Home and Family Life
Mrs. Fletcher lived at 698 Candlewood Lane in the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine 03041. While teaching criminology at Manhattan University, she stayed in Manhattan at the Penfield House Apartments, 941 West 61st St. Cabot Cove is a town of 3,560 inhabitants near the ocean. Based on the number of murders that occur in a given season of the show, the town seems to have probably one of the highest murder ratio of any town or city. This has even been remarked in the show by the town Sheriff Mort Metzger. He noted in Season 5, Episode 21 (Mirror Mirror On the Wall Part 1) that this was his fifth murder in one year. Given the population of the town to be about 3000 this is a fairly high murder rate. Given the murder rate in this town, it has about the same murder rate of a town 20 times its size. This trend was noted and parodied many times.
Her travels as an author very frequently took her to places around much of the English-speaking world, which gave her writers a little more ability to stretch the character and her situations than rural New England alone would have provided. One of them took her to Hawaii, where she shared a case with private detective Thomas Magnum, star of Magnum PI.
Mrs. Fletcher was widowed from her beloved husband Frank, with no children but with a seemingly endless collection of nephews, nieces, cousins, in-laws and other relatives or friends who always needed her help. Especially prone to get into trouble was her nephew Grady Fletcher, who was raised for a period of time by Jessica and Frank. Grady always seemed to meet the wrong girl, until he finally married Donna several seasons into the show.
Read more about this topic: Jessica Fletcher
Famous quotes containing the words family life, home and, home, family and/or life:
“Family life is not a computer program that runs on its own; it needs continual input from everyone.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“I knew a pure heart who refused tot be mistrustful.... He had written at his doorstep: “From wherever you are, enter and be welcome”. Who do you think responded to this lovely invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and gutted him.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn’t likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn’t remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“I swear ... to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)
“A native health and innocence
Within my bones did grow,
And while my God did all his glories show,
I felt a vigour in my sense
That was all spirit: I within did flow
With seas of life like wine;
I nothing in the world did know
But ‘twas divine.”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)