The longest-running detective drama series in television history, Murder, She Wrote premiered in September 1984 and ended in May 1996 after 261 episodes, becoming a feature of popular American cultural life in the process, and the highest-rated drama series for nine of its 12 seasons. As James Parish observed in The Unofficial Murder, She Wrote Casebook, the series broke a number of television rules, not least in having a middle-aged female lead where previous crime or suspense dramas with female stars had involved glamorous young women—Angie Dickinson in Police Woman, for example. The show did, however, tap into a vast reading audience who enjoyed traditional detective fiction by writers such as Agatha Christie. Despite the literary success of amateur detection stories in which crimes are solved by deduction rather than covenient coincidence or violent physical confrontation, few attempts had been made to adapt such material to television...