Barrington Pheloung’s introductory theme-music was a splendid opening, with its fusion of a fine melody with the ‘da-ditty-da’ rhythm of the Morse code. (Incidentally, it was later put to words and appeared on the pop-charts.) It was not, as some have supposed, a clever, surely too clever, means of tapping out the letters of the crook’s name. It was, quite simply, a poignant, haunting motif that set exactly the right tone and mood that the series required. After the individual episodes developed, music became integral to the moods, actions, and meanings of the scenes being portrayed. Let me give some illustrations of how it all worked, for which we owe everything to Barrington.

My own musical loves have centered predominantly on the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially Wagner (of course!), Bruckner, Mahler, and (later) Richard Strauss. Fairly obviously the musical tastes of Morse mirrored my own. And, being mentioned frequently in the novels, they had some influence on many of the musical extracts used by Barrington, as did the favorites of Kenny McBain, particularly in the latter case Mozart’s clarinet compositions. Which illustrations do I particularly remember? Vivaldi’s Gloria at the beginning of the first TV programme, The Dead of Jericho; Callas singing Tosca in The Ghost in the Machine; Ella Fitzgerald’s voice in Driven to Distraction; Mozart’s The Magic Flute (passim) in Masonic Mysteries; the Schubert Quintet in C in Dead on Time; the Immolation Scene from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in Twilight of the Gods; and the Prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal in The Remorseful Day. I could go on and on. And I will do a little, since I should not forget Barrington’s catchy composition Truckin’ Till I’m Dead in Promised Land; nor his original rave music in Cherubim and Seraphim.

If, as is often claimed, music is more able than other arts to give expression and form to our innermost feelings, let me single out the two examples which I found most memorable of all. First, the ethereal extract from the finale of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in Promised Land, when Morse mounts the steps of the Sydney Opera House. Does opera ever rise above such glorious heights? Second, the extraordinarily moving In Paradisum from Fauré’s Requiem in The Remorseful Day, which includes the wonderful words et cum Lazaro, quondam paupere, aeternam habeas requiem (“and with Lazarus, once a poor man, you may have eternal rest”). Inspector Morse would have opted for it at his funeral, as I shall at mine.

Did you have any discipline about the times you set aside for writing?

No.

Why did you kill off Morse?