TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, we enter a tangled web of country club snobs and social climbers via indomitable busybody and mystery writer Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury). 

Jessica is visiting friends in high places, and we soon learn they're all just as dysfunctional and terrible as the rest of us, but with money. Her bud is Lloyd Marcus (Norman Lloyd), who is trying to pitch Jessica his first novel... uh, a FRIEND's first novel.  During the course of the visit, we meet his terrible daughter (Anne Scheedon), her adulterous husband (Christopher Allport), his jealous other daughter (Andra Millian), and the husband's mistress (Ellen Davis). We wouldn't really miss any of them, and in fact, soon one of them is dead--the victim, it appears, of the town's cat burglar who's been nicking precious paintings for the last year. 

Broken clocks, orphaned suit buttons, and Italian-American kitchen utensils are all part of the crime scene, where Jessica meets this week's detective, Police Chief Cooper (Cliff Gorman). They round up the suspects, from the delightful dandy Binky (John de Lancie) to the clueless mayor and his sharp-tongued wife (Gordon Jump and Audrey Meadows), and, of course, the butler (Aubrey Morris). 

As this sordid burg is further exposed for its secrets, IF THE FRAME FITS shows that even after a full second season of shocks and thrills from MSW, they were saving up for this truly lurid gem of a finale.