Murder, I Wrote: A Guest Post by Jane Sullivan

A friend recently reminded me about Jessica Fletcher, the crime-solving novelist in the 1980s television series Murder, She Wrote. Played by the magnificent Angela Lansbury, she was an amateur detective and a bestselling writer, and she handled each task with great aplomb.

I went to Youtube to check her out. There she is, a widow of a certain age, but nothing like Miss Marple. She’s quirky, wily, she has oodles of charm that conceals a steely determination. She rides a bicycle, never drives a car. People give her lifts, which is how she finds out things. She plants flowers. You can tell a lot by the way she puts on and takes off her glasses.

And she writes. Boy, does she write. We don’t see her at her typewriter too often – that would make boring television – but we have every reason to assume she writes on and on, page after page, chapter after chapter. Until she types The End, draws out the final page, opens a folder and pops it into her manuscript, squeaky-clean without a single correction, ready to send to her editor.

I watched the show when it first came out and thought this looked like a pretty nice life. Crime solving would be beyond me, but maybe I could write a bestselling novel. Hadn’t I always wanted to be a novelist? As a child, I used to scribble stories and cartoons in notebooks and I was never stuck for where to go next.

 When I graduated, I looked around for a job that would pay me regularly for writing, and I hit upon newspaper journalism. My first taste of it was a bit like war: long hours of tedium doing wedding reports or sitting in magistrates courts, then exciting emergencies, with relentless demands on my time and energy. I loved it.

But as I entered middle age, I began to feel that something was missing. Where was that private world of my childhood, the thrill of making up stories and characters, seeing how far I could push them? You couldn’t do that with real people, real events. So then I remembered Jessica Fletcher.

She was the ideal role model for me because she was female, smart and feisty, and she wasn’t young. I thought, I’ll take some leave and write a novel. I was a journalist, a fast worker. I wrote all the time to deadlines. How hard could it be?

It was such fun. I sat down at the computer in the back bedroom and it poured out of me. All of it was there, waiting. Chapter One, Two, Three… just like Jessica, bar the crime solving. And when I got to The End, I was astonished and thrilled, deeply in love with myself and my creative achievement.

The euphoria gradually wore off and I thought I’d better look over what I’d written before I sent it to a grateful publisher. As I read, the first stirrings of doubt began. Was it really so easy? What if what I’d written was not as good as I ‘d thought? Or perhaps no good at all? My pride turned to shame and horror. I’d deceived myself and it was all Jessica’s fault.

I couldn’t tell what in particular was wrong, it all felt feeble and amateurish. I nearly gave up on the whole idea of novel writing, but something dogged in me kept me going. The biggest breakthrough came when I realised I could write something bad, but then I could rewrite it and make it better. If I’d known it would take me eight years from that point to the moment when I finally held a published book, The White Star, in my hand, I might not have continued.

I got help. I did a year’s course in novel writing at RMIT, joined a writing group. I shudder to think how bad the pages that I offered to my fellow writers were. My readers were kind but they didn’t let me off the hook. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the rewrites, over and over again.

And then, to my great joy, I found an agent, and I got a publishing deal… and everything was plain sailing after that… Ha, I wish. The next book was much harder than the first, and I eventually abandoned it. The third book did at last see the light of day, 11 years after the first. And now my third (published) novel has come out after another enormous gap of 13 years, so long that in the interim I wrote another novel and abandoned it, and a nonfiction book which was published.

It’s always perplexed and frustrated me. Why can’t I write like Jessica Fletcher? The answer is that almost nobody does, and I’ve always known this. Before I began writing my first novel, I was literary editor at The Age and I’d interviewed novelists, and many of them talked about the struggles they’d had, sometimes over years and years, to produce a finished book.  I have no idea why I so blithely assumed that such struggles would not be my lot. But one reason I managed to ignore plenty of real-life evidence was because I was so entranced by the fictional lady at the typewriter.

I know of at least one real-life writer like Jessica: Enid Blyton. She was hugely prolific: she sat down every day and wrote her books in a gushing stream of words, without any corrections. A storyteller gifted with a fertile imagination and sense of adventure that stimulated so many kids. But judged by the usual literary standards, a terrible writer. It never mattered to her or her readers. I loved her books passionately when I was the right age to appreciate them: it’s only now I can see the glaring flaws, and I wish I couldn’t. I want to believe it is possible to instantly write perfect prose.

Virtually everybody rewrites, including the greatest writers. John Le Carre spent six months on the first sentence of his iconic novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. During that time he shifted from first person to third person and left out one character altogether.

Another author who rewrites painstakingly is George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and many wonderful short stories. He looks at what he has written, sentence by sentence, word by word, and tweaks it… over and over again. The reasons he makes these tweaks he likens to an energy meter. If the meter tips towards positive, he’ll keep that passage, or enhance it. If it tips towards negative, this shows the need for some editing or rewriting. But where does that meter come from? Somewhere deep and mysterious in George Saunders’ brain.

So while I haven’t fulfilled my dream of writing as easily as Jessica does, at least I can now take on her signature title: Murder, She Wrote. My latest work is a historical crime novel, Murder in Punch Lane. It took eleven drafts, and a lot of rewriting between drafts.

The main difficulty, as always, was that I didn’t know what I was writing, although I convinced myself I did know. I thought I was writing a coming of age novel about a naïve young man who struggles towards maturity in goldrush-age Melbourne. At some point I thought, there’s a murder in this story, shouldn’t it be a crime novel? Very slowly the book morphed into more of a mystery, a thriller.

Several drafts in, I realised that a secondary character, a young actress turned amateur detective, was becoming more and more important. She deserved to take the lead and I let her run with it. But in contrast to my lead, the naive young man struck me as a hopelessly weak fellow detective. I changed his name and his character into somebody much more swashbuckling, somebody who fancies himself as a ladies’ man, somebody who drives my actress detective mad. And I let them loose in the same goldrush Melbourne, a city run by powerful men who could destroy them both.

So yes, Murder, I wrote. Not at all like Jessica. And yet I owe her a lot. I took inspiration from that admirably self-possessed female detective from an era when you didn’t see such characters much on the screen, long before Vera and the Nordic detectives in their woolly jumpers and the tough glamorous PIs. She was a role model who could solve mysteries, including the eternal mystery of how to write a novel, even if she never passed on her secret to me.

Jane Sullivan is an author and a literary journalist. Her latest novel is Murder in Punch Lane (Echo, 2024).