One of Mrs S’s favourite genre of telly and book is the cosy crime.
How to define this? Murder happens, but we don’t see any blood. The case is solved by an agreeable character who might be an amiable old lady (Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher), an avuncular older man (Diagnosis: Murder, Father Brown), a group of middle class chums (The Marlow Murder Club, The Thursday Murder Club) or a quirky detective (Poirot, Columbo, Death in Paradise). What is missing is grittiness, angst and suspense.
Columbo
Of all the programmes listed above, Columbo stands out. Columbo is one of the greatest telly programmes ever. Peter Falk brought an impish charm to the title character: a common man prying into the world of the upper classes of San Francisco and always being underestimated.
Watching Columbo lead the murderer into a false sense of security remains a delight. He has them believing that they are going to get away with it, until Columbo finds that one clue (lack of paint on the floor where an artist was supposed to have been), or the killer gives the game away (realising that his stock of wine has been ruined by a heatwave) and Columbo starts to whistle ‘This Old Man’ and we know he’s got the killer.
There is the theory that Columbo wasn’t all that as a detective, and only ever caught the killer when there was a TV crew to film the murder. But what kind of sick mind would come up with that theory?
Murder, She Wrote
With Murder, She Wrote we get to see a stalwart of Hollywood – Angela Lansbury – act a succession of actors off the screen while solving crimes. Jessica Fletcher starts as a dowdily-dressed widow mooching around the little New England town of Cabot Cove. Later, as her crime-writing career takes off, she glams up and travels widely. We see her in New York, New Orleans, London and, my favourite, Ireland.
This isn’t the Ireland you’d recognise if you visited. This is Oireland, where de accents are laid on tick as you loike, to be sure, from actors with at least one Irish great grandparent, an’ all an’ all.
There is a theory that Jessica is not as innocent as she seems. We believe that it is Jessica who commits all the murders (286 over the twelve years of the run) and had Doc Hazlit and Sheriff Tupper cover for her. Maybe she had blackmailed them.
In some cases the killer wasn’t Jessica, but her oh-so-innocent nephew Grady or his wife, who wasn’t really as wet and irritating as she pretended to be.
New design!
After all that, we need a new design for the shop.
The image is a still from the end of one of the episodes. A big, happy thumbs-up. Not only did she get away with another murder, but she pinned the blame on some other sap. And furthermore, she managed to gaslight this poor soul into confessing. An evil genius, by any measure.
I used a combination of Canva (processing the image of Jessica to get the half-tone, newspaper effect), Inkscape (colouring in to get the silk screen effect) and Canva again (arranging silk screen images and adding the text). I like the pop-art silkscreen look. The Alex Horne design works with and without text, I think Jessica needs text to set the design off.
This blue t shirt is on the WordPress site (Grim Up North Heath shop) and the design is also on RedBubble, on a variety of items.
