Inspector Morse

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Inspector Morse

"Inspector Morse" (book cover)
Genre Drama
Creator(s) Colin Dexter,
Tony Warren
Starring John Thaw,
Kevin Whately
Country of origin United Kingdom
No. of episodes 33
Production
Producer(s) Zenith,
Central Independent Television
Carlton Television
Running time 1 - 2 hours
Broadcast
Original channel ITV1
Original run 1987 – 2000
Chronology
Related shows Lewis
Links

Detective Chief Inspector Morse is a fictional character, who features in a series of thirteen detective novels by British author Colin Dexter, though he is better known for the 33 episode TV series produced by Central Independent Television from 1987–2000, in which he was portrayed by John Thaw. Morse is a senior CID (Criminal Investigation Department) officer with the Thames Valley Police in Oxford, England.

Contents

[edit] Novels

The Inspector Morse novels have been successful in both book and television serial form. Set primarily in Oxford with a vintage Mark 2 Jaguar car (originally a Lancia), a thirst for beer, intellectual snobbery, and penchant for Wagner, Morse presents a likeable person despite his sullen temperament.

Morse dislikes spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. This is demonstrated by the fact that in every personal or private document written to him, he manages to point out at least one spelling mistake. His approach to crime-solving, he frequently asserts, is deductive and one of Morse's key tenets is the axiom that 'the last person to see the victim alive was the murderer'. Dexter is a fan of cryptic crosswords, and Morse is named after champion solver Sir Jeremy Morse, one of Dexter's arch-rivals as a clue-writer in the crossword world. In every novel (except the first, Last Bus to Woodstock) the surname of the killer is taken from those of winners of the weekly Azed solving competition that appears in The Observer[1]. Indeed, for a while, Dexter wrote a weekly How to Solve Cryptic Crosswords column in the Observer's sister paper The Guardian.

Morse's first name, "Endeavour", was kept a secret until the end of Death is Now My Neighbour (traditionally Morse claimed that he should be called 'Morse' or jokingly that his first name was 'Inspector'). The origin of his name is the vessel HM Bark Endeavour, as Morse's mother was a Quaker (Quakers have a tradition of "virtue names") and his father was a fan of Captain James Cook.

Morse is an interesting and complex character to assess from a social and political viewpoint. In sharp juxtaposition to the Welsh (altered to northern in the TV series) working class background of his assistant, Lewis (named for another rival clue-writer, Mrs. B. Lewis), Morse is ostensibly the embodiment of white, male, upper-middle-class Englishness, with a set of prejudices and assumptions to match. He is, for example, frequently portrayed in the act of patronising women characters to the extent that some feminist critics have argued that Morse is a misogynist[2]. Morse's relationships with authority, the establishment, bastions of power and the status quo are, markedly ambiguous.

The titles of the books are:

  • Last Bus to Woodstock, 1975
  • Last Seen Wearing, 1976
  • Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, 1977
  • Service of All the Dead, 1979
  • The Dead of Jericho, 1981
  • The Riddle of the Third Mile, 1983
  • The Secret of Annexe 3, 1986
  • The Wench is Dead, 1989
  • The Jewel That Was Ours, 1991
  • The Way Through the Woods, 1992
  • The Daughters of Cain, 1994
  • Death is Now My Neighbour, 1996
  • The Remorseful Day, 2000

Inspector Morse also appears in several stories in Dexter's short story collection, Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (1993, expanded edition 1994).

Dexter killed Morse in his last book, The Remorseful Day. Morse dies in a hospital bed from complications of his neglected type 2 diabetes.

[edit] Television series

Main article: List of Inspector Morse episodes

The Inspector Morse novels were made into an extremely successful TV series (also called Inspector Morse) for the British TV channel ITV. The series was made by Zenith Productions for Central (a company later acquired by Carlton). The series comprises 33 two-hour episodes (100 minutes excluding commercials)—twenty more episodes than there are novels—produced between 1987 and 2000. The final episode was adapted from the final novel.

John Thaw (left) and Kevin Whately (right) as Morse and Lewis
John Thaw (left) and Kevin Whately (right) as Morse and Lewis

Morse himself was played by John Thaw and the faithful Detective Sergeant Lewis by Kevin Whately (Lewis is transformed from the elderly Welshman and ex-boxer of the novels to a much younger Geordie police sergeant with a family as a foil to Morse's cynical streak). Dexter makes a cameo appearance in all but three of the episodes. The series remains popular and is frequently repeated on ITV1 and ITV3 in Britain.

John Thaw had a special appreciation of the fact that Morse was different from classic characters such as James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. Morse was brilliant but he wasn't always right. He often arrested the wrong person or came to the wrong conclusion. As a result, unlike many classic sleuths, Morse does not always simply "bust" his culprit; ironic circumstances have the case end and the crime brought to him. Also, Morse was a romantic but had little success in meeting women.

Morse is a character whose talents and intelligence were being wasted in positions which fail to match his abilities. Several references are made to the fact that Morse would have been promoted above and beyond chief inspector at Thames Valley CID, but his cynicism and lack of ambition, coupled also to veiled hints that he may have made enemies in high places, frustrate his progression despite his intelligence and Oxford connections.

Morse is a highly credible detective and plausible human being. His penchant for drinking, his life filled with difficult personal relationships, and his negligence with his health, however, make him a more tragic character than previous classic sleuths.

John Thaw portrayed these characteristics of Morse with superb skill; however, this may have been due in part to Thaw's own alcoholism that plagued his later life, up to one year before his death. Morse's eventual death in the 2000 episode The Remorseful Day is due to heart problems exacerbated by heavy drinking, differing from the literary character's diabetes-related demise.

Cover of "Last Bus To Woodstock", the first Morse novel by Colin Dexter
Cover of "Last Bus To Woodstock", the first Morse novel by Colin Dexter

[edit] Music

The theme and incidental music for the series was written by Barrington Pheloung and utilises a motif based on the Morse code for "M.O.R.S.E." (-- --- ·-· ··· ·).

In the documentary entitled The Mystery of Morse Pheloung states that he occasionally spelled out the name of the killer in Morse code in the music, or alternately spelled out the name of another character as a red herring.

The choice of classical music excerpts as additional incidental music is reflected by the success of several collections of "music from the Morse series" recordings released on CD.

The TV series and the CDs play some of Morse's favorites, Mozart, Schubert, and Wagner.

[edit] Spinoff series

A pilot episode, Lewis, starring Kevin Whately as the now-promoted Inspector Lewis went into production in July 2005. This pilot was broadcast on ITV1 on 29 January 2006, and in the US it aired on PBS on July 31 of the same year. A further three episodes were broadcast on ITV1 in February-March 2007.

[edit] Radio

A BBC Radio 4 series was made starring the voices of John Shrapnel as Morse and Robert Glenister as Lewis.

[edit] Locations

  • Beaumont College (in the TV episodes The Last Enemy and The Infernal Serpent) and Lonsdale College (in The Riddle of the Third Mile, the book on which that episode was based) are both fictional Oxford colleges. The real Brasenose College was used to represent Lonsdale, while Corpus Christi is used for Beaumont. Both fictional names are from real streets in Oxford.


[edit] Legacy

  • In November 2005, the Jaguar Mark 2 car (with number plate 248 RPA) used in the television series sold for more than GBP 100,000 [1].

[edit] Further reading

  • Bishop, David, The Complete Inspector Morse: From the Original Novels to the TV Series London: Reynolds & Hearn (2006) ISBN 1-9052871-3-5
  • Bird, Christopher, The World of Inspector Morse: A Complete A-Z Reference for the Morse Enthusiast Foreword by Colin Dexter London: Boxtree (1998) ISBN 0752221175
  • Goodwin, Cliff, Inspector Morse Country : An Illlustrated Guide to the World of Oxford's famous detective London: Headline (2002) ISBN 0755310640
  • Leonard, Bill, The Oxford of Inspector Morse: Films Locations History Location Guides, Oxford (2004) ISBN 0-9547671-1-X
  • Sanderson, Mark, The Making of Inspector Morse Pan Macmillan (1995) ISBN 0330344188

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Jonathan Crowther, A–Z of Crosswords: Insights into the Top Setters and their Puzzles, Collins, 2006, ISBN 978-0-00-722923-9
  2. ^ e.g. Review: Death Is Now My Neighbour by Val McDermid.

[edit] External links

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