Romantic Dysfunctions in Crime Shows: J.B. Fletcher's Messed-Up Friends

And she always looks great!

Crime shows require mobile detectives: FBI agents who travel all over a specific area; Shawn & Gus who take any case that comes their way; world-famous forensic anthropologists who get called in to anywhere; NYC detectives. 

Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote is so successful and mobile because (1) she has lots of relatives; (2) she is an older woman with a wide network that stretches beyond her immediate circle to her dead husband's friends and relatives; (3) she is a famous novelist whose publishing contacts also stretch her circle; (4) she's played by Angela Lansbury. 

Angela Lansbury dresses and moves like a woman who has a wide network without that network turning her into a spotlight seeker. She's just one of those people who walks into a room and knows people and talks to them about their lives and discovers...

• A spouse is having an affair.
• A spouse married someone for money.
• A lover is a conman/conwoman.
• A spouse is trying to escape an investigation.
• A spouse is being blackmailed/pursued by the past. 

The ever distressed Grady!

She listens without coming across as a gossip. She helps without coming across a busybody. She investigates without coming across as an interfering amateur. 

Of course in real life, nobody knows that many murderers and potential murderers, a fact that Patrick McGoohan's character hilariously plays on in the Season 4 episode "Witness for the Defense" when he accuses Jessica of coming from a family of "homicidal maniacs!"  

Still, if one is suffering a terrible relationship, J.B. Fletcher is the confidant everybody wishes to have.