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?

Each medium, written novel and televised version of it, has its own distinctive strengths—and weaknesses. In a crime-novel, a writer can get away with anything; can literally get away with murder, or multiple murders (as I know perfectly well). And if I wish to write “Lewis decided to risk jumping down the 20 foot wall, and happily landed uninjured,” there is no problem. In reality however, on TV, he would either break his leg(s), or call in a stunt-man, or get the cameraman to fiddle the scene. In a novel, I can put a convenient end to some wicked malefactor by having a pack of rabid Rottweilers tear him literally to pieces, and even describe the process. With TV, life is still regarded as a little more precious. The big advantage of TV, of course, is that the viewer can see what’s happening, and where it’s happening. A very simple example would be the fabric of the city of Oxford. Whilst I may indulge myself for a couple of paragraphs on describing the effect of sunlight on the cinnamon-colored stone of an Oxford college, TV can do it in a few seconds—and do it better. It is the combination of such camera-work with the accompanying dialogue, which is, and which has to be, the modus operandi of television, this being the only obvious means available of carrying forward the development of any drama. Why? Because it is not at all easy to think on TV. What is the point of any actor’s face filling the screen for twenty seconds or so, hand to face like Rodin’s “Thinker,” saying nothing at all, but looking—well, looking thoughtful, just above the sub-title “Do not adjust your set”? Unless—unless one has a quite remarkable actor (and John Thaw was such a one) who could communicate by silence, by the slightest movement of his facial features, and most particularly by his eyes. In a novel, if he so purposes, a writer may indulge in “thinking” all the time on every page, never veering from some “stream of consciousness” flow, even to get up for a cup of tea. Television’s compensatory benefit is the use it may so readily make of music. None of us expects (or wants) to find an occasional CD stuck on to the pages of a novel. But music has been a wonderfully appropriate accompaniment to many TV programs—as it was to Inspector Morse.