S02E12: The endeavours of Inspector Morse

Being a fan because of him and in spite of him.

May 2019: we were curled up in bed in an Airbnb in Hartley, North Kent. It had drizzled relentlessly all day and we had got back from an outing to Greenwich, as miserable as wet kittens.

Mandatory ‘straddling time’ picture from Greenwich, May 2019

While I spooned my way through a Co-op cheesecake, SR channel-surfed…and stopped at Inspector Morse.

This was my introduction to the sensitive, genteel detective and his rather rough-around-the-edges but good-hearted sergeant Lewis. I am ashamed to say that all I remember from that episode are the glimpses of lovely Oxford (which we’d wandered around two years previously) and the haunting music. But SR¹ was hooked.

Back home in Bangalore, he raided Blossoms for Dexter novels and has become somewhat of a fan. I say “somewhat” because he likes to add many qualifiers to his admiration of Morse. I’ll let him say it his own way in today’s episode² of About Murder, She He Wrote.

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Colin Dexter’s endeavours with the Morse code

The persnicketiness of Poirot. The arrogance of Holmes. And the luck of Johnny English.

On the face of it, Morse—Inspector Morse, as he would have instantly reminded us—is an unlikely success story. Born in 1975 with the book, Last Bus to Woodstock, Colin Dexter’s creation is a character who was neither infallible nor infinitely charming. His rebellions against his superiors (such a child of the 60s and 70s!) was often the young adult’s tantrum, short-lived and invariably unsuccessful except for a few concessions won.

In his failure, there was success to be teased out; in his successes, failure. Yet, having read nine of the thirteen Inspector Morse novels, I have always found them compelling and engaging, as much because of Morse as in spite of him.

There is an element of the cosy mystery with these stories, something true and faithful to the best traditions of British detective fiction, and the whodunnit is as fair as it can be. There are usually no rabbits pulled out of hats at the last minute, no lazy writing where surprise revelations are used to fix up plot holes on the narrative road. The characters come to life with individuality and personality, credible constructions of a very active imagination.

Would I recommend this series to other fans of mystery stories? Yes, definitely. But for those who are particular about what they like about this genre, here are some observations (Morse might call some of them disclaimers) that must accompany my positive verdict.

I

“And you’re absolutely sure that we’ve got the right man?”

“It’s a big word - ‘absolutely’ - isn’t it?” said Morse.

The Secret of Annexe 3

Morse can often be found sharing his theories with Sgt. Lewis, his loyal sidekick, within the first third of any novel. And for someone so sure of his opinions, he could be incredibly diffident once his initial theories started collapsing around him. In this way, he is quite an interesting contrast from the usual ‘suspects’—Poirot, Marple, Barnaby, Dalziel, Thanet, Holmes—who’d be quite reluctant to stick their necks out that early in the game.

The wonderful thing about Colin Dexter’s writing is that he is consistently inconsistent about the accuracy of Morse’s theories, making it difficult for readers to guess correctly based on patterns. In some books (naming which shall be a spoiler, and therefore I shan’t), Morse is actually right with his first or second stab at the solution, only to be confounded later by new revelations and red herrings. But there are also cases where he doesn’t get on the right track until the very end.

I’ve often wondered if it is narrative technique or a bit of self-indulgence that is at play here. If the former, it is an excellent example of wielding one’s storytelling abilities—to take the reader along with Morse’s thoughts at exactly the same pace, never too far ahead, never too dumbed-down slow. If it is the latter, I suppose it must still be respected for the double-bluff, for Dexter has then earned his right to say, “Aha! I knew that’s what you’d be thinking!”

That’s what happens to me through many of these books. No sooner have I built up theories than Morse would bring them up in discussions with Lewis, and I’d go, “If Morse thinks this is the solution this early in the book, that can’t be it.” But then, dammit, sometimes, it is! But not without a few twists and turns that gets me double-, triple- and quadruple-guessing myself.

II

“Are you making some of it up, sir?”

“Of course I bloody am! But it fits the clues, doesn’t it?”

The Riddle of the Third Mile

Poirot and Hastings. Holmes and Watson. Vera and Joe. Morse and Lewis.

The use of the sidekick³ runs pretty much true to form to the genre in Morse—for expositions, comic relief, a bit of ‘domesticity’ in contrast to the loner protagonist’s life, the muscle when needed for the chase and the apprehension.

But since Morse is not infallible, it also falls to Sgt Lewis, Morse’s long-suffering deputy, to pose with the pin pressed to Morse’s hypothetical balloons, forcing the latter to confront his own leaps of faith and the chasms beneath. This is often the cue for Morse to get irritated at Lewis, and you wonder how it is suddenly Lewis’s fault for asking the same questions that may have just occurred to you, the reader.

It’s also a frequent trope in the series that even when Lewis is faster to an idea than Morse, he would still not have figured out every element, leaving Morse to fill in the blanks. But good-natured chap that he is, with ambitions capped at learning from the ‘guv’, Lewis’s momentary flashes of irritation at stolen (or unacknowledged) credit rarely get in the way of following Morse’s instructions.

Lewis is often presented in the books as a follower rather than a good detective in his own right (which, thankfully, the eponymous TV series managed to correct). I can’t help but wonder how the books might have worked out if these two had a more equal relationship—like Dalziel and Pascoe.

III

“Ah, Lewis.” He thrust the paper across. “Have a look at 14 down. Appropriate eh?”

Lewis looked at 14 down. ‘Take in bachelor? It could do. (3)’.

He saw what Morse had written into the completed diagram: BRA.

Last Bus to Woodstock

Like Reginald Hill⁴ (and more recently, Anthony Horowitz), Colin Dexter too has a penchant for being quite persnickety when it comes to the language. While it is Pascoe who’s the pedant of choice for Hill, Morse is the crossword-solving, anagram-decoding lingua genius in this series. What it means is that you, the reader, learn to look for clues within any and every reproduced text in the book. Sometimes, this could just be in the spelling of a particular word, or an inadvertent revelation of gender or authenticity.

In other words, nothing that you come across in the book is too insignificant, but whether that matters to the denouement is an entirely different question.

Hill and Dexter share another style signature - they tend to use unusual words quite liberally, especially in descriptions where that one word sums it up perfectly. Efficiency, yes, but one that might occasionally have even the logophile reaching for the dictionary. This proclivity is especially sharper in contrast when you follow up a Morse or D&P with an equally atmospheric work like the Shetland series, where Ann Cleeves is able to take you through the desolation and harshness of the islands with far simpler, yet equally evocative, phrasing.

IV

In which the author of this essay looks at the differences in chapter intros

Many authors prefer to avoid chapter intros. Some even skip naming chapters, lest these give away even the tiniest part of the suspense. But the ones that do tend to prefer to draw from the same wells time and time again. Off the top of my head, I would probably venture that Shakespeare is the most-quoted, followed by poets, philosophers or (in psycho-thrillers) the likes of Freud, Jung or Nietzsche. It often feels as though authors, once they find their preferred style for opening chapters, don’t even think about exploring any further. Deeper they might go, but not further afield.

But the Morse books have interesting chapter intros. Interesting not only in what they seem to be hinting at, often in theme with the book, but also in the variety of styles that are employed. For instance, in ‘The Secret of Annexe 3’, Dexter uses quotes from Ogden Nash, GB Shaw, Thomas Hardy, et al to set up the chapters—very oblique hints about what is to come. In ‘The Riddle of the Third Mile’, the intros are more prosaic. For instance: “Lewis again finds himself the unsuspecting catalyst as Morse considers the course of the case so far.” In Last Seen Wearing, the chapter intros are curated from a mix of obscure quotes and manuals: “We hear, for instance, of a comprehensive school in Connecticut where teachers have three pads of coloured paper…”

V

Lewis: I think you could have let her win the chess, Sir.

Morse: That’s the worst kind of deception, Lewis

Second Time Around (Morse, Season 5)

If there is a problem with Colin Dexter’s writing that has possibly prevented him from being as household a name as Agatha Christie, it is the overindulgent complexity of his plotting. As I mentioned earlier, most of the stories make you go through (at least) two or three possible solutions before the final revelation. The initial theories are often so compelling, even with the holes that Lewis manages to punch in them, that it is hard as a reader to let them go when they break down in the light of new events or revelations.

Murder mysteries endure not just for the intricacy of their plotting or the shock value of their solutions, but also for how much of the story stays with you days, weeks, months after you’ve read it. One of the Perry Mason solutions I remember is from a one-time read 25+ years ago, and that’s because the whole case twists on one detail—simple on the face of it, but with the power of a thousand ‘aha!’ moments⁵. With Morse, the explosive power is often dissipated by the profusion of false positives that precede it.

Another weakness in Dexter’s finishing was the occasional (and perhaps more frequent than advisable) closure-that-isn’t. The murderer escapes, or is caught somewhere else out of Morse’s—and our—view. Or the murderer ‘escapes’ because they die. There is a sense of futility, of being cheated out of some righteous gratification and affirmation in chasing the story to that point only to be told, “Sorry, you don’t really win!” Hill used it too, but only in 1.5 books, and it was the rarity of this that made it effective; Dexter over-used this ending—what in the wrestling world is called a Dusty Finish—with the result that it gets depressingly dissatisfying.

VI

Very soon, passengers were told that they could unfasten their seatbelts: everything was fine. And six rows behind the now empty window-seat, a woman lit a cigarette and inhaled very deeply.

The Secret of Annexe 3

One of the most effectively-wielded weapons in Dexter’s arsenal has been the use of pronouns/common nouns in the books. Like the snippet above, the books often show slices from unnamed perspectives. It is only when the final story is known that these perspectives become sharper and clearer to us in terms of context, personalities and implications. At the time they take place, they up the ante of suspense, throwing you tantalising clues that skirt the boundary of fair-play in mystery stories.

And every time I’ve read the book, I’ve also wondered how these vignettes would be adapted for television. Unlike a book that affords you anonymity through the use of pronouns, a screenplay would have to show you what is being described—unless, of course, these scenes are shot as if through the eyes of the pro-/common- noun-holder. It’s a tight line to be walked, and I’ll pay more attention to this to see how it has been executed when I watch Morse’s adapted-for-TV stories next time.

Epilogue

“A huge part of Morse’s attraction was John Thaw. Dear old John. So modest. He told me he couldn’t understand his fame, that the only thing he could do better than anyone else was learn his lines.” Colin Dexter

Thanks to John Thaw’s excellent portrayal of Morse for TV (1987-2000), it’s hard to think of the Inspector as anything other than middle-aged, nearing retirement, with a perpetual moue of something between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Yet, in the books, he starts at somewhere in his early 40s, a bachelor with fading - but never extinguished - hopes of finding a partner. Every story has something in the way of a romantic interest for Morse, even if in some cases it is rather one-sided (but on whose side?) Some leave off on a promising note, only to be completely forgotten in the next book if read in the correct order within the Morse Criminal Universe.

In what I found to be one of the starkest deviations from typical detective lore (filtered, of course, only to the enduring and enjoyable ones), Morse is wrong as often as he isn’t as a judge of character. And nowhere is this fallibility more pronounced than with the female characters he encounters. These women typically—but also typically of Dexter, not always—have prominent roles as witnesses, victims, suspects or murderers. Not every woman he encounters is a paragon of virtue, often a core (and, if I may add, hypocritical) requirement only for heroines even in these days.

The tease, if you can call it that, is a recurring theme throughout the series. Morse meets woman in the course of a case (or just before the case narrative takes off), Morse finds—or suspects—some connection to the case that will prevent him from pursuing a relationship till the closure of said case and exoneration of said interest, and events soon overtake them in some way—or Morse’s own conscience does—and que sera, sera-not.

And when that Remorseful Day comes, he passes on alone.

The books age Morse realistically, if also a little depressingly. The years of smoking and drinking catch up with him, culminating in the final chapters of the last Morse book with a legacy left to Lewis in a manner very reminiscent of Poirot’s last communique to Hastings.

With the TV show Lewis (2006-2015) picking up the threads a year or so after Morse’s demise (and giving Lewis himself a tragic personal loss as a backstory) with Kevin Whatley reprising his role, I can’t help wonder if that too was part of the legacy passed down from the Inspector to his Sergeant.

1. SR is R. Sreeram—author of a political thriller that he thought would change his life (it did, but not as much as he thought it would), fellow lover of murder mysteries, and father to my dog-children. While we both love detective fiction, he reads a lot more noir, hard-boiled crime, and suspense thrillers. Which is helpful because there’s a long list of topics that he can write about more authoritatively than I can.

2. I suppose I should call these issues, but I like naming my newsletters the way TV shows are named. So, episode it is.

3. Why do brilliant detectives need faithful sidekicks to solve the crime? I explore the question in the essay And then there were Watsons.

4. In a previous episode, SR wrote about the adventures of Dalziel and Pascoe, two Yorkshire policemen created by Reginald Hill.

5. The Case of the Amorous Aunt - Erle Stanley Gardner