Reassessing Murder, She Wrote: The Afterlives of a Popular Culture Phenomenon

This book provides a critical overview of the cultural impact of the Murder, She Wrote TV series and its paratextual elements, including board and video games, podcasts, fan conventions, collectible figures, and ghostwritten novels. It also explores the series’ position within the crime genre, particularly its engagement with earlier iterations of the ’lady detective’.

Bringing together a broad range of experts, the book includes contributions from both academics and crime fiction novelists to offer a wide-ranging view of this popular series and its afterlives.

Suitable for scholars and students working on popular culture, crime fiction, TV studies or fan studies, this collection provides an interdisciplinary analysis of one of the most successful and enduring female-fronted detective series in history.

Eva Burke completed her PhD, funded by the Irish Research Council, at the school of English at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Dr. Clare Clarke. Her research looks at domestic noir fiction, specifically the work of Gillian Flynn. Eva has published work in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, Feminist Spaces, Trinity Postgraduate Review, and the 2018 edited collection From the Domestic to the Dominant: The New Face of Crime Fiction, published by Palgrave Macmillan. She also co-edited a special ’domestic noir’ issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection.

Jennifer Schnabel is associate professor and English subject librarian at The Ohio State University. She contributes scholarly book reviews to Clues: A Journal of Detection and Crime Fiction Studies, and her own research explores women and crime fiction. She recently co-chaired the Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association and is the Research Support Officer for the International Crime Fiction Association.