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Inspector Morse

A Mysterious Profile

Colin Dexter

Inspector Morse

Colin Dexter

Perhaps (I hope) the most sensible way for me to write about Chief Inspector Morse is to try to answer some of the many questions which have been put to me most frequently by audiences and correspondents. Then, at least, I can believe that my answers will be focused upon things in which people seem genuinely interested.

But first, a few brief words about myself. The whole of my working life was spent in education: first, as a teacher of Latin and Greek in English grammar schools; second, with increasing deafness blighting my life, as a senior administrative officer with the Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations, in charge of Latin, Greek, Ancient History, and English.

Well, here goes!

What emboldened you to enlist in the rather crowded ranks of the crime-writing fraternity?

It is not unknown, even in mid-summer, for the heavens to open in North Wales; and there are few things more dispiriting than to sit in a guest-house with the rain streaming in rivulets down the windows, and with offspring affirming that every other father somehow manages to locate a splendid resort, with blue skies and warm seas, for the annual family holiday. That was my situation one Saturday afternoon in August 1973. Having rather nervously asserted that we were not planning a premature return to Oxford, I shut myself up in the narrow confines of the kitchen with a biro and a pad of ruled paper—with only a very vague idea of what I was intending to do. I had already finished reading the two paperback detective stories left by previous guests, and I figured that, if I tried hard, I might possibly do almost as well in the genre myself. So for a couple of hours I tried very hard. Resulting in how many paragraphs, I cannot recall. Yet I doubt more than two or three. It was, however, that all-important start: Initium est dimidium facti (the beginning is one half of the deed), as the Roman proverb has it.

Had I any reason other than vanity for wishing to see my name on the jacket of a detective story? Not money certainly, since I was fortunate enough to enjoy a well-paid university post, annually climbing a little higher up the salary scale. If as Dr. Johnson remarked—in uncharacteristically cynical vein—“no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, then I was one of the blockheads. And, again, not because I thought I had anything of criminological, psychological, or sociological import to communicate to my fellow man. I had just that one simple aim in mind—an aim to which I have always held firm in my subsequent writings: to tell a story that would entertain whatever readers might be coming my way.