‘Murder, She Wrote’ author Bain dies at 82

Prolific writer often didn’t use own name

Donald Bain, a little-known but versatile writer who sold millions of books, most of them published under other people’s names, died Oct. 21 at a hospital in White Plains, New York. He was 82.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his literary agent, Bob Diforio.

Considered one of the pre-eminent ghost writers in the publishing world, Bain wrote more than 100 books, including most of the best-selling “Capital Crime” mystery novels of Margaret Truman.

Bain was also responsible for more than 40 titles in the “Murder, She Wrote” series, writing as Jessica Fletcher, the fictional mystery author and small-town sleuth portrayed in the long-running CBS crime drama by Angela Lansbury.

The “Murder, She Wrote” television series ran from 1984 to 1996, with Lansbury’s character solving murders in Cabot Cove, Maine, which, for all its New England charm, had an alarmingly high rate of violent crime.

Consciously written in the voice of Lansbury-as-Fletcher, Bain’s book series began in 1989 with “Gin and Daggers” and continued through last year’s “Design for Murder.”

In the books, Bain often had Fletcher leaving the comforts of Cabot Cove to solve crimes all over the world. More than 5 million books in the “Murder, She Wrote” franchise have been sold.

Bain’s first major success came in 1967, when he wrote the pseudonymous best seller “Coffee, Tea or Me?,” a risqué novel purporting to be a nonfiction account of the amorous adventures of two free-spirited flight attendants, or “stewardesses,” as they were then called.

The title, derived from a salacious come-hither line delivered by one of the stewardesses, became a commonplace, if leering, catchphrase of the time. The novel sold millions of copies, prompting Bain to publish three more “Coffee, Tea or Me?” sequels, all written by “Trudy Baker” and “Rachel Jones.” The publisher hired two former flight attendants to portray the would-be authors on talk shows.

“It was magic,” Bain told Newsday in 1989. “They sold for 17 years. It was like having an annuity all those years.”

He went on to write a series of suggestive spinoff books about teachers, nurses, secretaries and other young working women.

Bain, a onetime broadcaster and part-time jazz musician, began working as a pen-for-hire in the early 1960s and quickly built a lucrative, if anonymous, business.

Although he did publish several books on history and other subjects under his own name, Bain spent most of his career writing novels, speeches, detective stories and frothy sex romps under assumed names — or the famous name of someone else.

“My strength is like an impressionist or mimic in a nightclub — I pick up on a style,” he told the Associated Press in 1997, “and write in that voice. That’s necessary if you’re going to be successful.”

Margaret Truman, the daughter of President Harry S. Truman, published her first mystery novel set in Washington’s corridors of power, “Murder in the White House,” in 1980. Bain did not help with that book, but he worked as Truman’s ghost writer for the next 23 books in the series.

Donald Bain