Getting to Know Inspector Morse

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.