If you know Inspector Morse only from the late John Thaw’s splendid impersonation in the BBC series shown on PBS over many seasons, you are missing the treat of reading Colin Dexter’s literate, clever novels on which the series was based. Dexter, now 80, graduated in 1953 from Cambridge (“a city that embraced its river just as Oxford turned away from its”), taught for a decade in a lesser public (private to us) school and then in 1966 moved to Oxford’s local examination board (an organization that creates many of the United Kingdom’s standardized tests) because of increasing deafness. Nine years later the first Morse mystery appeared. Morse is a thoroughly eccentric creation: Educated at Oxford, reader, music-lover, drinker, smoker, he often becomes ill at bloody murder sites. He is crusty, quick tempered, loyal; attracted to women, he has no luck with relationships, probably doesn’t really want them. He is content with scotch, Mahler and especially Wagner. His foil, Sergeant Lewis, on the other hand, is working class, mild tempered, happily married and devoted to eggs and fried potatoes. They are a perfect team. Oxford itself is a main character in the books: Before long you know that Magdalen College is pronounced “maudlin,” while Magdalen Bridge sounds as it is spelled. Oxford’s river, the Cherwell, is pronounced charwell. Scouts are the employees who tend to students’ rooms, except that some colleges don’t call them students. Oxford grows on you along with Morse and Lewis. Dexter also grows on you. The epigraphs that preface every chapter — Aristotle, Catullus, Hardy, Eliot and Housman are favorites — are at first charming, then instructive and, finally, necessary to the books as the plots themselves. You can’t imagine the one without the other. It does not matter which Dexter you read first they are so self-contained, and some have never been published in the United States. (One of my favorites, “The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn,” is a roman à clef about a barely disguised Oxford testing service and one of its academic employees who is deaf.) Most recently I read “The Daughters of Cain,” in which an Oxford don is murdered, an ex-scout suspected of dealing drugs to students turns up dead and his wife is suspected. False leads abound, Morse constructs hypothesis after hypothesis, yet the denouement still surprises. Typical Colin Dexter. Colin Dexter’s mystery tales are available at the Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury and elsewhere.
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Greg Fricke and James Boehmer, co-owners of Peggy Mercury in Kent, recently launched their first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts.”
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Fricke and Boehmer are not there to stock their shelves with the same products customers find at standard makeup retailers. They’re there to help customers find what works for them. That usually means asking customers about themselves and learning about their beauty habits, skin, style and the way they like to present themselves. Fricke and Boehmer believe it’s their job to help customers bring out the qualities that suit them and determine what works best for their look.
So much of the Peggy Mercury world is about emboldening people to become more creative, and possibly bolder, versions of themselves. Some of this comes through the store’s creative collaborations with artists, designers and stylists.
It’s part of an ethos that encourages them and their friends to use the shop as a kind of laboratory, trying out new creative experiments without knowing how they might turn out. Whether in fashion, painting, fiber arts or photography, the projects almost always turn out marvelously.
A line of sterling silver charms they sell started as a small project by their friend Nolan Percival. In the beginning, the pieces were for close friends and loved ones. But Boehmer and Fricke encouraged Percival to get a little more serious about the project and create a whole line for the store. Today, it’s one of their top-selling collections.
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
“Imaginary Concerts” has the duo taking their own advice.
The project started as a way for Boehmer to connect with his mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Taking old concert shirts from his own collection, Boehmer and his mother began cutting out the graphics with the idea that they would make a quilt together. Unfortunately, she died before they could complete the project in 2025. The pieces, which were ready for production, were put on the back burner as Boehmer and Fricke dealt with their loss and the whirlwind of projects that never seemed to cease at Peggy Mercury.
But the harsh winter of 2026 presented an opportunity to take some time and focus on themselves. Part of that meant revisiting and redefining the concert T-shirt project. This time, instead of looking to the warmth and comfort of a quilt, they turned to another passion — fashion.
Taking a page from their own book, they wanted to create something that felt comfortable to them. They took two disparate loves — one rooted in simple preppy style, with clean lines and classic silhouettes, and the other in the nitty gritty worlds of punk rock and pop — and blended them together to create something entirely new. Pulling from the staples of vintage Brooks Brothers and Charvet collections, they applied the graphic elements with bold stitching reminiscent of punk jackets of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a much more sophisticated air.
But the remixing isn’t just the pairing of prep and punk. The pieces are not canon. They take liberties with the realities of concert tours, combining one band’s dates with another band’s logos, mixing them all up until the reality is lost and imagination is the only truth.
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
Adding to the mix is an element of perpetual creativity. Art can be messy, both figuratively and literally, and many of Fricke and Boehmer’s artist friends carry evidence of their work on them at all times. As a nod to these tireless creatives, the duo added haphazard splashes of bright color, giving the line an even more distinctive feel.
For them, “Imaginary Concerts” passes the “Peggy Test.” The mythical Peggy Mercury is a fictional figurehead for the company, a character who thrives on creativity and change. The name, much like the clothing line, is a mixture of interests: Mercury is a planet, a deity and an elusive, transformative element, while Peggy is the wonderfully stylish and boundary-pushing Peggy Guggenheim.
Everything Fricke and Boehmer put in their store has to pass this test: Would Peggy Mercury approve? For their first collection, the answer is a resounding yes.
Peggy Mercury is at 9 Maple St., Unit 2, Kent.
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