On March 12, 1987, when Murder Wrote was airing its third season, Richard Levinson died of a heart attack at age 52. He was one of the three creators of the murder series. On December 27, 2020, when he had turned 87, William Link, another of the creators, died of heart problems. On October 11, 2022, it was Angela Lansbury who said goodbye at age 96, the eternal Jessica Fletcher, the only regular character in fiction. And finally, Peter S. Fischer, the third creator, died on Monday at the age of 88, according to his family. You could say he has ended an era.
Levinson, Link and Fischer co-created Murder Wrote after working together on Colombo, a Levinson and Link series on which Fischer had collaborated as a screenwriter. The formats had nothing to do with it. In Colombo, an episodic format almost like a TV-movie was chosen with hour and a half chapters, in which the viewer knew from the beginning the murderer of the week and had to see how the homicide detective played by Peter Falk discovered the truth of the crime.
On the other hand, A Murder Wrote started from a more naïve premise. Jessica Fletcher, a retired and widowed English teacher and amateur writer, began to play a more active role in her retirement: she became a successful crime novel writer and, along the way, solved crimes wherever she went. In the pilot, the intentions were clear: in Cabot Cove, her coastal town, Sherlock Holmes was murdered at a costume party and she, with the same obstinacy as Arthur Conan Doyle's character (and an innate ability to stick her nose where it shouldn't they called her), she solved the crime for the police.
This role, for the record, was not written for Lansbury, who until then was considered a film and theater actress. The trio of creators had considered Jean Stapleton, famous for her success in the seventies with the comedy All in the Family, but rejected the project. But Lansbury had a flop in theaters, the adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Broken Mirror where she played Miss Marple, which prevented her from being offered a contract for three more films. And, when she was offered the script for Murder Wrote, she accepted the challenge.
A Murder Wrote, released in September 1984, was a success that ended up having 12 seasons and four television movies, which allowed Jessica Fletcher to be a constant on television until 2003. During this time, there were no shortage of setbacks with her crime formula. murder of the week: in the fifth season, Angela Lansbury reported that the work hours were very long for a person her age and, while ending the series was considered, CBS and the creative team finally found a way to reduce her workload, reducing its presence in some episodes.
And, as The Hollywood Reporter reports, Peter S. Fischer was not always creatively involved in the series. After being involved in the first seven seasons, signing episodes in all of them, he left Murder Wrote due to lack of ideas. “I left after seven years because I didn't know how, as a screenwriter, to continue finding truly fresh ideas,” he acknowledged. The only thing he could think of was using old crimes in new settings and with new faces, and the idea of only doing creative recycling bored him.
And how did you spend the years after separating from television during the nineties? Like he was Jessica Fletcher, writing murder novels, only he set them all in classic Hollywood. The protagonist was a press agent who, like Jessica, despite not being a detective or police officer, was investigating crimes in the entertainment industry. He signed up to 22 books, publishing the last one in 2019.
