All The Tropes

Little Old Lady Investigates: Difference between revisions

Page Discussion

Little Old Lady Investigates (view source)

Revision as of 12:56, 8 April 2014

107 bytes removed ,  10 years ago
m
Mass update links
VisualWikitext
m (Mass update links)
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:murdershewrote_on_the_right_7287.jpg|link=Murder, She Wrote|frame|Watch out, crime.]]
 
{{quote|''"Miss Marple. She's not going to frighten [[The Yardies]] is she? 'Leroy, give her the gun, she have a hat!'"''|'''[[Lenny Henry]]'''}}
Line 17:
* ''[[Yattokame Tanteidan]]'', a 2007 kids anime series about a young girl who solves mysteries with the help of her candy store owning grandmother and her grandmother's friends. As Japan has different social taboos on what kids' anime can contain, there are murders in this series.
* ''[[Detective Conan]]'' has one episode where Kogoro is invited to a gathering of other famous detectives in the adult category as opposed to Shinichi's teen detective peers. Numbered among them is a little old lady detective who seems to have worked frequently with the two-fisted man of action private detective perhaps because their opposite strengths combine effectively. This ends up becoming a [[Subverted Trope]] since {{spoiler|the little old lady uses her status as being [[Beneath Suspicion]] to ''murder'' her partner, and plan to do the same to everyone else}}.
* Part of Saki's backstory in ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler (Manga)|Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' is that her grandmother is the "legendary housemaid" Kijima Rei, who, among other things, has been known to solve mysteries and prevent assassinations.
* An episode of the 1998 anime series ''Master Keaton'', "A Case for Ladies", has the titular hero team up with an elderly English woman to solve a murder. The elderly woman displays quite a bit of genre savviness, as she unfavorably compares Keaton to Humphrey Bogart and Steve [[Mc Queen]].
 
Line 29:
** In a subversion, Miss Marbles isn't the wheelchair-bound old lady who first appears with a triumphant fanfare, but the merely middle-aged lady<ref>Surprisingly, Elsa Lanchester was [[Older Than They Look|about 74]] when this movie came out.</ref> pushing the wheelchair. The old lady is her former nurse.
* Happens in the Korean film ''Omm-ah'' (Mom) about an elderly woman trying to clear her son of a murder charge.
* [[Angela Lansbury]] played [[Miss Marple]] in the movie version of ''The Mirror Crack'd'', long before ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]''. This would make Jessica Fletcher some sort of [[Expy]]. (''The Mirror Crack'd'' opened with a scene [not in the book], in which a mystery film was interrupted halfway through and Miss Marple deduced who the murderer must have been. The [[Pilot]] of ''Murder She Wrote'' opened with an identical scene.)
* Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce of ''The Ladykillers'' discovered, more out of luck than detective work, that her band of musicians were actually criminals. Although indirectly, her actions put an end to them as thoroughly as Dirty Harry could have.
 
== [[Literature]] ==
* [[Agatha Christie (Creator)|Agatha Christie]]'s [[Miss Marple]] is the [[Trope Codifier]]. In one book she explains her success like this: "Policemen asking questions are being policemen, but little old ladies asking questions are just being little old ladies."
** Dame Agatha's Tuppence Beresford of the [[Tommy and Tuppence (Literature)|Tommy and Tuppence]] books uses many aspects of the [[Little Old Lady Investigates]], but isn't a pure version because she prefers to work on instinct, has a partner in her husband Tommy, and often works under the auspices of an official branch of the government. In ''N or M?'', though, she essentially plays this straight while undercover as a doddering housewife and acting essentially as an independent agent.
* [[Dorothy Gilman]]'s Mrs. Pollifax is a little old lady investigative ''[[CIA]] agent''. It's a bit more believable when you learn that she was originally hired by the CIA as a decoy courier by accident when her file was inadvertently placed in the "people we can use for this decoy run" stack instead of the "people we've reviewed and rejected" stack, but her [[Nosy Neighbor]] and [[Weirdness Magnet]] tendencies, combined with a very no-nonsense common-sense approach to whatever trouble she landed in, led her into more and more active assignments -- this while still being essentially a part-timer who works for the CIA to keep her retirement years from being boring.
** There's been two movies made featuring Mrs. Pollifax, the second was a made-for-TV movie in 1999 starring... you guessed it... Angela Lansbury.
** Mrs. Pollifax isn't quite the normal little old lady either, as witnessed by the not more closely described "karate chop", which she delivers to many a foe, who is [[Tap Onon the Head|invariably rendered unconscious]].
* [[Dorothy Gilman]] also wrote a novel entitled ''The Clairvoyant Countess''. The title character, Madame Marina Karitska is Russian and uh, clairvoyant. Her talent leads her into many investigations with a member of the police department Detective Lieutenant Pruden.
* Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley (later Dame Beatrice Bradley). [[Justified Trope]] in that she was a psychoanalyst and had legitimate Home Office recognition.
Line 44:
* Miss Climpson, the chatty, ''knitting'', ''deeply religious'' old lady who works for [[Lord Peter Wimsey]], gathering information in places he can't go without ''arousing suspicion''!!
** And ''yes'', [[Bold Inflation|THIS]] is how the '''character''' ''talks and writes''!
* [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Maskerade|Maskerade]]'' mixes this and ''Phantom of the Opera'', parodying the heck out of both along the way.
* [[Deconstructed]] brutally in the short story "Granny Gumption Solves a Murder" from ''100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories''. The titular Granny Gumption does indeed solve a murder, and confronts the murderer [[Idiot Ball|in his own home]], [[What an Idiot!|without any witnesses]]-- and ''[[Have You Told Anyone Else?|mentions that she didn't tell anyone else that she figured out the truth]].'' {{spoiler|Needless to say, she becomes his next murder victim in an excruciatingly brutal death scene that starts with a broken jaw and [[Eye Scream]] and [[It Got Worse|just gets worse]] from there}}.
** You can read this vicious little story [http://www.cjhenderson.com/docs/GRANNY.pdf here] if you like. (Note: link goes to PDF file.)
Line 56:
 
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* Jessica Fletcher ([[Angela Lansbury]]) in ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'' is arguably the most famous TV variation.
* In the ''[[Columbo (TV)|Columbo]]'' episode "Murder by the Book," Jack Cassidy and Martin Milner portray the co-authors of the [[Show Within a Show|Mrs. Melville mysteries]]. Columbo creators [[Levinson and Link]] would later create Jessica Fletcher.
* Hetty Wainthropp (Patricia "[[Keeping Up Appearances|Hyacinth Bucket]]" Routledge) in ''[[Hetty Wainthropp Investigates]]'' is one of the more realistic takes on the trope, because she's a registered PI that by and large solves minor crimes and misdemeanors that the police can't be bothered with. She downright refuses to take murder cases.
** Sometimes she is hired to investigate larger crimes with a clear bias, such as when a young girl keeps turning up at the scenes of arsons and her mother hires Hetty to find another suspect.
* Mrs Bradley (Diana "[[The Avengers (TV series)|Emma Peel]]" Rigg) in ''The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries''. (Although the small and "bird-like" Mrs Bradley of the books is a better example.)
* ''The Snoop Sisters'', Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick. With that surname, [[Prophetic Names|it was inevitable]]...
* In the BBC children's series ''[[Marlene Marlowe Investigates]]'', Marlene was assisted by her interfering Aunt Maud.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/895188"