The crossword champion who created Inspector Morse

Colin Dexter 1930-2017

Colin Dexter thought of

himself primarily as a school

teacher, said Dennis Barker in The Guardian, but he will be remembered as the creator of Inspector Morse – the cantankerous but sensitive detective who, in 13 novels and many more TV dramas, drove a vintage Jaguar around Oxford, solving fiendish murders. This often involved thinking deeply about “chance remarks” made by his likeable and ever-patient sidekick, Sergeant Lewis – a working-class family man, wearily resigned to the fact that whenever Morse wanted to stop at a pub for a pint of ale, he’d be the one footing the bill. Dexter had much in common with Morse: both loved poetry, the classics, classical music and crosswords – but where Morse was gruff and misanthropic, his creator was warm and gregarious, with an impish sense of fun.

Norman Colin Dexter was born in 1930 in Stamford, Lincolnshire. His father was a taxi driver and his mother was determined that her children would move on to great things, so pushed them to work hard at their studies. Colin and his brother won scholarships to Stamford School, and Colin went from there to Christ’s College Cambridge, where he read classics. After graduating in 1953, he went into teaching, and by 1959 he was senior classics master at Corby Grammar School. He was, by all accounts, a popular and successful teacher, who prided himself on getting better marks for his pupils than they thought they could achieve. But then, in 1966, he sensed in class one day that the boys were distracted, but couldn’t work out why. It transpired that one of them had brought in a radio, and had slowly turned it up to full volume. Dexter had grown so deaf, he hadn’t noticed. He retired from teaching, and instead became an examiner for the Oxford board – which meant moving there with his wife, Dorothy. He began writing in the early 1970s, when, on a rainy holiday in Wales, he read two detective novels he found lying around, and felt he could do better. His first book, Last Bus to Woodstock, came out in 1975. Dexter was himself a crossword champion, and the principal characters were named after regular winners of contests he entered: C.J. Morse (the banker Sir Jeremy Morse), and Mrs B. Lewis (the pseudonym of Dorothy Taylor). Morse’s first name remained a mystery, however, until Dexter finally revealed that it was not Ernest, or Edward, or even Enoch, as some fans had suggested, but Endeavour (a name the bookies had never considered). Morse’s parents, he explained, were Quakers, and admirers of Captain Cook, who sailed on the Endeavour. Another mystery – why Morse, though attracted to beautiful women, never married – remained unsolved.

Dexter won two Silver Dagger awards for his Morse novels, and loved the TV adaptations, which began in 1987. He often visited the set, made repeat cameo appearances, and grew close to the show’s stars, John Thaw and Kevin Whately. At its peak, Inspector Morse attracted 18 million viewers, and it was sold to some 40 countries. Dexter, who wrote several of the original screenplays when the books ran out, grew rich, but money didn’t interest him. He and Dorothy (with whom he had two children) stayed in the modest house they’d bought in the 1960s; for their holidays, they were happy to go on coach tours, or walking trips; and though Dexter loved cars, his was not as grand as Morse’s. He finally killed off the detective in 1999, in The Remorseful Day (a title taken from a poem by A.E. Housman, whose work he, and Morse, loved). Later, he speculated that Morse would probably have chosen In Paradisum from Fauré’s Requiem for his funeral service, “as I probably shall for mine”.