I have never watched any "Murder, She Wrote." Not so much as an episode.

Marc would gasp in horror if he saw that, but Marc pretty much is no longer interested in anything that I post in any medium, so he won't see this and we can all agree not to tell him.

I mean, I'm familiar with the structure of the show, I don't live in a cave. I suspect I would find Jessica Fletcher extremely annoying, because I have a strong feeling she would cross over for me into "busybody old lady" territory. Characters like that are very tricky with me, and the only reason Miss Marple sometimes manages the trick is that, far from being the meddler people seem to often think she is, in the books she is really the exact opposite -- would very much prefer not to get involved and only offers her opinion after she sees that everybody else is absolutely hopeless. And she only manages it sometimes.

There are two pop-ins in that paragraph. I'll wait for you to pop them and hide them again before I go on, shall I?

It's actually difficult to avoid the whole "meddler" thing with amateur-detective characters. Eventually you can't ignore it or lampshade it and you have to deal with it. Please see Nancy Drew, whose reputation so much more and more began to precede her that the various authors behind "Carolyn Keene" realized they couldn't ignore it and just started writing it in. With people who are actually working detectives -- like Nero Wolfe -- this is far less of a problem, because it's their job.

But I'm getting ahead of myself a little and that's not really the topic anyway.

Every so often a discussion breaks out on social media about the shockingly high murder rate in Cabot Cove. There are all kinds of wild theories. A very common one is that Fletcher is the diabolical mastermind behind all the murders and manages to arrange them all so she's above suspicion. One I like better is that the murders aren't actually happening, not even in that fictional framework, but are instead Fletcher playing out plots of her books.

But one does feel a need to invent theories, because over the course of the show, the murder rate in Cabot Cove is just astonishing, and gradually the viewer starts to get the itch -- the feeling in the back of their head that says "Wouldn't someone have noticed? Wouldn't people be talking about this? Wouldn't there be, like, a whisper campaign telling people that Cabot Cove was maybe not a place you wanted to live? Shouldn't there be a mayor desperately denying anything weird was going on?"

The thing about the murders in Cabot Cove is that, as far as I can tell, the writers of the show never, not once, ever tried to explain it, justify it, lampshade it, or work it into the script in any way. Every time someone in Cabot Cove dies, everyone's just as surprised as they were the last forty times. Even St. Mary Mead had more awareness than this. And I point out that only a relatively small portion of the crimes solved there by Miss Marple were murders.

Body was found at the vicarage quarter past nine
People die from sudden strokes all the time
Verdict of misadventure mending the roof
The doctors niece, whilst tending the rosehedge
Stung to death by a swarm of bees

"My wife's cooking is out of this world, take a bite"
Died from some rare tropical disease in the night
Dab hand at pharmaceuticals, still no one guessed
The village vet was drowned in the pigswill
You wonder whose turn will be next

Anyway.

In the latest social media thread about Cabot Cove, there was a chain of posts that really set my brain to thinking, or doing whatever it does in place of thinking. I don't know the person who posted them, and I'm omitting their name not to deprive them of credit for their words but so it doesn't feel like I'm calling them out. Even though I'm not actually disagreeing with them.

The thing is, I feel that if I were producing a show like this, I would have to address the elephant in the room, somewhere around the third season or so if not sooner. Because I think it would get to the point where it was kind of immersion-destroying if I didn't.

And yes, I have a personal angle in all this.

The nine stories which will make up the Coldpoint series (the last two aren't done yet -- they will appear on 1 August and 1 December) are set about three months apart from one another. So the overall timespan of the arc is a bit over two years. A lot happens in those two years. In particular -- because, unlike some of my other detective stuff, here the crime is always a murder -- at least one person dies in each story.

In the course of these stories we see Coldpoint making some internal changes so they will have the space to accommodate a surge of new settlers. Going to Coldpoint is essentially a one-way trip, for cost and travel time reasons, and because people come there to live. Because space is big and news travels slowly, there is a lot of lead time needed. By the seventh story, "Exposed To Death," the fresh influx they've been expecting has begun to arrive. When this surge finishes, Coldpoint will have about five thousand inhabitants. Wendy Barlowe, our hero, says in "Exposed To Death":

In other words, for most of its life so far, Coldpoint has been a place where a murder every three months would definitely get noticed.

And it does get noticed ... by Wendy, and a few others. In the fifth story, "The Red Death," Wendy is notably irritable. (Wendy gets steadily more irritable as the stories progress, but the murders are only a small part of the various things making her that way.) At one point in "The Red Death," she proposes an insulting theory to Zusy-Q, the settlement's only real medical professional, who is also (among other hats) the coroner, by default.

Zuzy-Q: I'd be incredibly annoyed by that suggestion if I didn't know it was just you being frustrated at having to deal with your sixth murder in a year.
Wendy: ... It's been more than a year.
And one of them was only nearly a murder.
But yes.

But the thing is, the general population of Coldpoint has mostly been either not noticing or shrugging it off. Oh, maybe they talk about it. Gossip is one of the major recreational activities in Coldpoint (the other is sex). But they don't seem alarmed. Nobody is calling for Wendy to give up her job (well, not for that). It just doesn't seem to be a big deal. There are two extremist political factions in Coldpoint who hate each other, and each of them has been known to use the deaths as a political talking point, but apart from them and Wendy and her immediate staff, and possibly the people who have been personally bereaved by these deaths, no one else cares.

And I have one reader -- hi, Iain! -- who thinks it ought to be a bigger deal. And he's probably right. But I also think that there's a case to be made for my approach, and here are several reasons why.

First, Wendy tries as hard as she can to sweep the deaths under the rug. There's just no getting around it. She'd be the first to admit it. She's the mayor trying to keep the lid on. (She's actually the "operations manager," but that's even stronger: She is the boss of the settlement and absolute final authority on everything.)

Second, as I've said, it's not like nobody notices or reacts. It just doesn't seem to have affected the teeming masses much.

Third, it's not patterned killings. They are not linked. It's not a crime wave, it's not a serial killer, it's completely isolated incidents for a variety of different motives. This makes it happenstance. This puts it in "shit happens" territory. Nobody can point to any one thing that's deteriorating (though something must be, since the implication is that they didn't have these problems once upon a time). Wendy's current theory is that it's simply population pressure; you have to have a certain number of people before you can reach the friction points where some of them decide to kill each other. (I don't necessarily say I agree with Wendy's theory on this.)

Fourth -- and I think this is the key bit -- I have a certain cynicism about what people decide to ignore. Events in the real world, now more than ever, convince me that people are almost constantly in little individual bubbles and try very hard to blow off any bad news that doesn't affect them immediately and personally. Long-term problems? We'll ignore those until they become short-term problems. Systematic discrimination, systematic disenfranchisement, genocide -- hey, they think, as long as it's not my particular tribe getting the shaft, I don't care. I don't have to care. I got troubles of my own, y'know? Somebody got shot four houses down the street? Well, that's very sad, sure, but unless you think it's because there's someone who might come shoot me tomorrow, that's somebody else's problem.

In short, I feel like people have an astonishing capacity for obliviousness and willful ignorance.

You could make the claim -- implausibly, but you could make it -- that Donald Trump getting elected the first time was because a lot of people didn't know what a pile of crap they were electing. You could not make that claim the second time. To have reelected this shitball implies that a whole lot of people chose to cover their eyes and simply ignore a whole lot of information because they found it personally inconvenient to think about.

What's a murder every three months, if that's what we're like?