I didn’t. He died of natural causes—a virtually inevitable consequence of a lifetime spent with “cigarettes and whiskey,” though not with “wild, wild, women.” The cigarettes were always a problem, and Morse gave them up on innumerable occasions--usually every day. Alcohol, however, was a different matter, with real ale and single-malt Scotch his favored tipples. Frequently, with Lewis, he sought to perpetuate the claim that he needed to drink in order to think, and indeed there was clearly some justification for such a claim. Whiskey, if drunk copiously, may have at least three possible effects: the legs may buckle, the speech become blurred, the brain befuddled. But Morse had no trouble with this last effect. His brain was sharper than ever, his imagination bolder, even his deep pessimism concerning the future of the planet a fraction modified. A longer-term effect was that his health grew worse, and he knew the score as well as any of the medical consultants whom Morse steadfastly refused to visit.

But there were, if I am honest, several other reasons why I decided to end the Morse era. First, it is my opinion that few crime-writers manage to sustain their previously high level of output as they get older, and I had neither the ambition nor the need to try to join that select few. Second, my health was not robust, and becomes progressively worse now. Third, I felt that I had said enough about the relationship between Morse and Lewis, and I realized that the repeated exemplifications of Morse’s character traits were becoming somewhat cliché-ridden, with a good deal of the original freshness lost. Finally, I realized that I hadn’t many (any?) further plots left in my head to construct and develop. All right, we could have had a gentle ending, with Morse at last realizing his dreams of fair women, getting wed, and living happily ever after. But even my great hero Chandler made a sad mistake, in Playback, in my opinion, when providing a regular nuptial bed for Philip Marlowe and a beautiful lady.

You wrote only 13 full-length Morse novels. How come there were 33 episodes?

The Morse short-stories I had written were too insubstantial for any two-hour treatment. After the novels were exhausted, I was asked by Kenny McBain if I could come up with four new plot-outlines for the subsequent year’s quartet. I should have said no, since I was still a greenhorn in this TV business, and had little idea what such a task would entail.

I wrote two excessively lengthy ‘outlines’, for The Ghost in the Machine and for Deceived by Flight, both over sixty pages, as I recall. I then struggled through a third—and gave up on the fourth, realizing at last that my brain was quite unable to cope with such an assignment. From that point, screenplay writers were invited not just to adapt something I had written, but to produce original scripts. There were two dangers in this.