Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse Mysteries

A Return to the 'Golden Age' of Detective Stories

Inspector Morse is dead, after thirteen novels, several short stories, and a long-running television series. Pity. This was a return in the late years of the 20th Century to the Golden Age of Detection in the earlier part. No one else, in spite of all the 'current heirs to Agatha Christie', has come as close -- not so much for the mysteries, which are police procedural novels (although nothing like what everyday police procedure is like), but in the extremely literate and clever writing. The main interest, of course, is Inspector Morse himself, a complex and fascinating character and in some ways a throwback to the days of the eccentric detective. It is hard now to separate the book character from the TV version, brilliantly portrayed by John Thaw; indeed, Morse changed even in the books because of this, starting out as small, slim, dark-haired and gray-eyed, and gradually transforming into the white-haired, blue-eyed, comfortably middle-aged person we came to know. His car, a Lancia, mysteriously suddenly became a red Jaguar (well, maroon, but I have trouble defining colors). Sergeant Lewis, a stocky ex-boxer Morse's own age, turned into the younger man we now visualize as Morse's Watson. But in character, everything remained consistent, from the curmudgeonliness, the fondness for booze, crosswords, and Wagnerian opera, the unfortunate love life, to the brilliant but erratic leaping to conclusions. The TV show also gave us a haunting theme song, which is hard to forget.

Other nice things, from some readers' viewpoints, are the wonderfully apt (usually) epigraphical quotations at the beginning of chapters; the random interpolation of English-type crossword clues, rarely explained; the use of Chambers Dictionary and that fine cynical Regency period Small's for very obscure and not-so-obscure words (like pension); Morse's irritation at spelling or grammatical mistakes, 'your' as opposed to 'you're' for example; the appreciation of the few still-good English beers, as well as for good Scotches (but I would rate The Macallan or Talisker way above Glenfiddich). There is also his obsession with the ancient BBC radio soap, The Archers, which is a mystery to me though I've heard a bit of it, like seeing some Doctor Who, entertaining but what is all the fuss about? However, that's all excusably English*.

* As are Dexter's absurd attempts to transliterate accents by inserting letters like R which only make sense that way because in Dexter's speech R's are not pronounced but represent the sound Ah. So when he wants to convey the 'daunt' sound of Welsh 'don't' he spells it 'dornt'. He does omit the letter (le'er) T when representing the local Oxfordshire accent, but I can't even imagine how anybody could talk sensibly without that sound (denticular, as Morse would put it -- or is ' supposed to represent a glottal stop?), at least the way Dexter spells it out in the dialogue. Rendering accents phonetically is the bane of even the best writers. Robert Burns spoken is nothing like what you would say trying to read it as written (or Chaucer, for that matter). I have never understood why the original archaic spellings are retained in old texts, Medieval and Elizabethan. Diction yes, but spelling -- why? Academic claptrap. Who knows, maybe The Faerie Queene would even be readable, and worth reading (well, probably not), if it were spelled comprehensibly. But this is one of my personal bugaboos. I would like to point out Shaw's rendition of the word Fish: Ghoti (gh as in enough, o as in women, and ti as in nation). To have Americans pronounce the city of Bath 'Bairth' is absurd (what, 'bairth of a bonnie wee bairn'?).

Here are quick summaries of all his books (I just spent a month or so rereading all of them; this was inspired by his 'death' as a retrospective exercise):

• Last Bus to Woodstock (1975) -- A promising start to the series, although Morse is not yet the John Thaw character. Involves the murder of one of three single girls sharing an apartment. Has Sue Widdowson, one of the unrequited loves of Morse's life (and the first of his nurse girlfriends -- he tended to fall for nurses for some reason), and those scenes are very moving. [The TV scriptwriter renamed her Mary, and had Morse fall for another one of the girls -- why do they mess around like this with authors' original writing? No wonder so many of the great writers got pissed off when they were hired to adapt their books for Hollywood movie scripts.]

• Last Seen Wearing (1976) -- Rather chaotic story about a missing teenage girl, but the ending is a nice surprise. Series of books just creeping along here before it was (brilliantly) selected as a TV dramatization, at which point the author became a 'golden age' phenomenon, his stories even watched by the Queen of England.

• The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977) -- Very complex plot, and one that fully takes advantage of the peculiarities of the Oxford academic folk about whom Dexter writes so well and amusingly. Another of Dexter's recurrent themes: deafness. [As an aside, it should be mentioned that a lot of the books concern examination boards, which is the author's profession, apart from compiling crossword puzzles and writing these books.]

• Service of All the Dead (1979) -- An ecclesiastical setting (as Michael Gilbert, P.D. James and others have done) with some unsusual twists. ['Unsusual' is my mistake, but not out of ignorance, just carelessness, even Lewis would not have misspelled that word that way.] This is the first Morse I ever read, some six years before I got hooked on the series in the late 80's; have to say I didn't like it much -- the main characters are seedier than usual. Morse's eyes are beginning to turn blue, from gray, but he still drives a Lancia rather than a Jaguar.
  

• The Dead of Jericho (1981) -- A beautiful plot and another sad love affair for Morse, but misleading to speak of the 'Jericho Murders'. Jericho, by the way, is a lower middle-class district of Oxford, so this is one of the non-university books. Morse jumps to one of his spectacularly wrong conclusions in this story, and it is a truly great one involving Sophocles.

• The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983) -- This one is a real winner! Sort of a Michael Innes romp involving the definitely non-donnish escapades of some quintessentially donnish Oxford dons. Not a typical Morse, but a great mystery novel. The schemes and motivations and settings are wonderful. The fictitious Lonsdale College, which figures in many Morse books, is one locus, London's Soho strip clubs another, and the Oxford canal a third. [All favorite subjects for this author, but I don't want to make the 'literary criticism' mistake of assuming that everything an author dwells on in his books is autobiographical in some way. What color underwear did Dickens wear and how did that affect his use of the color brown? Why did he denigrate moneylenders and lawyers so much? Does Dexter have a fascination with ex-prostitutes with big tits?]

• The Secret of Annexe 3 (1986) -- Takes place in a horrendous hotel during one of those Butlins-type holiday weekends. Beautifully plotted. Nice bit of pseudo-John Dickson Carr stuff involving snow with no footprints on it, too. Lewis comes up with a nice off-the-wall solution of his own for a change (involving a construction crane).

• The Wench Is Dead (1989) -- Morse in hospital with an ulcer (first of his bouts with ill health that are to follow in later books) gets involved in investigating an old case that had happened 130 years before when he starts reading a chapbook. This is like Tey's Daughter of Time theme, and it is very well done. Dexter sometimes re-uses variations of the same plot element; this one reprises Last Seen Wearing and foreshadows The Way Through the Woods, but I won't say more than that.

• The Jewel That Was Ours (1991) -- Another hotel mystery, involving an American tour group (but a higher class hotel for sure than the Annexe 3 one). Jewel theft and a really nice revenge plot. But I was very irritated, as an American, by Dexter's attempts to transliterate American accents by interpolating R's -- Americans do not say Arksfourd for Oxford or Bairth for Bath (in the Queen's English R's are not pronounced, but they certainly are in California, Axfurd and Bæth would convey the accent better -- how would an American writer represent the British pronunciations? Ux-fidd and Baaah-th).

• The Way Through the Woods (1992) -- Another missing person case and a cold trail, with a nice diversion to Lyme Regis where Morse is on vacation. A letter to the Times, published by the police as a desperate measure (I should watch myself, almost wrote 'desparate' -- Morse would have killed me), and the consequent correspondence is a brilliant undercurrent in this typically complicated plot. Only in England... This book won the Crime Dagger Best Novel of the Year, and deservedly (so did The Wench Is Dead). Max, the crusty humpbacked police pathologist, dies in the course of this book, irrelevantly but sadly. He was one of the 'regulars' in these stories (but then the lovely Laura Hobson steps in -- and who was the lady that came to Morse in the last chapter? Dexter often obfuscates by not naming people who appear in scenes -- you have to guess).

• The Daughters of Cain (1994) -- A really grim story involving three unfortunate women -- Dexter is really good at handling females who are no better than they should be, that is, human beings who are just like everybody else (males? -- well Dexter's men are often total assholes, especially dons and mechanics of various sorts; he also doesn't have a high opinion of teenage boys on the whole). It is sad that the murderer(s) don't get away with this really, because the victim truly deserved to be murdered. Not much of a mystery, though, except for the neat trick about the knife.

• Death Is Now My Neighbour (1996) -- Morse gets diabetes and Janet. The Dons of Lonsdale College are a randy sex-craved lot. Also ambitious and unscrupulous. This is not an especially complex murder plot, but the setting is good. Blackmail and 'office' politics are a nice mix.

• The Remorseful Day* (1999) -- [this will hurt, especially considering how badly they screwed up the TV version -- yes, they really did, missed the whole point of the story] Half the time, Morse gets stuck on an unsolved case that, for whatever reason, his colleagues have not been able to solve. This is one. The mystery plot is overly elaborate, confusing, and improbable, and Morse's flights of insight, though right, sort of, go beyond common sense. What is really important in this book is the complicated involvements and interactions with the two most important of his colleagues (Lewis and Strange). One feels that Morse wasted his last efforts on this case even if he solved it -- as was shown in the TV version -- but what he really did do (which was NOT shown in the television dramatization) was a resolution to the man's life, a vague but poignant 'confession' and redemption at the end of his term. It all comes round in the end and is satisfying, if sad. Why the producers f---ed this up is beyond comprehension. (No, I should say 'fuck' -- Morse would.) The mutual cover-ups are also funny, by the way, and very ironic, and kinky as a lot of Dexter's stuff is. Did you know that handcuffs registered to police officers have serial numbers? The producers wanted to end up the series and short-cutted blatantly; this should have been a two-episode show, to include more of the other stuff, even if it isn't the best of the Morse mysteries per se.

  * Just out of curiosity, having spotted two quotations in the works that used the phrase 'remorseful day', I wonder why Housman's 'Hopeless under ground falls the remorseful day' was picked as the epigraph as opposed to Shakespeare's '...remorseful day is crept into the bosom of the sea'? If Mr Dexter ever reads this web page, I'd be delighted to receive a reply. And I would (should?) like to know the relative poetic merits of these quotations out of their context. Of the two, I'd have thought Morse would go with the one that contains the word 'bosom'.

• Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (1993) -- Collection: "As Good as Gold"; "Morse's Greatest Mystery"; "Evans Tries an O-Level"; "Dead as a Dodo"; "At the Lulu-Bar Motel"; "Neighbourhood Watch"; "A Case of Mis-Identity"; "The Inside Story"; "Monty's Revolver"; "The Carpet-Bagger"; "Last Call"

  A nice collection of short stories, six involving Morse (underlined). "Neighbourhood Watch" and "The Inside Story" are especially good and should be looked at by editors compiling Best-of anthologies. There are also a lot of Morse stories that were written especially for the TV series, not by Dexter, but I won't go into them here since they have never been printed (and, frankly, I didn't watch more than one of them because they were not original).

Morse's Will: His body to medical research (like his friend Max's); his property divided three ways between the British Diabetes Association, Nurse McQueen (!), and Sgt. Lewis (but no mention of the car); and finally, no funeral burial or memorial service at all. So no doubt something like this web page is against his will. Well, TS, Morse!

Be sure to visit the Inspector Morse web pages, where you will find all the details about the TV series, the episodes not written by Colin Dexter, etc. (official and unofficial *). Another fine Morse web site is MorseMania. Try this crossword puzzle * while you're at it. [* Feb. 2002 -- seem to be dead links now.]
     -- Grobius, March 2001

John Thaw, who played Inspector Morse so effectively on TV, died on 21 February 2002 at the age of 60. R.I.P.

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By the way, does anybody know what the abbreviation 'wef' in front of a date means? It is used constantly in the Morse books, and I haven't got a clue, being an ignorant Colonial.

I've had replies on this. It means 'with effect from', which I suppose is the English reverse of the meaningless 'not good after' that appears on American milk cartons, meaning 'we are not responsible if you ignore this' -- in effect, Trespassers will be Shot, or Pass at your own Risk.