What about Lewis? Like that of Morse, the surname was taken from another of my favorite crossword rivals, Dorothy Taylor, who took the nom de guerre “Mrs. B. Lewis” when entering crossword competitions. Lewis is a good name for a Welshman, and Lewis was a Welshman when I first wrote of him; roughly the same age as Morse, too. ITV’s decision to make him a younger man, with a Geordie accent, was taken without consultation with me, and indeed without my knowledge. Yet I did not remonstrate, nor, as it happens, should I have done so. After viewing the first TV episode of Morse, The Dead of Jericho, I realized that the casting of Kevin Whately as Lewis was a happy triumph, effecting a semi-surrogate father-son relationship between the two detectives. In subsequent Morse novels I solved the obvious discrepancy in the most cowardly of all ways—I ignored it completely, never giving further physical descriptions of Sergeant Lewis. His first name, though? In the episode Promised Land, Lewis (not Morse!) joined the Aussie lager-boys joyously; and the matey Oz culture naturally necessitated a first name. “Robbie,” we decided, was as appropriate as any.

What sort of problems arose with the adaptation of the Morse novels to the TV series?