Grim up North Heath

Tag: murder she wrote

  • Return to Cabot Cove – murder capital of the world!

    Return to Cabot Cove – murder capital of the world!

    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.

    ‘Cabot Cove is calling’ design.
    Redbubble design
    wordpress shop

    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.

    The ‘Cabot Cove’ t shirt, modelled by the model I think of as Ryan.

    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.

    1. 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. ↩︎
    2. According to Wikipedia, they are a phrasal template based on a cliché. They are both memes and clichés. ↩︎
  • Tonight on Murder, She Wrote: the killing continues

    Tonight on Murder, She Wrote: the killing continues

    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.

    Got away with it again! JB Fletcher gives the thumbs up as she gaslights another innocent into confessing to a murder she herself committed.

    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.

    Finished design, and a mock-up of one option from the RedBubble shop.

    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.

    Blue t shirt
    Other designs
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