Two quick links

Messy Nessy Chic asks: "Does anyone remember BEST stores?"

I do. Though the one my family shopped at was not one of the "innovative, artistic facade" ones - it was a fairly boring masonry building out behind (as I remember) Chapel Hill Mall.

I do remember their way of doing business: they were a catalog-showroom store, a largely-disappeared business model. They would have one item of each product out on the floor, and you filled out a sales slip if you wanted the product. Then a runner took a copy of the slip back to the warehouse and got your vacuum cleaner or lady-in-the-rain lamp* or whatever it was and either you took it out to the car or they put it in the car for you.

(* I will forever associate those with BEST stores, as that was the main place I remember seeing them. I suppose people bought them but in my snobby little town, such things were seen as somewhat infra dig and gaudy. If you've never seen one, a bit of history is here. Oh, I admit they're tacky, but I kind of like them for their tackiness. I wouldn't want one, though: I bet the oil that makes the "raindrops" gets everywhere, and they probably take a lot of maintenance. I do also remember the swag lamps the person on that page also refers to; we had a few swag lamps when I was growing up).

(There's a nice little editorial by someone whose father bought a lamp as a gift for his wife, a gift the practical-minded woman did not appreciate. My favorite line: "As children we always sided with our father, because we knew in our hearts that Christmas is all about tacky and fanciful...)

The BEST store near me did sell a few items "off the shelf" - at Christmastime, they had boxes of ornaments (really rather nice ornaments; my family still has a couple of silver-colored teapots and large gold teardrop shaped ornaments that came from there) that were sold in boxes "over the counter." And they sold most of their smaller toys that way. And a few books - I still have a Mickey Mouse cookbook my dad bought for me when I was 6 or so on a trip to the BEST store.

And another "blast from the past," but slightly-more-recent past:

Jessica Fletcher: Sleuthing for Virtue at Christ and Pop Culture.

I was still in high school when that show debuted. And while I was probably a good bit outside of its intended demographic, I liked it - liked it unironically, even, as a teen. I know it was fashionable at one time to deride the show for the simplicity of its plots or the unreality that a 70-ish widow could be involved in solving SO many murders, but it was one of those things I just liked too well to be able to snark about. And I think the show has held up better over the years than some have.

I think some of the points the writer makes generally apply to why I like "detective stories" in general - the idea that there IS  a right and wrong in this world, and killing people is wrong. Not because "you might get caught," not because "it will hurt their family," but because it is big-W Wrong.

And the purpose of a murder mystery is for the One Sane Man (or Woman, in Ms. Fletcher's case) to track down and figure out the person who committed that Wrong, and to see to it that justice is served. And not some kind of vigilante, "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die" justice, but a very *civilized* form of justice: the wrongdoer is handed over to the police, the expectation being he or she will either (a) plead guilty and accept their fate, (b) go to trial and be convicted of the act by a jury of their peers, or (c) be declared guilty but insane, and therefore sent off for treatment but still effectively removed from society. And she does this, as Kelly points out, with a sense of regret: how terrible it is, the show seems to note, that someone is moved to do such a horrible thing as murder, regardless of what "mitigating" circumstances there may be (feeling unloved by their parents, greed, jealousy....). It's a deeply moral show set in a frankly simple moral universe, and I admit, living in a world where there seems too often to be too many gray areas and too many people who have "pull" and can "get away with things," it's kind of a comforting show.

I think I like detective novels for similar reasons - as I've said before, the idea that a wrong is committed but some attempt at putting the world back "right" comes with the revealing and punishment of the killer. (In a few novels - I know Christie has used this trick at least once - the killer winds up "evading justice" of at least the earthly kind by doing themselves in shortly after (or, I suppose, before) discovery. And that always felt like a "cheat" to me...). And I think in a lot of the Golden Era stories I enjoy so much, there is a sort of "regret" expressed by the detective that the killer committed the act, that humanity can show such depravity - I see that in many of the Campion stories, and Hercule Poirot seems to suffer a bit of uneasiness after the case is over, a sort of regret again that humanity can stoop to that. (Some of the adaptations on film seem to make that more obvious - in particular, the end of the David Suchet version of "Murder on the Orient Express," I get a distinct feeling that Poirot regrets what has happened, is sad, and also to some degree feels uneasy in his sole over how he presented the results of his detection to the authorities - he is shown walking off counting his rosary beads, which I interpret as his feeling a need to repent for telling a bit of an untruth to protect some individuals).

And yeah, yeah, S.D. Kelly (the author of the piece) points out: "it should be acknowledged that Murder, She Wrote is ridiculous. The idea of an elegant, schoolteacher-turned-novelist widow from Cabot Cove, Maine running hither and yon across America and around the world, stumbling (sometimes literally) across dead bodies everywhere she goes defies imagination." It does. But it's a disbelief I was willing to suspend for all the years of the show. (I prefer the earlier seasons, set largely in Cabot Cove - it became less interesting to me when she moved to Manhattan, even if murders seem more likely there). 

I think it was that I liked the idea of Jessica Fletcher: here is a woman, rather like a more-sophisticated version of my grandmothers, who, while she is deeply disapproving of wrongdoing (murder, of course, but also,she took a dim view of extramarital fooling around and things like embezzlement) does have a fundamentally, it seemed to me, kind core - more than once I think she was involved with pushing a shy or nervous young man to ask his beloved for her hand in marriage, or in encouraging a young writer unsure of their ability, things like that. The writer of the piece describes her as a sort of neo-Victorian, and perhaps, in some ways, I'm a bit of a neo-Victorian myself, which is why the show resonated with me. (Though I know I'm far from the only one in my age group that it did: I remember one of my friends in the dorm trying very hard to get the Detroit CBS affiliate to come in on her little tv (we didn't have cable tv in the dorms, back in those days) so we could gather in her room on Sunday nights to watch the show. 

(And yes: it was on Sunday evening for much of its run. I think that was also part of the appeal to me - it was a last bit of relaxation before getting ready for the next week of school or work. OETA here has been showing the Father Brown mysteries at 6 pm on Sunday evenings, and they fill much the same role for me now - a little escape before the start of the workweek.)

Hallmark "Mysteries and Movies" channel (which I get) does re-run Murder, She Wrote, but it tends to be on at times inconvenient for me to watch when I am working (early to mid-mornings). Still, if there happens to be an episode on when I'm free, I will watch it, for old times' sake.