Inspector Morse

Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour 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. Morse is a senior CID (Criminal Investigation Department) officer with the Thames Valley Police in Oxford, England.

Novels

It is primarily the personality of the main character that makes the Inspector Morse novels so successful. With his beautiful vintage Mark 2 Jaguar car (originally a Lancia), thirst for beer, intellectual snobbery, and penchant for Wagner, he is a likeable person despite his sullen temperament. He also 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.

Dexter is a fan of cryptic crosswords, and Inspector Morse is named after champion solver Sir Jeremy Morse. In every novel the surname of the killer is taken from those of winners of the weekly Azed solving competition that appears in The Observer. 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 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 father was a Quaker (Quakers have a tradition of "virtue names") and a fan of Captain James Cook.

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, and has thus far shown no sign of resurrecting him—unlike Arthur Conan Doyle, who killed his main character only to bring him back to life. Morse dies in a hospital bed from complications of his neglected type 2 diabetes—his diabetes is mentioned repeatedly in the later books, and is one of the more realistic treatments of this disease in fiction.

Television series

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.

Morse himself was played by John Thaw and the faithful Detective Sergeant Lewis by Kevin Whately. 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; in the United States, reruns (often edited to allow additional commercials) regularly appear on a cable network, The Biography Channel, while the uncut versions have been shown on the PBS show Mystery!. The series has been issued as cut-price video cassettes and DVDs containing one episode each, together with magazine-size booklets giving background information on each episode, and as a series of 17 double DVDs containing two episodes each (the last disc contains one episode and a two-hour retrospective).

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 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 in part to Thaw's own alcoholism that plagued his later life, up to one year before his death.

Episodes by series

The titles of the television episodes are:

1st Series, 1987:
- 1. The Dead of Jericho
- 2. The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn
- 3. Service of All the Dead

2nd Series, 1988:
- 4. The Wolvercote Tongue
  (subsequently novelised as The Jewel That Was Ours, although the resolution is very different)
- 5. Last Seen Wearing
- 6. The Settling of the Sun
- 7. Last Bus to Woodstock

3rd Series, 1989:
- 8. Ghost in the Machine
- 9. The Last Enemy (based on The Riddle of the Third Mile)
- 10. Deceived by Flight
- 11. The Secret of Bay 5B

4th Series, 1990:
- 12. Infernal Serpent
- 13. The Sins of the Fathers
- 14. Driven to Distraction
- 15. Masonic Mysteries

5th Series, 1991:
- 16. Second Time Around
- 17. Fat Chance
- 18. Who Killed Harry Field?
- 19. Greeks Bearing Gifts
- 20. Promised Land, also known as Inspector Morse in Australia

6th Series, 1992:
- 21. Dead on Time
- 22. Happy Families
- 23. The Death of the Self
- 24. Absolute Conviction
- 25. Cherubim and Seraphim

7th Series, 1993:
- 26. Deadly Slumber
- 27. The Day of the Devil
- 28. Twilight of the Gods

Specials, 1995–2000:
- 29. The Way Through the Woods (with a very different resolution than the novel)
- 30. The Daughters of Cain
- 31. Death Is Now My Neighbour
- 32. The Wench Is Dead
- 33. The Remorseful Day

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." (-- --- ·-· ··· ·).

According to Pheloung, he frequently spelled out the name of the killer in Morse code, and 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 of course Wagner.

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 ITV on 29 January 2006.

Radio

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

Trivia

In November 2005, the Jaguar Mark 2 car used in the television series sold for more than GBP 100,000 ^*.

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 Merton is used for Beaumont. Both fictional names are from real streets in Oxford.

External links

Inspecteur Morse (série télévisée) | Inspector Morse | Inspektør Morse | Kommissarie Morse

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