposed to be funny, except it isn’t.

In the old vaudeville days they said if you have a funny man you have a bit, if you have a straight man, you have an act. There is some truth to this because the funny man does much better when he has a straight man to play off of. Humor is related to contrasts and the straight man sets up a stream of contrasts for the funny man to play off of. What somebody seemed to have missed in this episode is that the act does, in fact, also require the funny man. If all you have is the straight man, you don’t even have a bit.

This strange shtick comes up in every scene that the Lieutenant is in but it serves no identifiable purpose. It’s not funny, it doesn’t advance the plot, it doesn’t hinder Jessica—it doesn’t do anything but annoy the viewer. It continues throughout the rest of the episode, but I’m going to ignore it from here on out.

Jessica points out to the Lieutenant that if someone had been in the office with Randy when he was stabbed that person could easily have left and no one would have seen since it was dark. While true, this is of dubious relevance because Randy probably would have mentioned the person with him if there had been anyone. It’s also just unlikely that someone would be with Randy, with a knife at the ready, and just luck out that a blackout happened right then.

The Lieutenant is in Randy’s office speculating with his deputy when Jessica brings Greg in. He was taking a pill at the water fountain—he has a circulation problem in his leg—when he heard someone run past him and something drop. The Lt. asks if this was when the lights were out and Greg says that he doesn’t know, since he’s blind.

Jessica sees something on the floor.

The Lt. says that the cleaning lady will get that in the morning, and he noticed it too. It’s a splash of paint. How there was supposed to be a splash of wet paint on the carpet in the middle of an office in which no painting is going on, he doesn’t explain. Apparently he didn’t notice the bottle of nail polish that’s pretty obvious. Jessica asks to borrow his pocket handkerchief and use it to pick the bottle up, then screw the lid on, though I can’t imagine that any fingerprints survived the vigorous wiping she gave the bottle while she screwed the lid on. Before moving on, I really would like to know how on earth the nail polish was supposed to splash like that then bounce 8″ over without leaving any nail polish, then lay on its side not dripping at all.

The Lieutenant suggests that Jessica take the bottle of nail polish home with her as a souvenir. At this point I’m going to refer to him as Lt. Idiot, and also reference my previous statements about how a straight man without a funny man isn’t even a bit.

Jessica identifies the nail polish as “Moné Mauve,” an extremely expensive brand of nail polish. It’s still wet, which means that it must have been dropped very recently. So recently that I really doubt that it would be still damp, given the time it took for the police to come and begin their investigation. It really should have stank to high heaven, though, given how man VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) nail polish gives off while it dries. Oddly, no one comments on that.

Jessica recommends that Lt. Idiot find out who it belongs too but he seems reluctant to follow up on clues. A phone call comes in on the phone in Randy’s office, which Lt. Idiot picks up. Randy Witworth was dead on arrival at the hospital, making this a murder investigation. How on earth the hospital had Randy’s office phone number or why on earth they called it is not explained.

Shortly afterwards, they find the murder weapon behind a soda machine.

Jessica says that it must be what Greg heard drop. Jessica notices that Greg’s wife recognizes it.

It was the sharp intake of breath that Alerted Jessica.

The scene moves to the next day, where Greg and Jessica are taking a morning run. Jessica tells Greg, as they run, that she admires how he doesn’t let anything stop him. They get home and Greg’s wife is making breakfast. Greg does basically everything himself, barely letting her do anything. Then he gets a call from Carl, who I believe was the Texan businessman, who cancels Mystery Books for the Blind. “Does he have the power to do that?” Jessica asks. “Guess he must have,” Greg replies. I’m not so sure, Jessica says. So they visit Carl at his house.

In the conversation, it comes up that the Stony Carmichael tape that Jessica saw on Randy’s desk was a bootleg. Jessica pursues the subject of ownership of the company, because the previous night she saw a sizable cashier’s check attached to a contract transferring Carl’s ownership to Randy. Carl replies that a lot has changed since last night.

When they get back from this meeting, Lt. Idiot is waiting at Greg’s house. Lt. Idiot has a warrant to search the house. It turns out that they had a barbeque at their house a few days ago and most everyone from the studio attended. Jessica goes to help Greg’s wife with the coffee, and finds her reaching into the dryer.

Jessica chides her that Lt. Idiot isn’t stupid and will look in the dryer, too. Given that he told Jessica to take a bottle of nail polish from the crime scene home as a souvenir, I find this highly doubtful. Anyway, Nancy (Greg’s wife) had hid their knives in the dryer because one is missing—the murder weapon. Jessica tells Nancy that she can’t withhold evidence, and the knife may clear Greg.

In the next scene they’re standing in the living room and Jessica is exasperatedly telling Lt. Idiot that anyone could have stolen the knife at the barbecue, as the prints were wiped off the murder weapon. Lt. Idiot replies that Greg was standing next to the master switch when the lights went off. Apparently they put the master switch to the electricity in the building not in a locked service closet on an exterior wall where the electrical service comes in, like it normally is in commercial buildings, but on the wall next to a drinking fountain in the hallway.

Lt. Idiot’s main case is that the person most capable of operating in a blackout is a blind man, hence Greg must be guilty. He does have a motive, though. Randy said that he was cancelling books for the blind and Greg got angry. He said that Randy owed him.

Greg then elaborates. “A man owes something to somebody he blinds in a car accident. But not his life. A job, maybe. But not his life.”

This eloquence falls on deaf ears, as the next scene is in the police station with Greg under arrest. For some reason Jessica is interrogating Greg and no police are present.

She asks Greg if he can identify anything about the person who ran past him. Greg replies that sometimes he can tell the difference between a man or a woman, but not when they’re wearing soft-soled shoes. Jessica asks if he can say anything about it, such as “but did they sound heavy or light, did they move fast, were they young?” Given that they were running, I’d say he already answered the question of whether they were moving fast.

Nancy tartly tells Jessica that he’s not an eyewitness, he’s blind. When Greg objects, Nancy yells at him that he’s not superman and can’t do everything by himself, and it will never be the same as it was before the accident. Greg objects that he’s happy, with a good life, and she asks why he has to be so damn happy.

Basically, she complains that he’s dealing with his problems like a man, by dealing with them directly, and not like a woman, by talking about them with other women (note: generalization with exceptions). She also complains that he doesn’t confide in her anymore. This is the character development I said that the earlier issues with him stumbling into things were leading towards. I didn’t like this sub-plot, but it was intentional and worked for its intention.

After Jessica finished interrogating Greg, she and Nancy left and Jessica asked her about the previous power outages. Nancy asks if she thinks that they were related and Jessica says that if she were going to pull a murder in total darkness and frame a blind man, she’d want a few dress rehearsals under her belt.

Jessica then goes back in to talk to Lt. Idiot.

He’s checking out a “night scope” on his hunting rifle. “This night scope is great! The deer don’t even see you coming.”

Aside from this being obviously related to the plot, night vision scopes, before the advent of digital ones, did not work during the day. In fact for many of them it would damage them to be used during the day with bright light going into them.

Lt. Idiot then gets a call from someone or other and he has the last piece of evidence he needs—the blood on the knife matches the victims. As if a knife covered in fresh blood could have been dropped behind the vending machine from some other stabbing and be unrelated to this case! Anyway, now that the blood type matches (they weren’t doing DNA ID in 1987), the case against Greg is complete, so Lt. Idiot orders the studio unsealed. Jessica goes to the studio just as the police are removing the tape from it.

Jessica walks in and we get a shot of the main power switch:

Actually, this is the second shot of it. We got another shot of it ealier, for a moment, when people were running past Greg:

You can see the sign saying “DO NOT TOUCH! THIS MEANS YOU!” on it better in the shot with Greg in it.

It’s really convenient that they have a master switch for the electricity for the entire building here, where if you’re doing electrical work you’ll be plunged into complete darkness and then have to grope your way over to wherever they have the switch breaker panel, since installing new electrical lines or changing out switch breakers is the only reason to shut off the power to the entire building, rather than to shut off just one circuit. I wonder why they didn’t go whole hog and have it be an old time two-pole knife switch.

As Jessica examines this weird plot device attached to the wall, Stony and his neice arrive, as does Al on his motorcycle, not wearing a helmet.

As he goes into his office Jessica walks up to him. He asks if there’s anything she can do for him and she says says. As he comes in and puts his leather jacket next to his motorcycle helmet on the coat rack…

…Al says that Greg used to invite them over for barbecues, so he can’t believe Greg did it. He then excuses himself because he has a ton of work to do.

Jessica mosies on over to the other sound engineer’s recording booth, where she asks him some questions. The most important of which is whether it’s possible to tell the difference between a power outage due to electrical failure and one due to the master switch being thrown. The recording engineer says that they look the same, but he knows that it wasn’t the master switch because during other blackouts he checked the master switch and it was in the on position. The lights just come back on when they want to. The electricians can’t figure it out and it always happens during a recording session. Jessica asks if it’s during a recording session of mystery books for the blind, and he says, “come to think of it, during Stony Carmichael’s sessions too, as I recall”.

Jessica then asks the engineer about his fight with Randy. Randy accused him of selling the bootleg Stony tapes and he took exception to that. But he never saw anyone mad like Stony was about them. If Stony wasn’t in the recording studio at the time Randy was stabbed…

Jessica then goes out and runs into Sally Ann trying to work a vending machine. Under cover of helping her with the vending machine, she asks Sally Ann where she was in the blackout and is surprised that Sally Ann said she waited until the lights went on to leave because Sally Ann was the first to discover Randy. Sally Ann takes offense at this clumsy attempt to pump her for information because it looked like she was being accused of murdering Randy. Why Jessica sometimes does these clumsy interviews when she’s capable of tact, I don’t know. Perhaps Sally Ann’s angry reaction is meant to make us suspect her?

Jessica goes into Randy’s office and looks around. Margret Witworth (the widow) walks into the office with Carl. He leaves to get Jessica’s tape from the sound engineer. Jessica notices Margaret’s nail polish. When Margaret claims she last saw her husband in the morning, Jessica calls her on it. That goes nowhere, she just does and the scene ends. The end is coming so we need some suspicion to be sprinkled around, I guess.

After Carl escorts Jessica out to a Taxi, Stony accosts him and tells him to stay away from his neice.

Apparently she came to him to help her with her singing career. “Yeah, she came onto Randy too and I straightened him out just I’m going to straighten you out right now. What you got in mind for my neice sure ain’t no singing career. She’s got a tin ear and a voice like a screech owl which means that she’s only good for one thing.”

As a side note, Charlie Daniels turns in a good performance here. I’m surprised he didn’t do more acting than this (at least, I didn’t see on IMDB that he did any other fiction work).

This scene ends with Carl looking embarrassed as Jessica stops peeping and gives the taxi driver directions.

The next scene is that night at Greg and Nancy’s house. Jessica says that something has been bothering her, which is that how did the person who ran past Greg run in the dark? Greg replies, “maybe he had a flashlight?” Nancy says that she didn’t see one, but I don’t know that she would have.

Greg then plays the tape of Jessica, which he is eager to do because all he can think of is trying to salvage the mystery-books-for-the-blind program with some other company. That he needs this tape that has Jessica reading a few paragraphs—when it is made clear by earlier dialog that they have already produced completed audio books—makes no sense. It’s a ploy to have the tape playing, but it would have been just as natural to play the tape for fun. This is the part of the book Jessica was reading on the tape. It seems to have come right after what he had heard before:

…only ten minutes before Lt. Garfield arrived. Garfield took in the scene quickly. It wasn’t a pretty picture but he’d seen worse. He noted the swarthy man with the hideous bloody grin cut into his throat, noted the gown he was wearing, and dryly observed that he appeared to be wearing a size 12. It seemed bizarre that he was wearing a dress belonging to the lady of the house, but as Garfield said, we’re lucky at least the corpse wasn’t wearing makeup. Even more bizarre was the fact that there were no bloodstains on the dress.

During this reading Lt. Idiot calls on the phone to talk to Jessica. He hears the tape playing and asks what all this is about the corpse wearing makeup. Jessica replies that it wasn’t her, well, it was, but not her on the phone…

Jessica then realizes who did it and how it was done. As I’ve mentioned before, Jessica having to be given an idea by someone accidentally, which allows her to solve the mystery, is primarily there not because it makes for a good story but because it gives the audience time to process the clues and make a guess as to who did it. This isn’t necessary in a book, though you sometimes see it there just to distance the final clue from the realization that it’s the final clue and thus not draw excessive attention to it. In broadcast television, though, one cannot set the episode down for a minute to think about the story so far so the writers have to consciously give the audience time.

Lt. Idiot doesn’t see this look on Jessica’s face, though, so he proceeds to tell her what he called to tell her: he really wishes that she hadn’t accused Margret Witworth, because Mrs. Witworth has been talking his head off for the last hour about it. All rich people have the privilege of talking the heads of police detectives off, it seems, even though there’s no indication that this is a small town or that Mrs. Witworth is rich enough to get everyone on the city council elected and thus be owed favors. American rich people are basically just the English aristocracy from the early 1900s, I guess.

Jessica tells the chief to never mind Margret Witworth, she didn’t do it. Jessica knows who did it, and how, but she doesn’t know how to prove it. (This means that an elaborate stunt is going to be required to make the killer confess.) Greg shouts, “Who did it? Who?” and Jessica wheels around. I suspect that this was the out to a commercial break. The next scene is at the recording studio as the members of a rock band pack up their van. (Their band name appears to be Larry & The Lashers.)

We then cut to inside the recording studio where Al and the other sound engineer are talking. Al thanks him for the help and suggests that he go home for the night. The other sound engineer thinks that’s a good idea and leaves. Al then takes a screwdriver out of his pocket, turns toward his sound board, and the lights go out.

The door to the recording room—in desperate need of oiling—loudly creeks. Al asks who’s there. It’s Greg. He asks Al why he wanted to frame him (that is, to frame Greg). “You knew I could move around in the dark, Al. And I can. I’m getting closer.” Al then shouts at him that he’s crazy and to stay away, then hits a switch on the bottom of his sound board, which turns the lights back on.

Apparently Al has a switch on the bottom of his sound board which can turn on the lights to the building even if it wasn’t the switch used to turn them off. I’ll get to this more in a bit, but I guess when he installed the switch it was a 3-way switch with whatever switch Jessica & friends used to turn the lights off. That was very forward thinking of Al, assuming that he wanted to get caught.

Al then looks up and sees an unwelcome sight.

Somehow all four of these people, none of whom were familiar with the room and only one of whom was blind, managed to walk in and surround Al without bumping into anything. At this point they proved that anyone could have pulled off Randy’s murder, but no one remarks on this.

Al says, “What do you know, the lights came back on.” Jessica replies, “No, Al, you switched them on. Just as you switched them on the night you killed Randy Witworth.” When Al says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lt. Idiot reaches down to a different place on the sound board than Al had used and flicks the lights off, then flicks them back on again.

You can very clearly see that Randy used his right hand, to the right of his leg, to hit the switch. Lt. Idiot is equally clearly reaching to the left of Randy’s left leg. I really should check the credits to see if there was a continuity person… I just checked. No, there was no continuity person in the credits. That might explain a lot.

Anyway, Jessica tells Al that she realized he had to have rigged a way to turn the studio power on and off and he wouldn’t have had time to dismantle it with the studio being sealed and then recording sessions all day from the backlog. Al replies, “Just because I have a master switch here doesn’t prove anything. How could I see in the dark?”

Not exactly the greatest comeback of all time.

Lt. Idiot replies, “With this! We figure.” and picks up Al’s motorcycle helmet. Jessica points out that he didn’t wear it into work that morning but when she went into his office it was already there, which means that it had to have been left in the studio since the night of the murder. That seems odd. Was it because he figured he would be searched and in being searched the police would discover that the motorcycle helmet has an infrared visor?

They go over some other details, then we get a shot of infrared motorcyle helmet vision:

Curiously, this is why this episode stuck with me all those years. Here’s another shot of infrared motorcycle helmet vision:

I’m going to include one more shot of infrafred motorcycle helmet vision because it shows a few major problems with the plot, taken together with the previous one:

That door on the left is the door to recording studio A, which is Al’s studio and where he returns in a moment. You can’t see her clearly in this picture because of motion blur, but standing perhaps 8 feet away from the door to Studio A is Nancy, Greg’s wife. In other words, in order for Al’s brilliant plan to work, he had to somehow open the door to the studio, slip in, and close the door, all with neither Greg nor Nancy hearing the door move. The plausibility of this is… low.

And then we come to infrared motorcycle helmet vision.

While it is true that there is such a thing as night vision which can use illumination from an infrared light source to see in the dark, it’s a system of optics that tends to give a narrow field of view, it’s not a thin sheet of plastic with a wide field of view. It also requires an infrared flashlight to do that illumination. They’re also horribly blinded by daylight, so Al would have had to have brought a regular visor for his motorcycle helmet if he was going to wear the thing into work while driving anyway. In the 1980s infrared scopes were analog and those processes tended to make the night vision tinted green, not red. What they’ve actually done—and this is related to why it stuck in my head, so bear with me—is to just put a red filter on top of the camera and shoot in regular light. Probably the easiest way to tell is that things do not reflect infrared light the same way they reflect visible light. They do to a surprising degree; white things tend to reflect infrared well and black not nearly so well, so black letters on a white background is often readable. Where you really see the difference is in colors. Some blues and greens reflect infrared well and look white under infrared. The greens of plants, in particular reflect fairly well. Under a red filter, greens and blues tend to look black—like in the images above—rather than white, as in real infrared vision.

All of this went together to make me think that Al just had a red-tinted visor. I must have misheard “infrared visor” as “red visor”, which was then confirmed by the shots of what Al saw which were, clearly, just using an ordinary red filter. I puzzled over this at the time because it doesn’t make sense that removing light helps you to see in the dark, but I recall that I chalked it up to not quite understanding it. I may have even tried turning off the lights and looking through red cellophane, and been disappointed. I vaguely recall that I did.

All this while, it turns out that the episode just got it wrong. A motorcyle helmet could be tinted red, but it can’t give you infrared night vision. Infrared night vision doesn’t look like daylight filtered through red plastic. Oh, and you’re not going to have a simple toggle switch to the master power for the building hidden in a sound board.

The more direct way of doing this would be to run the main power lines to the building through Al’s sound board, but they’re probably about 2″ thick and he’d have no way of running them over or of hiding them in a sound board. Only slightly more plausible, then, would be for the switch in Al’s sound board to run over thin wires that remotely control a battery-powered switch that interrupts the electrical feed to the building. He’d still have to run these wires from the bottom of his sound board over to the ceiling and through the ceiling over to someplace he has access to the electric feed to the building. Oh, and he’d have to shut off the power to the building while he was installing this switch. All without anyone noticing what he was doing.

I suppose he could have stayed late, past when everyone else went home, then waited out the cleaning staff, then in the wee hours of the morning shut off the building’s power and installed a remote-operated cutoff switch. A cutoff switch that the electricians who had been called in to diagnose the blackouts missed.

So it turns out that several decades of me wondering how it’s possible to use a thin piece of red plastic to see in the dark is just the writer of this episode having no idea how technology works and the film crew being lazy.

Back to the episode, Al says that Jessica is crazy, that anyone could have rigged up the board, and that his lawyer will make sushi out of them. Lt. Idiot tells Jessica not to feel bad, he’ll find a way to make Al confess. Jessica points out that since they searched Al the night of the murder, and didn’t find a cassette tape on him—why would anyone have taken note if they did find a cassette tape on him?—it must still be there, in the recording studio. Unless Al wasn’t an idiot and erased the tape or recorded over it while he was there all day, of course. Probably not a big worry in this episode.

The next day Jessica is packing her bags into a taxi at Greg and Nancy’s house when Lt. Idiot drives up. He got Al to confess—he was the bootlegger. Jessica asks if he found the tape, then, and Lt. Idiot replies, “after 10 hours”. I guess Al was an idiot, after all. Lt. Idiot sees her into her taxi, and thanks her for her help in wrapping up the case. His final words are, “as long as I live, I will never again underestimate the power of women’s intuition. Jessica laughs and we go to credits.

It’s interesting how often Murder, She Wrote ends on Jessica laughing. This is something I forgot to comment on in my analysis of Mourning Among the Wisterias. Probably three out of four episodes end with Jessica laughing, about one out of four on a more somber note. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why some end on a somber note—it may just be timing as much as anything else. Part of the ending-on-laughing is probably just that it’s a good note to end on. As it says in the old song, always leave them laughing when you say goodbye.

I think it does have a greater artistic significance than this, though. As I’ve described in my post Detectives as Christ Figures in Mystery Stories, the detective story is a suspension of normal. With the crime the world has been broken by the misuse of reason and the detective, through the right use of reason, steps in and fixes it. During the investigation the detective takes on many attitudes and passes as many different characters. When the investigation is over, laughter serves to indicate that things are back to normal. It’s not the only way for a mystery to end, of course, that serves this purpose. It’s merely a very succinct way to achieve the purpose.

So, watching this episode again, thirty four years later, I have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that one of the most (to me) memorable episodes was not one of the best. It had its charms, of course. Charlie Daniels was great as Stony Carmichael, though it’s a pity that he and Jessica never got to interact. The title was great. Really, that’s about it, though.

The plot was a mess. It depended entirely on technology which was completely misunderstood at every level. This isn’t like the murder weapon in Unnatural Death being an empty syringe whereas in reality it would have to be an extremely large empty syringe. At no point was the size of the syringe of any great consequence to the plot. How the killer would have gotten a syringe of sufficient size might pose some difficulties, but not insuperable difficulties. In the worst case they had bicycle pumps and needles hooked up to tubing in the 1920s. Dorothy L. Sayers got the details wrong, but not in a way that mattered much to the plot.

By contrast, night vision equipment and how it could be concealed and detected was central to the plot of Murder, She Spoke. Had Al been given a realistic night vision scope, if he didn’t hide it like a moron Jessica would have had no reason to suspect he had it at all, and that’s what led her to him. There was no realistic way for Al to have switched off the electricity to the building from his sound board. Without that, he could not have carried his plan out. There was no way for him to get into and out of his office without making any sound and his plan required a blind man—someone they go out of their way to point out has extra keen hearing—only a half dozen paces from the door. Moreover, his plan involved running past that blind man and into his own office and following a trail of sound is easier than locating an isolated noise.

The other major problem I have with the plotting of this episode is that the solution to the central problem is just the obvious technology for it. How could anyone see in the dark? It can be an intriguing question, but not if the answer is, “by using the technology specifically designed to do that.” It would be like having the reveal to, “how did the killer manage to reach such a high place?” be, “he used a ladder to climb up to it.” Or “how did the killer manage to separate the paper into two pieces so cleanly?” be “he used scissors.” It doesn’t take a detective to figure out that the killer did the thing in the obvious way when there was no misdirection away from the obvious way. Al’s plan only came close to working because Lt. Idiot didn’t bother searching the recording studio for clues.

I’m not saying anything about the weird sub-plot of Mystery Books for the Blind being unprofitable making no sense in 1987 because, though they spend a bunch of time on it, it really has no effect on the plot. It sort-of gives Greg a motive for killing Randy, but since Randy was established to be responsible for Greg’s blindness and bum leg, it’s superfluous. (Frankly, it’s actually slightly a problem because it’s pretty ridiculous to suppose that Greg had brought a steak knife from his house to dinner just in case Randy should cancel the mystery books for the blind program that night.)

Oh, and the motive for the murder doesn’t make any sense, either. Al made bootleg tapes of Stony Carmichael’s comeback album, which Randy didn’t know, so he murdered Randy and framed Greg. He had been rehearsing the murder for weeks prior to Stony discovering the bootleg tapes in a “swap meet”. Worse, Randy had no evidence that Al was behind the bootlegging and didn’t even suspect him. In fact, he suspected the other sound engineer, not Al. Moreover, killing Randy didn’t solve any problem for Al. Stony still knew about the bootleg tapes and was still boiling mad about them. Whoever inherited the studio would still try to investigate to find out who was responsible for the bootleg tapes.

Killing Randy didn’t even get rid of any evidence. The way to track the bootlegger down would be by asking the person selling the tape at the swap-meet where he got it from and tracing this back. As far as I can see, killing Randy would have achieved exactly nothing for Al. He might as well have killed the other recording engineer or even the janitor. At least, then, he could have planted evidence on their corpses that they were the bootlegger. As it was, Al had precisely no motive.

I’ve got nothing more to say about the episode as a mystery, but I want to take a moment to put together all of the text of Jessica’s book as we heard it:

The body was discovered by Edie Babbage on November 2nd, at 3:30 in the afternoon. She knew it was 3:30 because she was late returning from her marketing. She checked her watch in the elevator, bothered the dinner wouldn’t be ready. Nothing fancy, just her husband’s favorite stuffed cabbage, but it took at least four hours. She was equally certain about the location of the body—the man’s throat had been slit and he was making a dreadful mess all over her freshly scrubbed kitchen floor. It had not been Edie’s day… But what really bothered Mrs. Babage was, the body was dressed in her only fromal gown… only ten minutes before Lt. Garfield arrived. Garfield took in the scene quickly. It wasn’t a pretty picture but he’d seen worse. He noted the swarthy man with the hideous bloody grin cut into his throat, noted the gown he was wearing, and dryly observed that he appeared to be wearing a size 12. It seemed bizarre that he was wearing a dress belonging to the lady of the house, but as Garfield said, we’re lucky at least the corpse wasn’t wearing makeup. Even more bizarre was the fact that there were no bloodstains on the dress.

I suspect that snippets like these are as much jokes as anything, but it is curious to see what J.B. Fletcher’s best sellers are supposed to be like. I do find it curious that they don’t give Jessica a detective that appears in more than one of her novels. Ariadne Oliver had Sven Hjerson and Harriet Vane had Robert Templeton. I suppose that the less continuity they had the easier it was to farm scripts out to non-staff writers. It’s a pity, though. It would have been fun for people to ask her what her fictional detective would do in various circumstances.

Towards the end of the third season of Murder, She Wrote is the episode, The Days Dwindle Down. It’s one of my favorite kinds of mystery stories—a historical mystery. Jessica is asked to investigate a killing which took place thirty years ago.

Very unusually for a Murder, She Wrote title screen, it features Jessica in it. She’s talking with a publicist, who wants to use the real-life murders she’s solved in order to sell books. I’m not clear on what his actual plan is, but it doesn’t matter because he’s not really a character in this story. He’s only here to introduce the information that Jessica solves real-life crimes to one of the real characters:

This is Georgia Wilson. She’s the one who asks Jessica to solve the thirty year old mystery. It happens not long after the breakfast meeting. She shows up at Jessica’s room and asks if she can come in because she could be fired if anyone sees her bothering Jessica. It turns out that her husband just got out of prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and she wants Jessica to… actually, she never really says. He’s a broken man and she wants him to be repaired so they can enjoy whatever years they have left, but she doesn’t say what Jessica can do to bring this about. She does ask Jessica to come and listen to his story, though, which is at least actionable.

When Jessica arrives, Sam is sitting in his chair, staring out of the window.

After a minute or so in which Sam is grumpy, he agrees to tell the story of what happened. And here we come to something fascinating about this episode: it is actually based on a movie. The movie is called Strange Bargain and was released in 1949. Since this episode first aired in 1987, the events depicted really took place thirty eight years before. Everyone in Hollywood always plays younger, even the movies themselves, it turns out. It works, though, and the flashbacks are done using footage from the movie.

Sam’s story starts out with Gloria talking Sam into asking his boss, Mr. Jarvis, for a raise. He makes an appointment and manages to get past Mr. Jarvis’s personal secretary, who was an intimidating character in her own right.

He did get past her, though, and saw Mr. Jarvis. Unfortunately, after he asked for the raise, Mr. Jarvis told him that he was fired because the company is in financial trouble and they have to cut costs.

He, himself, had sunk all of his money into the firm except for about $10,000 dollars. (That would have been worth in the neighborhood of $50,000 in 1987 dollars and $109,000 in 2020 dollars.) Later that day, Mr. Jarvis took Sam out for a drink and offered a, well, a strange bargain. He had recently increased his life insurance policy to $250,000 (about $2.7M in 2020), and was planning to kill himself so that his wife and child would get the money. He would give Sam the $10,000 he had left if Sam would clean up the crime scene to make it look like murder instead of suicide so that his family would get the insurance money.

Sam at first refused, but Jarvis called him at home and told him that he was going through with it earlier than he originally planned and begged Sam to help him. Sam drove there to talk him out of it but by the time he got there Mr. Jarvis was already dead. The envelope with the money was there, and Jarvis had already done it, so Sam took the money and did as Jarvis had asked him to do. He forgot to fire the shots when he was in the library, though, so he fired them through the library window. Before going home he drove to the Santa Monica peer and threw the gun away underneath the pier.

Unfortunately, after he washed the blood off of his hands he forgot to wash the blood off of the steering wheel in his car. Also, the next day, when they went to pay their respects to the widow, Lieutenant Webb was there and told them that though the gun hasn’t been found the three bullets matched—the one in the body and two that were fired into the wall. When Webb said this, Sam looked at where he fired the shots into the wall. Webb was looking for it.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Wilson. Right there.” From this point on, Webb was convinced that Sam did it and was out to get him, at least according to Gloria. She also had a complaint that Sam had done everything he could to help Mr. Jarvis but Mrs. Jarvis and Sidney (Jarvis’s son) didn’t lift a finger to help him.

Sam telling Gloria that the Jarvis’s couldn’t have known about Jarvis’ plan is interrupted by Sam and Gloria’s son Rod and his very pregnant wife Terry coming in.

Jessica said she would like to meet Lieutenant Webb, but Rod wishes her luck. He tried, himself, but was told that Webb was retired and “unavailable”.

Rod gives Jessica a lift back to her hotel, where he fills her in on a few more details. He became a police officer in order to try to clear his father. The police file on the Jarvis case was missing, so he assembled his own file on the case full of newspaper clippings, court depositions—every scrap of evidence and information he could get his hands on. He lends this to Jessica. Jessica speculates that the reason why it wasn’t possible to prove suicide is that perhaps there’s a possibility that no one had yet considered: what if someone else had murdered Jarvis and only made it look like suicide when Sam found the body?

While this is an intriguing possibility, I’m not sure that it’s really justified. It would be different if there should have been evidence of the suicide which wasn’t there, but in fact the evidence was there, where you would have expected it. Furthermore, its disappearance is adequately accounted for. The reason that there is no evidence to prove suicide is that Sam destroyed it all. Speculating that someone actually murdered Mr. Jarvis doesn’t account for anything. Jessica seems to really like this idea, though, and takes it as a working hypothesis.

The next day they go to the house where Mr. Jarvis died.

This is one of those cases where it’s unfortunate that Murder, She Wrote wasn’t filmed in widescreen, because the house was so big that a 4:3 image can’t capture it all (at this distance away). It’s a big house. So big, in fact, that I wonder how on earth the family paid for it. If we use 2020 money throughout, $2.7M over thirty years is only $90k/year. Granted, it probably would have been smarter to invest the money and live off of interest or dividends or what-have-you, but if you assume that they were able to get 5% above inflation, that would still only amount for $135k/year. Comfortable, yes, but hardly wealthy. It wouldn’t surprise me if the property taxes on this palace consumed half of that. The gardening and maintenance bills would eat into a decent chunk of it, too. This isn’t a big problem; had it been about four to eight times bigger the results would have been far more in keeping with what we’re shown here. (An alternative would have been for Mrs. Jarvis or Sidney to have invested the money in some business which succeeded, but that clearly didn’t happen.)

On the way there, Jessica speculates that the killer might have forced Mr. Jarvis to call Sam. That would explain why Jarvis said that the plan was going ahead sooner than expected. Rod raises the excellent question of, why? Why kill someone you knew was intending to commit suicide? Jessica gives the only possible answer: perhaps the killer thought that Jarvis wouldn’t go through with it.

They go up to the doors of the house and Sidney opens them before anyone can ring the doorbell.

They explain that Jessica is here looking into the case, and Sidney dislikes the whole thing. In the discussion, it comes up that Jarvis’s business partner, Mr. Hearst, had lied about not visiting the home shortly before Jarvis was killed. Eventually Jessica persuades Sidney by pointing out that now that his prison sentence is over, Sam has nothing to gain by stirring up the past. Sidney relents. Jessica asks to talk to his mother, but unfortunately his mother is dead. Sidney then shows them to the library.

On the way, Jessica notices a clue. On the sideboard, there’s a letter written to Mrs. Jarvis in the mail.

They do not want us to miss this clue. Fair enough. Obviously this means that Sidney is lying about his mother being dead, though in reality it’s not uncommon to get mail addressed to someone who is dead for years afterwards. Anyway, why is Sidney lying about his mother being dead? We’ll find out.

Not right now, though. We don’t see the examination of the library, possibly because it would be too much work to come up with a set that closely matches the set from the movie. Instead, we cut to Jessica having an appointment with a “Mrs Davis”.

Mrs. Davis is the granddaughter of Mr. Jervis’ business partner, Mr. Herne. (He’s the one who wanted Jervis out of the business and lied to the police about not visiting Jervis at his house the day of the murder.) Susan Strasberg, the actress who plays Mrs. Davis, looks tiny compared to Jessica. I looked it up and she’s just a hair over 5′ tall. This made me wonder how tall Angela Lansbury is, since she towers over Ms. Strasberg, but normally looks small herself. It turns out that she’s 5’8″, which makes me think that they make a point of surrounding her with taller actors. That is, at least, one explanation for me never having noticed this before.

Be that as it may, Jessica pumps Mrs. Davis for information in a surprisingly clumsy way. She offends Mrs. Davis, who had been misled into thinking that Jessica was there to look for investment advice. In the course of the heated conversation which follows, Mrs. Davis said that Jervis had been in the process of completing a deal for her grandfather to take over the firm. This contradicts what Mrs. Jarvis said, that Herne took over the firm after Jarvis’s death. She accuses Mrs. Jarvis of lying, and says that Mrs. Jarvis lied doesn’t surprise her, though not why it doesn’t.

The sub-plot with the granddaughter is hard for me to figure out. The actress who played her was 49 at the time of this episode, so if we go with the Hollywood standard that actors play characters 10 years younger than they are, the character would be 39. That would make her about 9 years old at the time of the murder, which generally fits. She wouldn’t have known anything about it and what she did know would have all been second or third hand, learned much later. She can’t have inherited the firm more than about ten years ago, so her knowledge of the state of it twenty years before that would be minimal at best.

The attempt to set Herne up as a suspect in Jarvis’ murder seems to me a bit clumsy. There’s extremely little evidence given. Herne wanted the firm without Jarvis, and since Herne had money and Jarvis didn’t, and since the firm was going under, it seems quite superfluous to murder Jarvis to get the firm. This could be worked in such a way as to give him a motive—Jarvis was going to run the firm into the ground before giving it up—but Jessica never tries to establish this or anything like it.

I also don’t understand why Jessica is so aggressive with Mrs. Davis. I am inclined to suspect that the hostility created was meant to take the place of evidence that makes Herne a suspect. Be that as it may, on her way out Jessica talks to an older woman in a nearby office and finds out the address of Thelma Vante, Mr. Jarvis’s personal secretary. She then goes to visit her.

Thelma is delighted to meet Jessica. “Wait till I tell the girls. Me, in a book by J.B. Fletcher.” She shows Jessica an old photo book, and also relates a little personal history. Her ex-husband was beautiful but never worked a day in his life. Also, they had a beautiful home. Jessica doesn’t come out and say it but you can see that she’s wondering where the money came from for that beautiful home. Jessica also brings up the idea of Mrs. Jarvis having killed her husband—she didn’t get to the beach house until well after Mr. Jarvis was dead. Thelma poo-poos the idea because Mrs. Jarvis didn’t have the guts to murder anyone.

As soon as Jessica drives off in a cab, Thelma goes inside and places a phone call. She says that “there seems to be some new interest in our problem.” I suppose this isn’t giving away too much because she was awfully suspicious when Jessica interviewed her, especially with the evidence of her nice house, workless husband, and complaints that she didn’t get anything when Jarvis died.

Over a family dinner at the Wilson house, Jessica discusses the case with them. Sam Wilson thinks that Mrs. Davis is lying about when her grandfather took over the firm. His recollection is that even after Mr. Jarvis’ death, Mr. Herne (Mrs. Davis’ grandfather) didn’t know if he’d be able to take over the firm. Jessica thinks that Mrs. Davis was lying to protect her grandfather’s reputation, or the reputation of the firm. Rod comes in and delivers the news that Mrs. Jarvis is not dead, she’s living at a rest home. Jessica and Georgia Wilson decide to pay her a visit in the morning.

Before they can do that, someone comes to Jessica’s hotel room, points a gun in her direction while she’s sleeping, and fires.

If you ask me, this is playing a little unfair with the audience. We know that Jessica is not going to be killed in an episode, but here the gun is actually pointing at her. The camera does move to showing only the gun, from the side, when it fires, though. The next scene (which I suspect is after a commercial break, in the original airing) has Rod coming over to check on Jessica.

The guy in blue who is kneeling is extracting the bullet from the cushion of that chair. Now, granted, the gun is not in focus in the earlier frame, but it really looks like it’s pointing directly at Jessica and nowhere near the chair. The bullet is from a .38 pistol and hasn’t been made in twenty years, btw. Jessica asks the police detective (the guy in the blue suit who pulled the bullet from the cushion) to humor her and compare the ballistics of the bullet to the one from the Jarvis case.

The next morning, Jessica and Georgia follow through on their plan to visit Mrs. Jarvis.

Unfortunately, it turns out that she has dementia and doesn’t even know that her husband is dead. Sydney walks in on them after Mrs. Jarvis tells them about the roses that her husband grows and they question him a bit more. He claims that Mrs. Davis is lying about when her grandfather took over the firm and it happened in a “proxy fight”, which was a matter of public record. This implies that the company was publicly traded, because proxy voting of shareholders is only a thing in publicly traded companies. That’s not of great significance, except that if it is a publicly traded company, stock purchases that give somebody more than 5% ownership of the company are public record, which Jessica should know. That said, proxy fights are about getting the shareholders to vote for somebody (or some bodies) for the board of directors of the corporation, they’re not about ownership. I think we need to chalk this one up to Hollywood writers having no idea how corporations actually work.

After saying goodbye to Sydney, Jessica and Georgia take a minute to discuss the shot fired into her hotel room chair. Whoever it was, Jessica points out, it certainly wasn’t Mrs. Jarvis. Further, it clearly wasn’t an attempt on her life. The shooter had all the time in the world to aim carefully, or even to fire a second or third shot, if he really wanted Jessica dead. Jessica then asks for a lift to back to Herne and Jarvis (the firm).

At first Mrs. Davis is reluctant to see her but, through an intercomm trick, Jessica gains entry. They talk for a bit, but nothing really comes of it. After Mrs. Davis angrily tells Jessica to leave, Jessica replies, “If you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Davis, it appears to me that you suspect your grandfather more than anyone.” As far as I can tell, that includes the audience. This is the last we see of Mrs. Davis, and we’ve still got fifteen minutes to go.

I still don’t understand why she was here. I suppose it’s supposed to be a red herring but at best it’s a pink herring. Mrs. Davis is angry and defensive but we’re never given any reason why she’s angry and defensive. Or if Jessica is right that Mrs. Davis suspects her grandfather, there’s no reason why she suspects him—at least none that we’re given—so her defensiveness doesn’t feel like it comes from anywhere.

Later on, in her hotel lobby, Jessica tells Sam and Georgia that unfortunately the ballistics report on the Jarvis case went missing with the rest of the case file. After they leave she gets a telephone call from someone claiming to have information on the Jarvis case but she has to come alone. He won’t give his name but Jessica goes anyway. She takes a taxi.

It turns out that it’s Colonel Potter in a wheelchair. Recognizing the actor by his most famous role aside, it’s actually Lieutenant Webb, who had been in charge of the case thirty years ago. He apologizes for all of the intrigue but it had to be strictly unofficial. How waiting until Jessica got to his house to admit to his name makes it any less official than telling her his name over the telephone, he doesn’t explain. He also couldn’t face the Wilsons, because he always had the feeling that Sam Wilson was innocent. He couldn’t do anything, though, because the DA told him to wrap up the case quickly and that his job was to collect evidence, not to judge the case. This bit of backstory out of the way, he gets to the reason he asked her to come—he’s got the old case files, including the ballistics report from the Jarvis case.

The bullets match.

They discuss the case for a while, which is fun because Harry Morgan is a wonderfully charismatic actor. They don’t really add anything to the case, though. Jessica suggests that perhaps the killer thought that he would benefit, but was wrong. Webb said that he entertained that theory, in particular that Thelma Vantay, the secretary, might have been having an affair with Jarvis and thought she would benefit, but they checked it out and Jarvis seemed to be faithful to his wife. He wishes Jessica well on her investigation of the case, and she leaves to go see Thelma again.

Thelma is initially reluctant to talk but Jessica points out that the statute of limitations for blackmail has passed. Once she understands the significance of this, Thelma opens up, though curiously she mostly just confirms what Jessica guesses. She knew about the life insurance policy increase and she had heard Jarvis talk about suicide a few times, so when he ended up dead, she figured out what happened and blackmailed the Jarvises. In particular, she blackmailed Sydney. What, exactly, she blackmailed him with is not entirely obvious, though. She didn’t know anything that the police didn’t know—certainly they knew about the life insurance policy. I suppose she could have told them that Jarvis had talked about suicide before, which might corroborate Sam’s story, but it’s thin material to blackmail someone with.

Jessica and Rod get to talking about it. He thinks that they can now prove suicide but Jessica is bothered by the gun being used to shoot near her. Why? It doesn’t really make any sense to attract this sort of attention to the case so unnecessarily.

Jessica then has an epiphany.

They go to the Jarvis house and press Sydney until he makes a slip and says that the gun was thrown under the Santa Monica pier. This wasn’t public knowledge; all that the public was told was that the gun was disposed of. Sydney admits to following Sam to the pier and retrieving the gun, because, he says, he killed his father. Jessica asks if he isn’t covering for his mother, instead. The Wilsons point out that Mrs. Jarvis couldn’t have fired the gun near Jessica the other night and she agrees—it was a mistake to think that the same person who killed Jarvis fired the gun near Jessica. Sydney did it to direct attention away from his mother, who had the perfect alibi for the second crime.

Sydney admits to it all. His mother didn’t mean to kill his father. She came back to the library to retrieve a book and came across him when he was in the process of trying to commit suicide. She grappled with him, but in the struggle the gun went off and he was killed. It was an accident but with the insurance money no one would believe that. So Sydney tried to cover it up. He even tried to protect Sam by putting pressure on the DA to close the case quickly, except that backfired when Thelma figured out what was going on and blackmailed him. He had to choose between Sam and his mother, and chose his mother.

The Wilsons and Jessica leave. On the way out Rod says that he will call the DA but Sam tells him not to. He has the closure he wanted—it would be absurd to prosecute Mrs. Jarvis, who didn’t really commit a crime, and Sydney was only trying to protect his mother. They know what happened, which is enough for him. Rod appeals to Jessica, who says that justice is imperfect and that sometimes there’s a difference between serving the ideal of justice and doing what’s best. Sam and Georgia kiss and the episode ends with Jessica smiling on them.

Before I get into further analysis of the story and it’s ending, I have to say that it’s frustrating how utterly incompetent Hollywood writers are at moral philosophy. Justice is not always imperfect. Human attempts to achieve justice are always imperfect. Worse still is the consequentialist conclusion that when a principle doesn’t produce the consequences you want, to hell with the principle. What they really want to get at is the perfectly legitimate conclusion that they do not have it within their power to achieve justice and invoking the criminal justice system, which is a blunt instrument wielded by flawed human beings, is not permissible because it will not achieve the end for which it will be invoked.

That said, it seems likely that the statue of limitations on withholding exculpatory evidence for a charge for a crime that was not committed has probably run out quite a while ago, so the whole thing is almost certainly moot. If the DA could not bring any charges calling him doesn’t matter, one way or the other.

That out of the way, it is curious that this episode has a different ending than the movie it used as a source did. In Strange Bargain, it turned out that Mrs. Jarvis actually did kill her husband and set the murder scene to look like suicide. The movie ends with her admitting this to Sam before she kills him; Lieutenant Webb arrives just in time to save Sam.

Obviously, they did have to change the ending to the movie in order to justify the episode and I think that on the whole they did change it in a way that at least made sense. They could have done a better job than an accidental death that basically was a suicide, just with someone else trying to claw the gun away when the suicide was committed. It really having been the business partner, for example, would have been a more interesting reveal, though they couldn’t have the weird sub-plot where the same gun was used to shoot at Jessica had they done that. The other odd thing about this ending is that it doesn’t really change anything for the characters in the story. Jarvis did really kill himself and the only people who have learned that are people who already believed it. Why Sam was brooding when the episode started and now is willing to forgo public exoneration is not really explained. Such character development is possible, of course, it just didn’t happen in this episode.

On the other hand, TV shows are, structurally, short stories. Short stories are about sketching out stories, not about painting them in full. We could certainly imagine a story in which a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder at first broods but then in the course of helping a sleuth investigate what really happened comes out of his shell and, though he can’t prove the truth, has spent enough time focusing on something that is not himself that he no longer needs to prove it to anyone.

Though it is not a conventional detective story, it is possible to tell a detective story in which the detective uncovers the truth but it doesn’t do anyone any good. To some degree the Poirot story Five Little Pigs is that. Poirot uncovers the truth but the only person he helps by doing so believed it, or at least part of it, already. (She believed that the person convicted was innocent; she did not know who was guilty.) A few other people who didn’t know it now do, but that’s it. Yet, it is profoundly satisfying because the mystery was such a tangle and everything about it makes so much more sense when it is untangled. It is not merely satisfying to see a puzzle unraveled; it also gives insight into how possible it is to misunderstand fragmentary facts. It’s an extremely good story and I think that The Days Dwindle Down is an enjoyable episode in part because there are fuller versions of it like Five Little Pigs.

Overall, I think that The Days Dwindle Down could have been, realistically, better than it was. Probably the better outcome would be to have revealed someone else as the murderer. Failing that, it would still have been better to come up with some sort of exculpatory evidence which did actually prove suicide. It’s hard to think what that could have been since the premise was that Sam had destroyed it all; some sort of witness is about all that could be done. To be fair, that’s actually what they did, except that the witness still refused to talk publicly. I think that the best way out, here, would have been the route of Five Little Pigs—a witness who misunderstood what he saw all these years. This would have been easier if there had been something else in Strange Bargain such as a bump on the head that could have been caused in a previous struggle. Unfortunately, that movie had a different purpose in mind, so it didn’t provide these things. With what we’re given, I’d say that it would have made more sense for Herne to have brought his granddaughter in the car, somehow, perhaps after the death but before Sam arrived, and she got bored and came out and saw her grandfather in the room with the corpse, and thought that he did it. Unfortunately, we couldn’t have a flashback for any of this, since it wasn’t in Strange Bargain, but a flashback isn’t a strict requirement here. The flashback that they had was very incomplete, as it was.

If a flashback was an absolute requirement then I think it would have been better to go through with how Strange Bargain actually ended, with Mrs. Jarvis having murdered her husband because he wouldn’t go through with it. Sydney could have protected his mother. That would make him an accessory after the fact, though, so he still wouldn’t be able to come forward (depending on the jurisdiction). If they had gotten rid of the shooting at Jessica, he could have been merely a witness who didn’t come forward, though, which wouldn’t have been so bad. They could have changed the ending around so he would have been willing to publicly exonerate Sam, now that his mother has dementia (or she could have recently died). That would have been better, and still allowed the use of flashbacks from the movie in the denouement. Not as good as the other options, but still an improvement over an accidental death.

All told, yes, it could certainly have been a better episode, but The Days Dwindle Down was a good episode and the idea of using flashbacks from a 38 year old movie was a lot of fun.

The second episode of the fourth season of Murder, She Wrote, is titled, When Thieves Fall Out. It’s a very unusual episode of Murder, She Wrote.

The episode begins with the owner of a car dealership firing a drunk salesman. After that we meet a rather enigmatic character. I’m not sure whether to call him the protagonist or the antagonist, and in many ways the episode isn’t sure, either.

His name is Andrew Durbin. It’s a bit complicated, but we learn his backstory: he just got out of prison for a murder he claims he didn’t commit 20 years ago. He had been a hitchiker, and a wealthy businessman was giving him a ride. A car swerved almost into their lane and they swerved to avoid it, crashing. The businessman was injured and Durbin ran to a nearby farmhouse for help, but they didn’t hear his banging on the door. When he got back someone had bashed the businessman’s head in with a rock, and $100,000 in bearer bonds were missing. At that moment the police showed, and he was taken to be the murderer, and was convicted.

He’s back in Cabot Cove because he recognized a kid in the car (in a prom outfit; it was prom night) that ran them off of the road, and he wants vengeance and to know who the driver is.

The kid turns out to be Bill, the owner of the car dealership.

Somewhere around here, the car dealership owner recognizes that some weird things are going and her husband is very scared, so she goes to Jessica for help.

Andrew Durbin goes to the car dealership and says that there seems to be some electrical trouble with his car.

Bill says that he’s busy and will need some time to get the repair done. He suggests that Andrew come back at 9pm to pick up his car. Andrew agrees. Jessica shows up and talks to Bill, but not much really comes from this. He denies everything. Jessica leaves, and Bill calls a confederate—presumably the other person in the car, that fateful night.

Interestingly for a Murder, She Wrote episode, while we’re pretty sure that someone is about to be murdered, we don’t really know who.

It turns out to be Bill, which is an interesting turn of events because it leaves the field so wide open for who the murderer could be. One obvious suspect is the man with whom he had an appointment at around the time he was killed, Andrew Durbin, but it turns out that Durbin has an air-tight alibi. He was eating dinner for 2 hours at a restaurant where several reliable witnesses could vouch for him.

The alibi is useful, structurally, but it’s also very curious that Durbin never showed up to the appointment. It’s somewhat implied, later in the episode, that this was really a setup; he expected this to stir up Bill’s confederate and get him to kill Bill. It’s never explained in detail, and doesn’t make all that much sense as a plan. Unless he figured that Bill’s killer would be sloppy and get caught, this plan would most likely result in the trail going cold and Durbin’s only hope of justice being extinguished. That said, for whatever reason he does it, he never shows up and is careful to have an excellent alibi for before, during, and after the murder is committed.

Convinced that Durbin is both innocent and telling the truth, Jessica interviews Bill’s old high school friends who were with him that night.

They lie to Jessica, of course, in order to protect Bill’s memory, and say that he was with them the whole time. Eventually it comes out that Bill was drunk and left early. There’s some further investigation and a sub-plot where one of Bill’s old football friends who is pretending to have been crippled in a car crash and is suing Bill turns out not to be crippled and to only be scamming.

I probably should have mentioned earlier that high school football was a big theme. All of Bill’s male friends from high school were on the football team with him, and they were the only team from Cabot Cove who ever won the state championship. This is important because it turns out that the driver, and the murderer both of Bill and of the driver 20 years ago was the beloved high school football coach.

There was actually a pretty good line from his confession, when he talked about how the business he had invested his share of the $100,000 into went bust almost immediately: “I guess I should have known that nothing good would come of that money.”

What really makes this episode special, though, is that it doesn’t stop here. Later that night, as Jessica and Amos are having dinner, Andrew Durbin shows up at Jessica’s doorstep to thank her.

Jessica says that she wishes he wouldn’t. She acknowledges that he was telling the truth and spent 20 years in prison unjustly, but he knew what would happen when he came. He replies that he did warn her that he was after justice.

Jessica acknowledges this, but says, “I can’t help but think that justice could have been served in a better way.” Durbin is taken aback.

After thinking for a moment he then delivers one of the all-time great lines in Murder, She Wrote. He says it slowly, thoughtfully, and very fairly.

“Oh? Well you give it some thought, Mrs. Fletcher, and when you figure out what could have been, you let me know.”

Jessica is at a loss for words. He turns and leaves, and she closes the door. She then leans against it, thinking.

And there the episode ends.

Something I touched on in my blog post about how Jessica Fletcher is an oddly libertine scold is that she has an extremely strong but highly selective sense of indignation. She deplores violence but not, in general, any of the things which tend to make it necessary.

She dislikes, tremendously, that people she cared about were made to suffer. This is understandable, but it is a fault in Jessica that she didn’t rise above her feelings and stick to her principles and acknowledge that Durbin was in the right. Instead, she resents being made to be the one to find them out. In short, she is entitled to grieve, but not to be indignant, and Durbin’s final line points out to her how little she is entitled to her indignation.

Jessica does not learn from this moment, of course. First, because she’s written by television writers. Second, because Murder, She Wrote was episodic, with episodes not being related to each other. Frankly, I think it’s really more the former than the latter, though. All that said, it’s pretty satisfying for Jessica to get a comeuppance, for once.

Apart from all this, it’s an interesting episode. Detectives investigating long-ago mysteries is interesting, because the evidence is so limited (at least when people don’t have oddly good memories about things long-past to which they hadn’t attached any great significance at the time). This is done much better in Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs, but it’s an unfair comparison. That was a novel. A forty eight minute long TV episode cannot be as good. It does partake of some of what made that novel so good, though, even if it takes the easy route and uses photographs instead of people’s partial memories.