Colin Dexter

• Born: September 29, 1930
• Birthplace: Stamford, Lincolnshire, England
• Died: March 21, 2017

Types of Plot: Police procedural; master sleuth; hard-boiled

Principal Series: Inspector Morse, 1975-1999

Contribution

Colin Dexter’s major accomplishment was his creation of the unforgettable Inspector Morse. The novels of the Morse series have made Dexter an important and influential figure in modern English detective fiction. In a poll, Dexter’s fellow mystery writers chose Morse as their favorite male sleuth, ahead of Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe, and Adam Dalgliesh. Others have compared Dexter to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler because he has written not only good detective stories but also high-quality literature. The novels of the Morse series have brought Dexter fame, fortune, and fans around the world, some of whom travel to Oxford to meet him and to relive their favorite scenes from the novels. The Crime Writers’ Association has awarded him its Silver Dagger Award twice (1979 and 1981) and its Gold Dagger Award twice (1989 and 1992). He has also received this organization’s Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime fiction.

Morse made his first appearance in Last Bus to Woodstock (1975), a novel that introduced several of Dexter’s principal techniques and themes, such as insightfully choosing epigraphs relevant to each chapter’s subject and mood. Readers also encounter the theme of Morse’s fallibility, because he often misidentifies the murderer in the early stages of his investigations. Dexter also uses Morse’s companion, Sergeant Lewis, to update this relationship between detective and associate that began with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Like Holmes, Morse is an eccentric bachelor, but he is unlike Holmes in his passion for good English grammar, satisfying food and drink, and intelligent, attractive older women. Like Watson, Sergeant Lewis is less intelligent than the master sleuth, but the Morse-Lewis relationship tends to be more acrimonious than that of Doyle’s pair. Unlike the traditional puzzle-solving detective, Morse rarely discovers clues in a straightforward fashion. They are scrambled, and he manages to use them in specious but false explanations, so that when the reader finally learns the truth, it is usually a surprise.

As the series evolved, so, too, did Morse, whose interests in poetry and modern literature are explored. In The Wench Is Dead (1989), which some critics have praised as the best novel in the series, Morse’s physical and moral weaknesses are on display. Immobilized with a severe illness in a hospital, the cantankerous Morse is nevertheless able to solve a dead case from the Victorian period. By 1999, with The Remorseful Day, which Dexter insisted was “the final Inspector Morse novel,” the author told interviewers that he had said all that he wanted to say about this character, and unlike Doyle and Holmes, there would be no resurrections. Dexter’s reputation was further enhanced by the success of the Inspector Morse series on British television between 1987 and 2000. Dexter himself, à la Alfred Hitchcock, made cameo appearances in several of the episodes.

Biography

On September 29, 1930, Colin Dexter was born in Stamford, England, a small town in Lincolnshire about seventy miles north of Oxford, which would later become his residence and the scene of his Morse novels. Alfred Dexter, his father, was a taxi driver, and Colin was educated at Stamford School from 1940 to 1949. After national military service in the Royal Corps of Signals, Dexter read classics at Christ’s College of Cambridge University, from which he received his bachelor’s degree in 1953. For the next three years he was an assistant classics master at Wyggeston School in Leicester, an East Midlands institution about twenty-five miles west of Stamford. He married Dorothy Cooper, a physiotherapist, in 1956 (they eventually had two children, Sally and Jeremy). After receiving his master’s degree from Cambridge, he took a post as sixth form classics master at Loughborough Grammar School. In 1959 he moved closer to Stamford when he became senior classics master at Corby Grammar School. Early in his life Dexter described himself as a socialist in politics and a Methodist in religion, but later he added “lapsed” to each of these descriptors.

In 1966 increasing deafness forced Dexter to retire from teaching, and he became a senior assistant secretary to Oxford University Delegacy of Local Examinations in Summertown. Dexter developed a fascination with crossword puzzles, and he became so adept that he became national champion in the Ximenes competitions. He once said that this interest influenced his style of creating mysteries.

Dexter was forty-two years old before he became interested in writing mystery stories. The precipitating event occurred when he and his family were on vacation in Western Wales on the shore of the Irish Sea. A rainstorm confined him to a kitchen, where, with nothing to do, he wrote the first few paragraphs of a detective novel. Within a few years he published Last Bus to Woodstock (1975), which introduced Inspector Morse to the world. He had no plans for other Morse stories, but the success of his effort led him, in his spare time, to continue developing the character in a series of mysteries. Every year or two another Morse mystery appeared, and the novels began being translated into other languages, and Morse mania spread throughout the world.

To satisfy this great appetite for Morse, Dexter agreed to allow his novels to be dramatized for television. They appeared as part of the Mystery! series. While several films made use of Dexter’s plots, not always accurately, others used his characters to formulate plots of their own. Dexter decided to bring the series of novels to an end in 1999, and John Thaw, the actor who played Morse so effectively in the television series, died in 2002 at the age of sixty.

Dexter continued to be honored after the series came to an end. In 2000 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature. He also began to devote himself more assiduously to his hobbies, which, like those of Morse, included doing crossword puzzles and listening to classical music.

Analysis

Colin Dexter once described the essential nature of his Inspector Morse novels, which represent the core of his literary achievement, as “the exploitation of reader-mystification.” By this he meant that the novels incorporate both traditional and modern elements. The Morse novels are in the puzzle-solving tradition, and Morse is the agent in restoring reason and order after a crime has created chaos. Dexter also observes Father Ronald Knox’s ten commandments for writing detective fiction. Knox, who was the Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford University, issued in 1929 a list of such rules as “No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.” Indeed, Morse often has intuitions that turn out to be wrong. However, Morse is a modern detective not only in his mode of transportation, a Lancia or a red Jaguar, but also in his reliance of the unconscious to do a lot of his work. As Dexter states in The Daughters of Cain (1994), Morse would toss clues into “the magnetic field of his mind,” trusting that the explanation for the crime would “suddenly appear under his nose.”

Last Bus to Woodstock

The mixture of the traditional and modern can be seen in Dexter’s first Inspector Morse novel, Last Bus to Woodstock, in which the inspector tries to discover the murderer of Sylvia Kaye, a provocatively clad young woman who was found bludgeoned to death outside a pub in Woodstock, a small town about eight miles northwest of Oxford. Morse customarily began his cases with a surfeit of confidence, and he is certain that he can solve this murder if he can find and interview the young woman who was seen hitching a ride with Sylvia on that fateful September evening. However, when he finally gets to talk with this woman, she does not tell him what he wants to know. In addition, neither her girlfriends nor her other “Oxford playmates” provide the information he seeks. Indeed, he is frustrated by their withholding of facts and feelings. He settles on the wrong person as the murderer before a husband and wife, each of whom confessed to the murder, are murdered themselves. This tragedy leads the way to the resolution and the identification of the woman murderer, who claims to be in love with Morse. In this novel Dexter makes use of red herrings, which were a staple of traditional puzzle-solving mysteries, but his early misidentification of the culprit and the sexual themes make it modern.

Service of All the Dead

Service of All the Dead (1979), which won for Dexter his first Silver Dagger Award, is the fourth in the series, and it centers on the murders of a churchwarden and a vicar. Inspector Morse postpones a vacation to Greece to investigate the seemingly senseless killing of a churchwarden, which the Oxford police have been unable to solve. Furthermore, Morse believes the death of the vicar in a fall from a church tower, which the police think was accidental, was murder. The way Dexter introduces the clues of this ecclesiastical murder mystery is similar to the techniques used in traditional puzzle-solving mysteries, but the way he scrambles the clues once they seem to mesh is modern. Modern, too, are the lives of the vicar’s congregation, which exhibit the mixture of unholy lusts and disreputable desires of characters in American hard-boiled mysteries. During Morse’s investigations the number of unexplained deaths increases before he is able to “serve” all these dead persons by finally fitting all the pieces together to complete the true picture of what happened.

The Dead of Jericho

The Dead of Jericho (1981), which won for Dexter his second Silver Dagger Award and which fans voted their favorite Morse story, focuses on Anne Scott, a woman Inspector Morse meets at a party. She later appears to have hanged herself in Jericho, a lower-middle-class section of Oxford. At the inquest, the jury brings back a verdict of death by suicide, but Morse cannot accept this. His subsequent investigations lead him to his usual early wrong conclusions, while he tries to untangle the very messy former life of this beautiful but enigmatic woman, to whom Morse was attracted, and whom, he feels, he might have saved.

The Wench Is Dead

The Wench Is Dead (1989), the eighth novel in the series, won the Gold Dagger Award for the best mystery of the year. The title comes from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (pr. c. 1589): “Thou hast committed—/Fornication; but that was in another country,/ And besides, the wench is dead.” For Dexter, the past is this other country, and this novel is unusual in that it centers on a murder that occurred in 1859. Inspector Morse comes across the case during his stay in Oxford’s Radcliffe Hospital while he recuperates from a stomach hemorrhage and an enlarged liver. In a hospital library book, he learns of the murder of Joanna Franks, a young woman whose body was found floating in the Oxford Canal, but he becomes convinced that the two men hanged for the murder were innocent. With the help of the hospital librarian and Sergeant Lewis, he begins to collect the pieces of the puzzle, but he is unable to put them together until he is discharged from the hospital. He discovers the solution, of which he is 99 percent certain, through an anagram.

The Way Through the Woods

The Way Through the Woods (1992), which won for Dexter his second Gold Dagger Award, is the tenth novel in the series. Inspector Morse’s interest is piqued when a young woman disappears and he believes that she has been murdered, but when a year later she turns up neither alive nor dead, the case remains unsolved. Then the police receive an anonymous letter with a puzzling poem that the writer claims provides the solution to the young woman’s disappearance. The police publish the letter and poem, which Morse reads while he is on vacation in Dorset. After some surprising twists in the plot, Morse solves the poem’s riddle, and the persons responsible for the crime are taken into custody by the Thames Valley police. Incidentally, in his letter of thanks to The Times, Morse reveals the first initial, E, of his first name, which remains unknown to the reader.

The Remorseful Day

Dexter culminates his series in The Remorseful Day (1999) with Inspector Morse’s unofficial investigation of the death of a local nurse, Yvonne Harrison, with whom he was once romantically involved. The case has baffled the police for two years, and Morse, even after new evidence surfaces, refuses to lead the reinvestigation of the crime, but he does collect clues on his own, which puzzles Sergeant Lewis. Morse, who is in failing health, also has to contend with the criticisms of Lewis and Chief Superintendent Strange. Morse eventually discovers the truth, which proves to be disturbing to all those involved.

Following the making of his will, in which Morse leaves his body to medical research and his property to Lewis and the British Diabetes Association, Morse’s “confession” of what was good and bad about his life brings him a kind of personal redemption, and his death brings the series to an emotionally moving end.

Principal Series Characters:

• Inspector Morse is a brilliant, Eton-educated, curmudgeonly bachelor with a love for classical music, especially that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner, and for solving crossword puzzles. He smokes too much and is overly fond of ale, beer, and scotch. He works for the Thames Valley Constabulary of Kidlington, Oxon, and in the early novels, he is depicted as slim, gray-eyed, and dark-haired, but perhaps under the influence of the actor John Thaw, who played Morse in the British television series, he is described in the later novels as paunchy, blue-eyed, and white-haired.
• Sergeant Lewis is Morse’s associate and contrasts sharply with his boss. He comes from a working-class background and was not as well educated as Morse. He was a boxer as a young man and then married and had a family. He is described as a grandfather early in the series, but because of the influence of the young actor Kevin Whately, who played him in the television series, Lewis is described as younger than Morse in the later novels. Dexter says that he created Lewis to serve as “target, scapegoat, and sounding-board” for Morse.
• Chief Superintendent Strange of the Thames Valley Police at Kidlington is a large man and Morse’s superior, who is critical of the time that Morse spends in pubs, which Morse claims aids in his crime solving. Strange is pleased, however, when some of Morse’s cases achieve national interest.
• Maximilian “Max” Theodore Siegfreid de Bryn is the pathologist who is often called on to examine the corpses in the crimes Morse investigates. He is very professional and has few friends at Thames Valley Police Headquarters. He dies in 1992.
• Dr. Laura Hobson takes over Max’s job after his death. A bespectacled small woman in her early thirties, she objects to Morse’s calling her “dear” and insists on the professional “Dr. Hobson.”

Bibliography

Dexter, Colin. “The Man Behind Inspector Morse.” Interview by David Brown. Christian Science Monitor 89 (April 2, 1997): 15. This transcript of a radio interview conducted in Boston deals with the personal background to the novels, an analysis by Dexter of Morse’s character, and his explanation of why the novels and the television series have been so successful.

Edmonds, Joanne. “Creation, Adaptation, and Re-Creation: The Lives of Colin Dexter’s Characters.” In It’s a Print! Detective Fiction from Page to Screen, edited by William Reynolds. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Some critics have complained about the omissions and distortions in the television versions of Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, and this article analyzes what is lost and gained when his characters appear in the new medium.

Heinz, Drue, et al. “Criminal Conversations.” The Paris Review 44 (Winter, 2002-2003): 178. This is the fifth in a series of conversations with well-known writers to be published by The Paris Review. It is an edited version of discussions on the subject of crime writing held at a villa on Lake Como in Italy, and Dexter was very much a part of this seminar.

Karnick, S. T. “Detective and Mystery Stories.” American Spectator 33 (December, 2000/January, 2001): 40-55. In this article, Dexter’s first Inspector Morse novel is compared with Edward D. Hoch’s “The Problem of the Covered Bridge” and Tony Hillerman’s Skinwalkers (1986). These, and other examples Karnick analyzes, are seen as representatives of how new authors have breathed life into the moribund puzzle-solving mystery.

May, Radmila. “Murder Most Oxford.” Contemporary Review 277 (October, 2000): 232-239. This article seeks to answer the question of why the Oxford setting has proved so important and beneficial in the novels of the Inspector Morse series and in the novels of other authors. May tries to show how both the real and mythical Oxford informed these stories.