Cabot Cove, Maine, USA, witnessed a murder spree like no other from 1984 to 1996. 64 murders in a population of 3,500 puts it above any place in the USA in terms of murder rate1. But who was really to blame?
Murder, She Wrote
I’ve blogged before about Murder, She Wrote, the detective series that starred Angela Lansbury as the successful mystery writer Jessica “JB” Fletcher.
We like to joke that Jessica is the real killer in all the episodes and manages to frame some poor schmuck who is gaslit into confessing. I made a design that celebrates Murder, She Wrote and uses a snowclone to explain this.
Snowclones
There is a rhetorical device that you will be familiar with, but may not know the name of: the snowclone. These are sayings where the sentence format is well known enough that the subject can be changed2. For example:
Orange is the new black
In space, nobody can see you boogie
Have spacesuit, will travel
Horsey McHorseface
A phrase I’ve seen on a lot of t shirts is a variation on the original “The mountains are calling, and I must go.” This comes from a letter the naturalist and mountaineer John Muir wrote to his sister, Sarah, in 1873. On t shirts, ‘the mountains’ is replaced by Australia, London, Lagos, the ocean, adventure… anywhere, really.
The design
This is a simple enough design. It features an image of Angela Lansbury as Jessica, a New England-type scene in the background and the phase ‘Cabot Cove is calling and I must kill’.
The font choice was the main sticking point. I’ve used Badhorse here, though I used Art Nuvo in the previous Murder She Wrote design. The show itself used Art Gothic, but that’s not available in Canva.
I’ve added a white outline to some of the designs to help it stand out against some backgrounds. As it is, it works well with light backgrounds, but I like a colour on things like mousemats and phone cases, so a white outline and a default sky blue background is what I’ve gone with.
- Above anywhere in the world. The Turks and Caicos Islands have a homicide rate of 76 per 100,000 inhabitants. For the twelve years of Jessica’s spree, that figure was 143 per 100,000 in Cabot Cove. ↩︎
- According to Wikipedia, they are a phrasal template based on a cliché. They are both memes and clichés. ↩︎
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