Authors: Otto Penzler
It would be pleasing to report that later on that August Saturday afternoon the sun broke through the lowering clouds. Yet, as I recall, it didn’t. What I can report is that my first work of fiction, Last Bus to Woodstock, originated on that day, and was finally published by Macmillan in 1975. It featured a detective named Morse. “Just call me Morse!” as he was to say so many times when some delicious and desirable woman asked him for his Christian name. And that is how I shall refer to him throughout this article.
Which crime writers and what kind of crime writing have influenced you?
First memories for me are of Sexton Blake and Tinker, then Edgar Wallace (“King of Thriller Writers”), with his racy and uncluttered style. Next Agatha Christie, pulling the wool over my eyes from page one in myriad imaginative and ingenious plots, and almost invariably baffling the delighted reader until the last chapter, last page, last paragraph.
And she more than any other writer determined the direction of my writing, with an emphasis more on “who” perpetrated the dreadful deed, rather than “why” or “how.” For some “dreadful deed” it had to be, since no reader will be overlong enthralled by the theft of a tin of salmon from the supermarket. It was Christie, then, who motivated my eagerness for surprise endings in the Morse novels. Other writers of course were influential, and like most teenagers I was a great fan of Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes. But more important, I should mention John Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson), with his wonderfully “impossible” locked-room puzzles. I was never able to write such a mystery for Morse to solve, but again it was the “puzzle” element that delighted me so hugely. And it is not unfitting that in his book Bloody Murder, Julian Symons writes of “the puzzles set by Colin Dexter,” gently adding that “perhaps it is churlish to wish that motives and behaviour were a touch nearer reality.” So often have I listened to some of my crime-writing colleagues arguing about the respective merits of “plot” versus “characterization.” But I have always viewed such discussions as somewhat phony, since the totality of a good story subsumes them both, and the greatest accolade that any of us can hope for is to hear one’s partner’s plea from a room downstairs: “I’ll be up in a few minutes, darling. Just let me finish this chapter first.”
Furthermore, in this connection, there is little doubt in my mind that Homer and Ovid would have been the top earners in Hollywood. One other major influence: I had long envied the ability of some few writers, Simenon and Chandler in particular, to establish in their novels a curiously pleasing ambience of a city, a street, a bistro, etc. And I have ever hoped that the physical sense of Oxford, and the very spirit of the city, has permeated the pages in which Morse is summoned to so many (mostly fatal) scenes. Perhaps my one wholly legitimate claim to notoriety is that single-handedly I have made Oxford the murder capital of the UK—and probably of the EU.
What sort of man was Morse? Was he like you?
Of Morse’s physical presence, I had very little idea. I had assumed, I suppose, that (unlike me) he measured up to the height specification for the police force; that his incurable addiction to real ale and single-malt scotch whiskey was gradually but inevitably adding a few inches to his girth; that unlike his creator he had a good head of hair; that to the world at large he paraded no deformities. He was in no way likely to be confused with the description I once gave of myself to a Finnish journalist: “short, fat, bald, and deaf,” on which the lady in question congratulated me warmly, saying that because of this she had recognized me “immediately”!
Morse’s other qualities? Well, unless one is a genius, which I am not, a writer will tend in many respects to be semi-autobiographical in the delineation of the character and temperament of the detective hero. As such, Morse changes very little throughout the novels, betraying the same qualities displayed in my first and, and as I thought at the time, my only one. He was, and remained, a sensitive and sometimes strangely vulnerable man; always a bit of a loner by nature; strongly attracted to beautiful women (often the crooks); dedicated to alcohol; and almost always on the verge of giving up nicotine. In politics, ever on the Left, feeling himself congenitally incapable of voting for the Tory party; a “high-church atheist” (as I called him), yet with a deep love for the Methodist Hymnal, the King James Bible, the church music of Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, etc., the sight of candles, and the smell of incense. Finally, like me, he would have given his hobbies in Who’s Who as reading the poets, crosswords, and Wagner.
And what of his negative qualities? He was quite unwilling to give thanks to any of his hardworking underlings (especially Lewis) and had little or no respect for most of his superior officers. He was unorthodox, with little knowledge of police procedure and only minimal respect for forensic pathology. He was often pig-headed and impatient, a man with alpha-plus acumen, normally six furlongs ahead of the whole field during any investigation but so often running on the wrong racecourse. And has there ever been a fictional detective so desperately mean with money?
On this latter point, I was encouraged by my editors to exemplify any fault rather than merely stating it. And I think that readers began to expect such exemplification in each novel. For example, in The Remorseful Day, the pair of detectives are the first customers in the bar of Oxford’s Randolph Hotel at 11:00 a.m., and Lewis’s eyebrows are raised a few millimeters when, throwing the car keys to him, Morse suggests that it’s high time he, Morse, bought the drinks: a large Glenfiddich for himself and half a pint of orange juice for Lewis—only for the unfortunate barmaid to tell Morse that she cannot find sufficient change so early on for the fifty-pound note proffered. Whereupon, patting his presumably empty pockets, Morse asks his sergeant if by any chance he has some appropriate small change on his person. (Here, I must admit, I had little difficulty in finding exemplars, with advanced symptoms of this odious trait, among a few of the Oxford dons I worked with.) But let me insert a caveat. Mrs. Valerie Lewis (alas killed in a hit-and-run accident) always knew whenever her husband had been selected as Morse’s lieutenant: there was a perceptible change in his step—if less change in his pocket.
How did you get your first Morse novel published?
I have ever maintained that luck, good and bad, plays a considerably larger part in our lives than most people are prepared to acknowledge. It was not always so. The Romans, for example, as well as regularly pouring their libations and sacrificing animals to their traditional pantheon, were also very careful to appease and to seek the approval of the goddess of good luck (Fortuna). We can all accept that a little talent and a lot of hard graft are indispensable concomitants in any worthy enterprise. But what a blessing if the gods collectively are occasionally smiling on us! As they were, after a few early frowns, upon me.
I had my manuscript typed up, with just the one heavily corrected and smudged carbon copy, and asked around for the best bets among the publishing houses. Collins, Gollancz, and Macmillan, in that order, topped the list. I had no agent (still haven’t) and I posted the typescript to Collins—from whom, after a chivvying letter from me, I received a letter about four months later. It was a pleasantly argued letter of the kind that so many hopeful, budding authors have come to know only too well: an “if-ever-you-write-anything-else” kind of letter. A rejection letter. So, leaving out my second choice, I parceled up Last Bus to Woodstock once more and sent it to Macmillan, a publishing house with, as I learned, an increasingly prestigious crime list.
Within forty-eight hours I received a phone call from the senior crime editor there, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, asking me to get up to London posthaste. He had read my novel and was prepared to publish it without further ado (and without alteration!), “warts and all.” Later I learned that he had been suffering from a serious bout of flu at the time and had requested that any new stories should be brought to his bedside. Whether or not his illness was impairing his judgment in any way, I just don’t know. What I do know is that the gods were smiling benevolently on me that particular weekend. Incidentally, when I say that I have never had an agent, that is strictly true. But I have ever stuck with Macmillan. And for over thirty years now, successive crime editors—George Hardinge, Hilary Hale, Maria Rejt, and Beverley Cousins—have handled my literary affairs wonderfully well. I have been, let me repeat it, a very lucky writer.
How did you come up with the names of Morse and Lewis?
Strangely enough, I spent eighteen months in the Royal Signals Regiment doing my National Service, and became a high-speed Morse code operator, serving most of the time in West Germany (1948–50). That, however, had nothing to do with Chief Inspector Morse, whom I named after Sir Jeremy Morse, a man with as sweet and clear a brain as I have known. He was a former chairman of Lloyds Bank; key member of the Bank of England and the IMF; Fellow of All Souls, Oxford; Warden of Winchester College, etc., etc., regularly parading his genius in chess problems and crossword puzzles. Indeed, it was in the crossword world where, as early as the mid-1950s, we became keen competitors—and later good friends. And when I wished to introduce a detective-hero of consummate mental caliber, the surname was staring me in the face, was it not?
What of his strange first name? In The Wench Is Dead, Morse was taken to hospital in Oxford, where from his sickbed he was to solve a murder mystery of well over a hundred years standing. To add, as I trust, a measure of verisimilitude to the situation, I had a medical chart fixed to the bottom of his bed, chiefly recording the regular functioning or nonfunctioning of his bladder and bowels. The chart was headed “Mr. E. Morse.” Now, there are many men’s first names beginning with E, from Eamon to Ezra, and I had no idea at all which one was Morse’s. Understandably so, really, since first-name terms were a bit of a rarity in my day. At school I was “Dexter (ii),” with my older brother “Dexter (i)”; in the army I was “922 Dexter,” the last three digits of my army number; as a schoolmaster I was just “Dexter” to my colleagues and “Sir” to my pupils; and at Oxford, in correspondence to the many hundreds of examiners for whom I was responsible, it was ever “Dear Jones,” “Dear Smith,” etc., with “Dear Miss/Mrs. Whatever” for the ladies.
But just “Morse” was not going to be wholly satisfactory henceforth, since some of the leading bookmakers had produced a list of odds, with Ernest, I believe, a common favorite. So I had to come up with something, and I did. In previous novels I had informed my readers that Morse’s mother was a Quaker and that his father’s great hero was Captain Cook. An examination of the New England Quaker lists threw up a variety of names—not just the familiar Faith, Hope, and Charity, but others, also enshrining comparable Christian virtues. And it was my wife, Dorothy, who discovered Determination Davies, and (yes!) Endeavour Jones. Things were settled then. “It is now Endeavour Morse,” wrote a correspondent to The Times, “endeavour more shall be so”! I broke the news at the end of Death Is Now My Neighbor, whereupon Lewis was heard to mumble, “You poor sod, sir.”
What about Lewis? Like that of Morse, his surname was taken from one of my favorite crossword rivals, Dorothy Taylor, who used 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 semisurrogate 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 television 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.
How and why did Morse make it to TV?
In the 1980s, the Independent Television Corporation (ITV) was looking for a new detective series, and simultaneously it appeared that many viewers wanted less violence, fewer gunfights, and (please!) no more car chases. Several of the imported American crime programs were coming to the end of their runs, and perhaps the stage was being set for a quieter, more cerebral breed of detective series, where brains were likely to be a better bet than brawn. The Zeitgeist was definitely changing. But there were some early doubts about whether Morse could and should fit the bill. It may well be, as someone pointed out at the time, that as well as being “more everything else,” such a program might also turn out to be more tedious. “Dexter’s idea of dramatic confrontation,” I read, “is a couple of Classics dons arguing about Aristotle outside the Ashmolean.” Fortunately for me, two very gifted men, each with huge experience in the TV world, were very much pro Morse. After reading some of my novels, both agreed that the beautiful city of Oxford would be an ideal setting for a series of murders, solved by a lugubrious Wagnerian and his solid (never stolid!) sidekick.
At a meeting in a north Oxford pub, The Friar Bacon, Kenny McBain, Anthony Minghella, Julian Mitchell, and I drank a few pints of beer together and talked of many things… of which I remember only one with clarity. When I suggested that after lunch I would with the greatest pleasure show them around a few of the murder sites in Oxford that I had already used, McBain smiled and declined my offer: “We’ve already visited them, Colin.” After lunch, half launched upon the shores of light was Inspector Morse that day.