The following is excerpted from Nowhere to Go but Up: What Angela Lansbury Can Teach Us About Living a Big Life by Lily E. Hirsch.
In fact, the initial idea [for Murder, She Wrote] surfaced in a conversation between Carla Singer, the first woman vice president of programming at CBS in drama, and her mom. Singer had previously worked at Citytv in Canada, which was officially on the air as of September 28, 1972. At Citytv, when she was only 26-years-old, she became Canada’s first and only woman TV director. In 1979, after a brief period working at the BBC, she moved to Los Angeles and eventually found herself at CBS. As vice president of drama programming, Singer would field pitch ideas. She would also get and develop about 100 scripts every year, selecting seven or eight to turn into pilots, hoping for a hit series.
Part of her personal mission in selection and development, she told me over Zoom on March 10, 2023, was representation: “I was very interested in putting women and minorities as leads at that time because they were mostly secondary characters.” She did a pilot featuring Billy Dee Williams, who would later play Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars movies, and another one, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, with Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner. That latter show, which first aired in 1983, was remarkably progressive, with Jackson playing the character Amanda King, a divorced mother who inadvertently meets high-level operative Lee Stetson, played by Boxleitner. She eventually joins his spy agency after rescuing him.
But, as an executive, Singer could also develop her own ideas. She would assign those ideas to people in the business and ask them to flesh out the details and create a script: “That’s what I was doing at this point.” When her mom, Betty, living in Canada, came to visit her in LA, Carla filled her in on the details of her exciting work at CBS, including the reasons she wanted to increase the number of women in meaningful roles on television. Betty had one big question in response: “I was telling her what I was doing,” Singer told me, “and I was putting these shows on and women in important positions whenever I could, and she said, ‘Well, that’s great. But what about women my age?’” Singer didn’t have an answer yet but she knew her mother’s question was an important one.
After that conversation, Singer first thought of English writer Agatha Christie and her character Miss Marple, hoping to create a series around her. Though a woman detective was then new on television, in literature there had been women, like Marple, who solve crime in unofficial capacities, somehow pushed to investigate by personal need or circumstance. In American novelist Anna Katharine Green’s That Affair Next Door (1897), amateur detective Amelia Butterworth helped police detective Ebenezer Gryce. Adrienne Gavin, in “Feminist Crime Fiction and Female Sleuths,” links the Butterworth character to Miss Marple, who debuted in book form in Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage (1930).
Marple was certainly popular enough for resurrection on television. Christie, who authored 66 mystery novels, is the best-selling novelist of all time according to the “Guinness Book of World Records.” However, the idea of a Miss Marple series hit an immediate snag: “the Agatha Christie estate turned us down.”
That’s when Singer started thinking about a brand-new character inspired by Marple, an original cozy mystery. She called in William Link and Richard Levinson, a remarkable writing team as well as best friends who grew up together in Pennsylvania. The two writers were behind the show Columbo, a popular crime drama that first aired on NBC in 1971 with the much beloved Lieutenant Columbo, played by Peter Falk. When they arrived at Singer’s office, she said, “Here’s what I would like to do—I would like you to think about doing a pilot for me, a mystery with an older woman.” To do right by her mother, Singer also had specific qualifications for the character, which distinguished her from the slightly older Marple character. She explained to Link and Levinson: “She has to be physically active. And she has to be romantically attractive.” Clearly, Jessica couldn’t be a cliché—a sweet, stereotypical mom, weak and wearing an apron. In order to do right by Singer’s mother, Jessica had to be soft like a fire.
Lily Hirsch will be a guest speaker at the 2026 Murder, She Wrote Festival. Come meet her and pick up a signed copy of Nowhere to Go but Up at the Murder, She Shopped Market Hall (Preston Hall in Mendocino) from 10am-noon on Saturday, May 2nd.