On re-reading Inspector Morse
I don’t often re-read books. This may be because when I was an English teacher re-reading books pretty much came with the territory, and the pain of having to read yet again a book I would rather not have read in the first place is still fresh in my memory.
So it’s come as something of a surprise to find myself willingly re-reading not just one book, but a whole series. The series in question is Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, and I’ve plunged into a re-read for two reasons.
The first is that, in preparing a talk I gave recently, I realised I wanted to cite the Morse novels as a big influence but I only had vague memories of them – I knew I had enjoyed them but my recall of detail was thin. The second is that, as a writer who has recently embarked on a series of novels featuring my own fictional detective I’m interested to see what I can learn by going back to the works of a master. I’m also interested to see how much the Morse novels might have influenced my own.
I was lucky enough to meet Colin Dexter several times . I invited him to talk to the Sixth Form when I was teaching in a school near Oxford and I interviewed him for a local newspaper. I remember him telling me in that interview that when he started to write his first Inspector Morse novel he did a lot of homework on the geography of Oxford but very little on the police. He also said that the most important elements in a good detective novel were character and place.
In re-reading the series I realised how true this is. It’s the character of Inspector Morse and the Oxford setting that supply the lifeblood and sustain the interest. Morse may be a police detective but there isn’t much procedural detail at all in the early books and although more creeps into the second half of the series (the first appearance of the term SOCO comes in about the eighth) it’s clear that the creator’s principal interests do not include the minutiae of police procedure.
Another thing that struck me was the level of intelligence at work – not just in the elegance of the prose (though the classically educated Dexter certainly knows how to turn a phrase and craft a sentence) but also in the way that Dexter (and Morse) seldom dumb down. Neither is afraid to display learning and cleverness. The range of literary allusion shows this, as well as the fascination with puzzles – not just the crosswords of which both Dexter and his creation are so fond (and at which both are so adept) but all kinds of textual teasers and clues.
This sense of an overarching intelligence is accentuated by the way Dexter tells his stories. Re-reading the series , and especially reading it as a writer, made me aware of his characteristic narrative method. It’s always third person omniscient with the narrator assuming the kind of God-like position favoured by Victorian novelists and often commenting on the action in a similar way. He is all-seeing and all-knowing and gives us access to the thoughts of a wide range of characters, often shifting point of view within the same scene and always, in the great tradition of crime writers withholding certain information from the reader until it suits him to reveal it.
Maybe Dexter’s influence on my writing is greater than I realised. I too am more interested in character and place (in my case Garibaldi and Barnes) than details of procedure, and I too always write third person omniscient, shifting point of view and giving access to many characters’ thoughts – though, unlike Dexter, I confine myself to one perspective in each scene. And it was only on the re-read that I realised I’ve given my detective a character trait that is identical to one of Morse’s – both indulge in what they would call linguistic precision but which others would refer to as grammar pedantry.
Something else I learned is the extent to which my memory of the Morse novels is filtered through, and affected by, my memory of the TV series. I can’t visualise Inspector Morse without seeing John Thaw, and I can’t see him behind the wheel of anything other than a red Jaguar.
So I was surprised to discover in my re-read that Morse originally didn’t drive a Jaguar at all. For the first seven books in the series he’s driving a Lancia. Then in the eighth, The Jewel that was Ours , he’s in a Jaguar. There’s no explanation and the only conclusion can be that the novels that inspired the TV series have become novels influenced by the TV series. It’s clear that Dexter adjusted some aspects of the books in response to the huge success of the TV adaptations.
But there’s one thing the re-read highlighted that has caused me some concern and that’s the novels’ presentation of women. I was a little shocked by the way women were relentlessy subjected to the male gaze and so often presented in terms of marks-out-of-ten fanciability. This may well be Morse’s perspective and a reflection of his flawed character or it may merely reflect the attitudes of a different time, but the jury’s out, in the same way that it’s out on the fact that pornography features in some form in every book and Morse himself shows a worrying fondness for it.
But overall the series re-read was both enjoyable and instructive. Given that I’ve always seen Garibaldi as the bastard son of Morse and Montalbano, maybe it’s time to re-read Camilleri.
