Creator of tetchy detective Morse
Colin Dexter, writer: b Stamford, Lincolnshire, September 29, 1930; m Dorothy Copper, 1d, 1s; d Oxford, March 21, 2017, aged 86.
Colin Dexter created the cerebral, Oxford-based policeman Inspector Morse, one of the bestloved characters in English detective fiction.
In 14 novels written by Dexter – as well as in more than 30 sumptuous adaptations for television with John Thaw in the title role – Morse out-thought every murderer he encountered. However fiendish or wily the perpetrator of a crime, the ungracious inspector – mean with his money, thoughtless to his staff – was always his equal.
Morse was probably the most physically inactive fictional detective since Hercule Poirot. He disdained the rough stuff; houseto-house inquiries were punctuated by visits to the pub; and he had no time for anything so vulgar as a high-speed car chase.
In all this – as in his tastes for real ale, crossword puzzles, the classics and classical music – Morse was relentlessly old-fashioned. He was also highprincipled. But he was saved from priggishness by his bluff honesty, and by his occasional crises of selfconfidence – he always got his man, but not without enduring some exquisite mental tortures.
Dexter always acknowledged the brilliance of the television programmes. He did, however, once complain: ‘‘I had quite a bit of success before. I had won two Silver Dagger Awards, and that was why they wanted to put the stories on television.’’
Of his writing, he said: ‘‘I’ve never worried about character study or anything like that. I want to write stories people are interested in. The idea that I am analysing or exploring the dark abyss of the soul is silly.’’
In fact, it was probably Dexter’s choice of location that was truly inspired. The classic British detective story is informed by the device of an ordered, predictable world that is destabilised by the act of murder. Oxford – with its familiar beauty and aura of tradition and continuity – is a powerful paradigm of that world.
He began his first book, Last Bus to Woodstock, on a whim, while he and his family were on holiday in North Wales. The principal characters, Morse and Lewis, were named after the banker Sir Jeremy Morse and a Mrs B Lewis, both regular and successful entrants in the crossword competitions which Dexter also entered and excelled in.
Norman Colin Dexter, the son of a taxi driver, was born at Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 1930. Having won a scholarship to Stamford School, he went on to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Classics. After completing his National Service, he became a classics master in the Midlands, teaching Latin and Greek at grammar schools in Loughborough, Leicester and Corby.
It was at Corby that his deafness, which had been getting worse for some years, forced him to abandon his teaching career. He was soon offered another job, as senior assistant secretary at the University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations; in this role he ran the English and Classics syllabuses for Oxford’s examination board from 1966 until 1987, when he retired to concentrate on writing. The television adaptations began in 1987, and at their peak in the early 1990s attracted some 18 million viewers; they have also been sold to 40 countries.
Fans of Inspector Morse were also invited to speculate about their hero’s Christian name. Having learnt in Service of All the Dead (1979) that it began with an ‘‘E’’, they had to wait till the last sentence of Death is Now My Neighbour, published 17 years later, to discover this stood for Endeavour.
After nearly 25 years and 13 novels featuring 80 corpses, Dexter had tired of his hero, and in 1999, to a fanfare of publicity, he killed off Inspector Morse in his last book, The Remorseful Day; true to form, Morse did not perish in hot pursuit of a villain, but in a hospital bed, from cardiac arrest brought on by his inattention to his diabetic condition.
Dexter was by now a rich man, though he cared little for the things that riches could buy. He and his wife continued to live in the semi-detached house in North Oxford which had been their home since the 1960s; they never replaced their car until it began to disintegrate; and were perfectly happy, when they took a holiday, to book places on a coach tour.
Once asked to describe himself, Dexter wrote: ‘‘Short, fat, bald, deaf; a lukewarm socialist; a Low Church atheist; a lover of crosswords, Wagner, cask-conditioned beer and the scholar-poet A E Housman; a hater of American musicals, Australian cricketers, litter and the political prejudices of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.’’
Some of these characteristics were equally applicable to Morse. But Dexter was unlike his fictional creation in that he was excellent company.