Television has generated a staggering number of detectives to preside over its crime drama programming, and quite a few mystery novelists as well who have had wildly successful turns as sleuths, most notably Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) on Murder, She Wrote and Richard Castle (Nathan Fillon) on Castle. On a lighter note, the UK gave us Queens of Mystery and Two’s Company, and even though Robin Masters was never seen on Magnum, P.I., Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) did owe his fancy living quarters to a wealthy crime fiction author, who was voiced by none other than Orson Welles.
Crime novels, and the unique pleasure they provide, are also frequently spotted in non-mystery shows, and the following are some sightings of imaginary whodunits, their fictional creators, and their fans, from a variety of shows over the past several decades. While countless tv shows have borrowed from the crime genre—such as the time the Golden Girls solved not one but several “murders” in the episode “The Case of the Libertine Belle,” the episodes cited below focus on the written word, and those professionals who string words together.
A mangled mystery novel is at the center of M*A*S*H episode 129, “The Light That Failed.” In a premise that fuels a particularly satisfying episode of the ensemble sitcom, Army surgeon B. J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), stationed with the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, receives a mystery titled The Rooster Crowed at Midnight by Abigail Porterfield, and soon learns that everyone else in the camp, desperate as usual for anything to take their minds off of the war, is as impatient to read the book as B. J. The doctor’s solution is to tear sections of the book out and pass them along to the other doctors and nurses as he finishes them, creating a chain of readers, each one of whom is one chapter ahead of the next. A crisis arises when no one can find the last page, the one on which Inspector Langley, after pausing to light his pipe, reveals the name of Lord Cheevers’ murderer (forcing fellow surgeon Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) to shout “It’s that blasted Langley’s fault—if he hadn’t stopped to light his pipe, we’d know who did it!”). Debates begin raging throughout the camp about who the killer could be, and which of the suspects couldn’t possibly have done it. Becoming increasingly frustrated, Hunnicutt, Hawkeye, and even their commanding officer track down the phone number for Abigail Porterfield and call her in Australia, to hear from her who the killer is—but Col. Potter (Henry Morgan) realizes afterward that what Porterfield told them couldn’t be right—and Hawkeye dispels the collective frustration by declaring that it was in fact he who killed Lord Cheevers.
Newhart drew a lot of genteel humor from Bob Newhart’s eternally deadpan reactions to the oddballs and strange situations around him; season seven, episode 21, opens with Vermont inn owner and how-to manual author Dick Loudon (Newhart) receiving his author copies of his first attempt at a mystery—Murder at the Stratley. Several of the locals point out that the fictional Stratley Inn sounds a lot like the inn Dick and his wife Joanna (Mary Fran) run, the Stratford (“Especially the ‘Strat’ part.”). Dick insists that the innkeepers in his mystery, “Rick” and “Johanna,” aren’t based on anyone (even though Joanna and “Johanna” even share the same hometown), and the book’s handyman “Jorge” should not be seen as inspired by the Stratford’s handyman George (Tom Poston). Joanna is especially upset to read of “Johanna’s” brutal murder—at “Rick’s” hands!—on page six, leaving “Rick” free to pursue the seductive town librarian. Needless to say, the actual town librarian, Ms. Goddard (Kathy Kinney) thinks the book is terrific, though it makes her wonder about Dick (who, unlike “Rick,” doesn’t seem at all interested in her). When Joanna leaves town to visit her mother, the staff of the Stratford confront Dick with their suspicions that he has killed and dismembered his wife, as described in the book—and evidence keeps turning up supporting this. At the same time, Dick’s accusers keep asking him to provide refreshments, becoming even more critical of him when he refuses, and finally causing him to shout “The next time I murder my wife I’ll order a deli platter!” Joanna’s sudden return doesn’t even let Dick off the hook, as the attending cop Officer Shifflett (played by Todd Susman, who played a very similar role on the Golden Girls murder mystery episode) is now convinced that Dick probably has a murdered wife somewhere in his past—maybe he’s wondering what happened Suzanne Pleshette, Newhart’s wife from his previous sitcom.
The crime show Stingray provided an unremarkable twist on the formula of the mysterious freelance tough guy who travels the nation’s byways taking down criminals—in this show, he drove a Corvette Stingray! Still, Stingray had a style to it that gave it the semblance of something different, and the season two episode seven offering “Autumn” was perhaps the most original of all of them. While a woman’s voice (Bibi Osterwald) narrates a crime novel she’s working on, Stingray’s nameless hero, who usually goes by Ray (Nick Mancuso), is summoned to the wealthy digs of a beautiful and seductive blonde woman (Shannon Tweed) to help her find out why her father disappeared. Ray of course takes the case; meanwhile, we get more voiceovers of the woman writing the crime novel in which Ray seems to be an unwilling participant. Ray eventually finds a body and more, but nothing seems connected to anything, until he finally catches a lead—the beautiful blonde is in fact an actor who appears in commercials—and so is the guy who played the ‘body’ that Ray found. The woman writing the book, it turns out, is author Audrey Brewster, and since she’s having trouble with her new novel, she’s hired actors to stage a mystery and is simply writing down Ray’s investigations. But if Audrey had looked a little closer to home, she would have discovered real crime closer at hand—as Ray eventually does—in the form of her own sister trying to poison her. What starts off as a mindbender of a Stingray episode ends in something fairly ordinary and anticlimactic—though the idea of a writer hiring struggling actors to put an unsuspecting sleuth through their paces just to generate material for a book should win an award as one of the least realistic writing prompts in crime drama history.
Going back into sitcom territory, Modern Family relocated its cast onto a train for the season seven ep 21 show “Crazy Train,” in which we learn that in-laws Phil (Ty Burrell) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) are huge fans of the mystery writer Simon Hastings (Simon Templeman), author of the Silverton mystery novels Dismembers Only and A Death of Fresh Air. Hastings, after years of writer’s block, is working on the new Silverton novel Locomotive for Murder, and he has shown up on the train—lugging an impressive manual typewriter (television’s way of saying “He’s a writer”)—to research and add the finishing pages to the new book. Hasting generously lets Phil and Cam read early chapters, and their fawning praise of the mystery’s opening accidentally reveals to the author some technical problems; as the episode goes along, almost every character’s comments to Hastings make him aware of the failings of his manuscript, and his complete lack of understanding regarding the operation of trains. Ty, Cam, and other members of the clan help Hastings rework some details, before Phil’s daughter Haley (Sarah Hyland) drops a comment which leaves Hastings convinced that the book is unworkable, and presumably plunges him back into a fit of writer’s block. Did Hastings not have beta readers?
Finally, it would be a stretch to call New Girl’s Nick Miller (Josh Johnson) a published author, and it might also be inaccurate to say that the book he wrote, The Pepperwood Chronicles, is a mystery. The “bayou noir” tale, which in an earlier draft was loaded with zombies, has a retail track record of “over 30 copies sold.” But even if it is self-published (and even self-printed and self-bound), Nick can claim to be the author of a story with definite crime fiction elements: Protagonist Julius Pepperwood was a Chicago cop who relocated to New Orleans to become a PI, and the book opens with a streetcar conductor handing him a bag of blood-soaked beignets. The most mysterious thing about the book, however, is its reception. Nick intended his story, “about life, about race, about the sexualization of the American handgun”, in which a man “wrestles with the alligator within” to be read by rough, flinty manly men, yet the book’s fans are overwhelmingly teenage girls, who appreciate the way Nick depicts female desire, and who pick up on a dog in the book being gay, even though Nick doesn’t explicitly state the dog’s sexual preference (but yes, he intended the dog to be gay). Season six episode 18 of New Girl, titled “Young Adult,” has Nick’s roommate Jess (Zooey Deschanel), wanting the students at the school where she’s a principal to think of her as cool, arranging a school visit where Nick, who hasn’t been able to figure out what he’ll write next, gets to confer with three ardent fans (Makayla Lysiak, Saylor Bell Curda, and Olivia Rodrigo). The young women give him great ideas for a Pepperwood Chronicles sequel, and Jess gets a brief boost to her cred. Interestingly, The Pepperwood Chronicles is the only book mentioned here to actually have an Amazon listing, though the one they’re selling can’t possibly be the one in the show.
It’s honestly a little strange that the character-reading-a-mystery setup isn’t more common in sitcoms and dramas, given that a show can build a contained little journey around it that can lead to a character undergoing a dramatic arc in under an hour. Keep your eyes peeled and your bookmarks close at hand for additional visits from fictional authors to familiar shows—there are sure to be more, as long as there are fans of whodunits.
