Dexter, Inspector Morse mystery writer, dies at 86

Teacher turned author, wrote ‘to entertain’

Colin Dexter, a British grammar school teacher turned author who created Inspector Morse, a curmudgeonly detective who adores real ale, poetry, Wagnerian opera and crossword puzzles and who became the hero of more than a dozen novels and a popular television series, died March 21 at his home in Oxford, England. He was 86.

In announcing his death, Pan Macmillan publisher Jeremy Trevathan said that Dexter “represented the absolute epitome of British crime writing.” No cause was provided.

Adapted for public television and shown in 33 episodes in 200 countries between 1987 and 2000, the mysteries of murder most foul — in the academic serenity of the university town of Oxford — were no match for the brains and wit of Inspector Morse, who eventually solved the riddles, sometimes long after the fact.

The show’s producers once claimed to The Washington Post that 1 billion people around the world watched Inspector Morse and his sidekick, Sgt. Lewis, bring culprits to justice or at least to public exposure. In reruns, the audience has only swelled.

Inspector Morse was played by John Thaw, a British actor who died in 2002, and Kevin Whately portrayed Lewis; Dexter often made cameo appearances, playing variously a tourist, a doctor, a prisoner, a bishop and a bum.

In a measure of Inspector Morse’s popularity, there were tours of Oxford with visits to real-life pubs he was said to have frequented and stops at fictional murder sites.

Dexter’s awards included two Golden Dagger prizes from the Crime Writers Association of Britain and its lifetime achievement award in 1997, a Diamond Dagger.

“I wrote for one purpose only and that was to entertain,” he told Britain’s Sunday Express in 2005. “I wanted people to turn the pages.”

Norman Colin Dexter was born in Stamford, England, on Sept. 29, 1930, a birthday he shared with the fictional Endeavour Morse, the detective chief inspector of the Thames Valley Constabulary. (He did not reveal Morse’s first name until late in the series.)

Friends of Dexter gradually came to recognize that he shared personality traits and characteristics with his fictional creation.

“I wanted to make him a bit like me in general terms,” he told The Post in 2001. “No faith in the almighty, on the left in politics — he would have voted for (Al) Gore. In temperament he’s pessimistic… . He’s sensitive to the poets, he’s a bit vulnerable, easily hurt, though he doesn’t show it much.

But he has this aesthetic capacity, which I think people enjoy, he’s very clever, more clever than I am. Slightly melancholy. I think people respond to that.”

Dexter’s father was a taxi driver and garage owner who had left school at 12.

He and his wife, who also quit grammar school, were determined that their sons, including Colin, would be well educated.

Dexter studied the classics at Christ’s College at Cambridge and graduated in 1953, later receiving a master’s degree from the same university. In 1956, he married Dorothy Cooper, who survives, along with two children and two grandsons.

JOHN STILLWELL/PA, FILE VIA AP In 2000, author Colin Dexter was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature.