Morse coda
Nine years ago the Guardian ran a leader asking if Inspector Morse wasn't creating a dangerously false impression of Oxford University. In Colin Dexter's novels and Central TV's adaptations, seen by 750m viewers in 50 countries, the university appeared to exist chiefly to fill the city with corpses. "The legend was getting around," claimed the leader, "that the main preoccupations of university people were conducting adulterous liaisons and killing each other."
Since then the body count has reached 75. That includes a don's wife strangled in a telephone kiosk, a Kidlington physiotherapist felled by a bullet through her kitchen window, three murders and a manslaughter resulting from evil machinations by a college master, and the curator of the Ashmolean Museum found floating in the Oxford canal - all fresh meat for the irascible chief inspector, who solved these crimes as he solved his crosswords. Indeed, crime for Morse was little more than a puzzle, an opportunity for a display of intuitive association and virtuoso deductive skills. A cold-hearted, intellectual business, to be sure, but one heated by Morse's mostly unconsummated romances.
Now we can add another body to the tally. Morse himself has been killed. Or, rather, killed off. In The Remorseful Day, the final Inspector Morse novel, published today (Macmillan, £15.99), the inspector dies - though, good classicist that he is, he dies offstage, his expiration reported almost off-handedly. There can be no reprieve, no miraculous recovery, since the press release accompanying the Guardian's review copy states: "Colin Dexter has stated this is the very LAST Inspector Morse novel." And while, sadly, this may not have the status of an affidavit, it seems unlikely Dexter will bring Morse back from the dead.
During Morse's life, which started when The Last Bus to Woodstock was published in 1975, the detective never got married, never voted Tory and never wore jeans. He lived as an affront to a world that he didn't like, a world that was killing off everything he loved: good bitter, good music, the England hymned by AE Housman. He was so bitter that he never got his round in at the pub. That task was mostly left to his Geordie sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, who as often as not nursed something orange, fizzy and non-alcoholic while Morse looked on as though something, perhaps everything, was wrong with the world. Thus began one of the finest double acts on British television, singular for having two straight men.
How does Morse die? Of a heart attack in bed, though I have my suspicion that it was brought on by savouring Frances Barber's preposterous décolletage one time too many. The murder weapon? Dexter's pen (he likes to write his novels long hand). The motive, too, shouldn't be very difficult to discover. Dexter may well have been so tired of the confusion that persisted between creator and created that he decided one of them had to go. Like Dexter, Morse loved poetry, single malts and more than a spot of Wagner. Like him, too, Morse was a classicist who existed on the fringes of the university, akin to Jude the Obscure in that he was never quite comfortable in the inner sanctums of academe.
They shared dislikes, too: American musicals, litter, Conservatives, television. But there the resemblances ended. Dexter told the Daily Mail in 1996: "I think that Morse has made a bit of a mess of his life. He has ended up alone, ungracious, mean and curmudgeonly." In this he was nothing like Dexter, who completed his degree, has been married since 1956, and is so fond of first names that he has had two - before he was called Colin he was known as Norman.
Morse, famously inscrutable, seemed for years to have no first name; intimacy was not his strong suit, so he had no name but Morse - and "sir". Then Dexter let it slip that Morse's Christian name began with an E and speculation about what this stood for went wild. The Observer even offered tips on what it could be - Eos (Ancient Greek for dawn), perhaps, but probably not Eros (the Greek god of love). Ernest, Eustace, Ethelred, Enoch, suggested William Hill. All wrong, said Dexter: Morse's first name was Endeavour. Dexter disclosed, too, that Morse had been nicknamed Pagan at school because the first four letters of Endeavour were an anagram of Eden. Thus, to his schoolchums, he has been cast out of Eden, like a Pagan. That must have been one noncy school, the fanciful invention of Dexter, a man who used to set crosswords for the Times. The inspector's surname, too, grew out of a puzzler's mindset: Dexter could never complete the Observer's Ximenes puzzle, but each week scanned the list of winners and regularly noticed the name CJ Morse.
There are more reasons for killing off Morse now. He has become a tiresome hero and, worse, his continued existence encourages Dexter to write such ugly, affected sentences as the one with which he starts chapter 72: "Unwontedly in a car, Morse was almost continuously talkative as they drove along." It is a necessary death, and one that may allow John Thaw, who played the detective so marvellously, to emerge from the long shadow of Morse and into the bright sun of something better than Kavanagh QC.
Oxford is where a certain kind of England comes to die. At least on ITV. In John Mortimer's 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder drank champagne and ate plovers' eggs, leading the dissolute lives of the damned while the innocent England that they prized and that Evelyn Waugh loved faded into oblivion all around them. In the early 80s, students organised Brideshead undergraduate tours to pander to viewers' needs to see this Oxford, to bear witness to the same pretty city that they had seen in the TV series. A decade later, a new generation of undergraduates took tourists around Morse's Oxford, all sandstone, good pubs, botanical gardens - symptoms of an England that had long been superseded by shopping centres and ice rinks.
But no one wanted to see the new Oxford; they wanted the carefully cropped, sunlit and sanitised one that they had consumed along with sweet sherries on TV from 1987 to 1993. Throughout Dexter's 14-novel sequence, college quadrangles and the leafy north Oxford avenues were littered with corpses. Morse and Lewis were rarely called to investigate crimes in the working-class suburb of Cowley or the one-time joyriders' haunt of Blackbird Leys. But that made sense: murder would have been too real, too abject there and, given Dexter's aesthetic of murder as an intellectual riddle to be solved in front of a pretty English backdrop, Morse could hardly be expected to wander down those mean streets after a pint of authentically warm bitter at the Perch. Murder, in Dexter's world, was most foul, but it also took place in a most decorous milieu.
That, surely, is the key to Morse's huge appeal. True, Dexter claimed that the TV episodes were "106 minutes of intellect on TV", a medium that he otherwise despises. But in this Dexter flatters himself and deceives nobody. The true mass appeal of Inspector Morse is not how he solved his crimes but what he did during the investigation and where he goes: a wheredunnit rather than a whodunnit, enlivened by Morse cruising Oxfordshire lanes in his burgundy Jaguar 3.4 to the soundtrack of the Magic Flute.
But that Jaguar will transport Morse to the crime scene no more. There he lies now, in the mortuary. He is not alone. "Feeling slightly guilty, Lewis looked around him. But at least for the moment his only company was the dead. And bending down he put his lips to Morse's forehead and whispered just two final words: 'Goodbye, sir.'" Deference to the end, like Hardy at expiring Nelson's cheek. That, or gay necrophilia.
Now what? Isn't it obvious? A new cycle of novels about Chief Inspector Lewis, a maladroit Geordie copper amid the dreaming spires, played - how could it be otherwise? - by Kevin Whately. Lewis's likes? Soft drinks, Alan Shearer, Randy Crawford, conjugal felicity. Dislikes? Crosswords, posh people, working late. He would really clean up Oxford University, and make it a place safe for book learning once more. It could work, you know. Particularly if it was not written by Colin Dexter.