by
Colin Dexter
320
pages, Pan
Review
by Pat Black
We
take another stroll through Oxford’s dreaming spires and foaming dives with our
most curmudgeonly detective, Inspector Morse. The Dead of Jericho places Morse in the early 1980s, at some remove
from the raging sexism of the mid-70s, but not that much.
It’s
got a spooky beginning. We meet a nameless man at a party, casting his predatory
eye over a slew of ladies with a view of taking one of them – any of them – to
bed. He focuses on one particular lady, and they get on well, but his
intentions don’t quite seem honourable.
It’s
only after a reference to drinking cask ales the whole day long and being
“over-beered” as the party draws to a close that we realise this man is not a
potential murderer, but Morse.
The
inspector continues to behave in a shadowy fashion. He drifts through the early
part of the narrative dealing with the death of the lady we meet at the party
much like Sherlock Holmes’ silhouette haunts the moors in The Hound of the Baskervilles. He does eyebrow-raising, if not
jaw-dropping things – like wandering into the house of the woman at the party
uninvited when he tries her unlocked door, driven by a compulsion we’d rather
not consider in too much detail. He is probably the last person to cross Anne
Scott’s threshold before she is found hanging in her room. This could be a tad
problematic for Morse.
You
don’t quite feel at ease with the great detective. His hands always seem a little grubby.
Our
cryptic clue: one across, Father Green, missing some Endeavour? (7)
Morse
isn’t the cause of this tragedy, but he is firmly locked in its orbit. It takes
all of his celebrated skills to unravel the mystery of Anne Scott’s death,
especially when her neighbour, handyman and full-time stalker also turns up
dead.
This
my second dip into Morse’s world after his debut, and again I was struck by the
contrast between the academic Mecca he lives in and whose cerebral matters he
thrives upon, and the relatively low circumstances and sordid expirations he
investigates. There’s a lot in the mix, as usual, with a blackmail plot, some
voyeurism, petty neighbourhood gripes contained within a bridge school unguent
with spitting cobras and of course, Morse’s permanently thwarted priapic
quests. In considering a crime scene, Morse notices a pile of pornographic
magazines, and idly flicks through them with the bulging-eyed wonder of a
plooky teen.
Morse
is a wonderful curmudgeon, both in Dexter’s source material and in the TV
series starring John Thaw, which fixed him permanently in the public
consciousness. But in the TV show he was a frustrated romantic, whereas here
he’s a seedy wanker. Sergeant Lewis, stolid, loyal and long-suffering as a mistreated
donkey, is on hand to counter Morse’s irascible tendencies and to help him
escape the confines of his own raging ego to see the flaws in his lines of
inquiry.
One
saving grace is that Dexter is keen to point out Morse’s flaws. The great
detective makes mistakes, and falls for the red herrings as readily as the reader.
Another plus point for the book is its brevity – a couple of hundred pages and
out (or 300-odd, depending on which edition you have), with barely a breath in
between chapters.
The
front cover of my omnibus is of a piece with the TV show, bearing the bonnet of
Morse’s burgundy Jaguar. The original paperbacks, if you check them out online,
betray its less noble lineage - slim volumes with slightly seedy covers
befitting its insalubrious subject matter. Morse is a fascinating character,
and one I enjoy returning to, with all his perverse complexity.
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