If you take aspects of Mrs Oliver & elements of Miss Marple and add an American accent then you get Mrs Jessica Fletcher ! If you watch a couple of these & then view a 1980's TV movie as based on one of Agatha Christies novels then one can get a little hazy as to which is which ! This series just gets better & better ! It was brave & creative to have episodes with Mrs Fletcher just narrating as it was interesting watching Denis Stanton & Michael Haggerty at work solo as it were . Watching Jessica rebuking herself for her ' stupidity ' for not solving it sooner is just like Joan Hickson's Miss Marple saying ' Iv'e been so stupid ' but less dramatic that David Suchet's Poirot saying in Sad Cypress ' I am thirty six times an imbicile ! ' Angela Lansbury is a fine actress and gets first rate support from Ron Masark and William Wimdon - both fine performers in their own right . It is a running comic theme when the sherrifs face falls as he see's that Mrs Fletcher might be about to prove him wrong . This is a well written & entertaining show that proves the American's not only have excellent taste in terms of the following that Agatha Christie has in the USA but also that they have the skill to learn from her work and reinvent it into a superb piece of TV detective fiction . Angela Lansbury was made for the part as she played the ill-fated author in Sir Peter Ustinov's maginificent Death On The Nile and acted the part of Miss Marple in The Mirror Cracked From Side To Side . Another treat is seeing Mrs Fletcher's unlucky nephew Grady to use an Agatha Christie style expression ' mixed up in murder ' ! A fine show that got better & better during its first six series and which therefore deserved to run for 12 years .