If I told you that I spend last night watching Murder She Wrote, would you still respect me in the morning?

The premiere of a two-hour telemovie featuring Angela Lansbury in the role that kept her away from musical theatre for way too many years, Murder She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle provided a low-key reintroduction to everybody's favorite Old-Lady-Snoop-Who's-Not-Miz-Marple. The tactic of taking a series character and placing 'em in occasional TV-movies is a long established one, and theoretically it should work. Removed from the rigors of weekly series production, you'd think that the writers, at least, would be able to craft a solid piece of genre work. But in practice, it seldom seems to come out that way: I don't know of anyone, for instance, who would seriously assert that the seventies Perry Mason teleflicks were equal to the older one-hour black-and-white series eps. Some series characters just seem to flourish better under the weekly pressure of production.

In Jessica Fletcher's case, though, I had some small hope that this first TV-movie would rekindle my interest in the character: her series had lost its punch years before it'd gone off the air. Originally, a tidy classic mystery series (creators Richard Levinson & William Link, plus Peter S. Fischer had cut their teeth on early Columbo and the Jim Hutton version of Ellery Queen), the series had steadily grown less puzzling under a procession of writers whose idea of a telling clue was to have a character state something totally unrelated to anything else we've heard come out of 'em ("I'm color-blind, you know.") - only to have that out-of-context line be the one thing that tips off Jessica ("Only someone who's color-blind would've dressed the victim in two different toned socks!") To an old-fashioned mystery fan, nothing can be more maddening than recognizing that a guilty party has given us the big clue, often before the actual crime has been committed.