Jessica Fletcher

Jessica Beatrice Fletcher is a fictional character portrayed on the American television series Murder, She Wrote by veteran British-American Oscar-nominated actress Angela Lansbury.

This program was one of the most successful of the 1980s and 1990s on the CBS television network. Mrs. Fletcher was a retired teacher turned author of detective fiction under the name J. B. Fletcher, but was constantly finding that her work and personal lives overlapped. In every episode she was introduced into a situation where someone was killed shortly after her arrival. She was generally forced to solve every mystery herself in the style of one of the characters from her book, as the police proved to be incapable of doing so without her help. In fact, on at least one occasion a man of the law was actually unmasked as the killer, when cult TV actor John Astin appeared as the villainous Sheriff Harry Pierce.

Mrs. Fletcher lived in the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine, which WAGs proclaim to have probably the highest murder rate of any small town in the civilized world (and as a not unnatural corollary in many parodies and satire she is arrested by law enforcement agencies as her very presence causes the commitment of murder! Perhaps residents should pay her to stay away!), but her travels as an author very frequently took her to places around much of the English-Speaking world, which gave her writers a little more ability to stretch the character and her situations than rural New England alone would have provided. One of them took her to Hawaii, where she shared a case with private detective Thomas Magnum, star of Magnum PI.

Ms. Fletcher was widowed from her beloved husband Frank, with no children but with a large collection of cousins, nieces, nephews and in-laws who always needed her help. Especially prone to get into trouble was her giddy nephew Graidy Fletcher, who always seemed to meet the wrong girl, until he finally married Donna several seasons into the show.

Ms. Fletcher began her career writing on an old Underwood typewriter, but as her career progressed, she eventually purchased a suitably antiquated 386 class computer running Windows 3.1. Among her friends she can count both multi-millionares who own Beech Starship's to down-on-their-luck homeless dudes, moving effortlessly between the social strata. Jessica always strived to solve mysteries within five minutes of the end of each program, unless the producers felt they could prolong the nail-biting suspense across two episodes. Perhaps her most notable experience was encountering a Mr. Potts who preferred to be called Mr. Bond - he did at least have an Aston Martin DB6, in which Jessica herself ended up racing to the rescue.

When a series of original novels based upon Murder, She Wrote was published in the late 1980s/early 1990s, these books were credited to Jessica Fletcher.

'Harbinger of Death!!'

It's also a mystery that Mrs. Fletcher is not severely depressed. Most famous characters who solve mysteries are hired to solve the crime... the murder is committed, and then they get involved after the fact. Mrs. Fletcher, however, can be said to just have bad luck: everywhere she goes, someone dies. She is a harbinger of death. The show ran for 264 episodes, which equates to at least 264 deaths, far more than one person usually experiences through pure circumstance. Yet she still seems to have a positive outlook on life. If the circumstance seems too great that people die wherever she goes, we may need to accept the possibility that Ms. Fletcher did them all in and somehow managed to repeatedly convince Sheriff Tupper (uber-man Tom Bosley) that she was not involved directly.

'Radishes!!'

In one episode it was revealed that she is allergic to radishes.