Inspector Morse
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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 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.
Contents |
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: Image:Last Bus To Woodstock.jpg
- 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.
Image:Inspector Morse.jpg 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 the alcoholism that plagued his later life, up to one year before his death.
List
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 had spelled out the name of the killer in Morse code to tell you who did it, and has purposely spelled out someone else to throw you off.
That the makers of the series took great care in the choice of classical music excerpts as additional incidental musicTemplate:Ref, reflects in the fact that several collections of "music from the Morse series" recordings were published successfully.
The TV series and the CDs play some of Morse's favorites, Mozart, Schubert, and of course Wagner.
- Template:Note But in Driven to Distraction, Morse is listening to a cassette playing the end of the Prelude from the first Bach 'Cello Suite. Sgt. Maitland asks to hear the other side of the cassette. The start of Prelude plays — making the cassette about two minutes total, with half the Prelude on each side.
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.
Trivia
- In November 2005, the Jaguar Mark 2 car used in the television series sold for more than GBP 100,000 [1].
- Beaumont College (in the TV episode The Last Enemy) and Lonsdale College (in The Riddle of the Third Mile, the book on which that episode was based) are both fictional colleges of Oxford University. The real Brasenose College was used to represent Lonsdale.