I admit it. I occasionally watch episodes of the entirely dull Murder She Wrote series in order to fall asleep. Sometimes they are cute and the plots are tolerable, but most of all it reminds me of the years when I was assigned as a law enforcement ranger in “Cabot Cove” where the story usually takes place. Cabot Cove is really Mendocino, California, a truly lovely part of the state.. J. B. Fletcher (loosely modeled off a modern day take on Agatha Christie), on the other hand, is not lovely. She is an industrial strength magnet for murder. If she shows up in town, you better have your life insurance paid up, because someone is gonna die. She is just plain not someone you want to hang around with. She’s a true murder cesspool. In my 30 years in law enforcement and 12 in firefighting/medical, I only had to deal with a dozen or so murders in any way whatsoever. J. B., on the other hand, can’t go an hour without someone croaking under suspicious circumstances in this tiny little “whitebread-wealthy” town. To make matters worse, she is seen as an incredibly valuable crime solving resource to almost everyone in law enforcement because…wait for it…she is a writer of mysteries.
I can just see it now, the Mendocino Boosters Club Slogan… “Come to Mendocino and Get Wasted.” (Did I mention that section of the coast was prime drug culture as well for a great many years?) Realtors showing houses with metal security doors and barred windows would be the norm in Fletcher-land. ‘Willful suspension of disbelief’ is an issue in writing that needs careful use…especially in serious murder mysteries. Let’s be real: J. B. Fletcher’s way of doing things in the T.V. series eventually stretches our notion of credibility way beyond the limit. If you are going to write a series that solves murders, you have to choose someone who is likely to have responsibility or genuine opportunity to investigate them. It’s one of the things I have against the “Cozy Mystery Series” phenomenon (this is a kissing-cousin to the “Mystery Books Solved by Cats” phenomenon, but that is a subject for another blog). If it’s not a series set in the same place all the time, you can knock yourself out using anyone you please and killing whoever you want. Oh, I suppose you could set it in the ghetto where there is a murder every hour or so and perhaps make it believable, but even then you’d have to be careful to give some credible reason for your character to be always investigating said murders…and frankly that’s hard unless they are with law enforcement, or are private investigators with defense attorneys that specialize in high crimes. So, there it is, my pet peeve of mystery writing.
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Greg
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