Inspector Morse

[poliphilo]

I never got hooked on the TV series. I watched an episode or two. Gentle, middlebrow stuff, not really for me.

But the book was lying there and I wanted a change from Dickens. 

The first surprise was it's not very well written.  Awkwardness, pomposity, uncertainty of tone, too many adjectives and adverbs-  all the marks of the literary amateur.  I thought this was going to be at the high end of the market and it's not. Morse is a culture-buff, but his reported judgements are banal; Keats is  a  "fine poet. ...You should read him, Lewis",  Wagner is "exquisite", the spires of Oxford are "stately". Dorothy Sayers or P.D. James this ain't.

The second surprise was- hold on a minute- Morse is a porn-fiend. How very unJohn Thaw. He gripes at the News of the World for not being racy enough, he thumbs through a suspect's collection of "supremely pornographic" Scandanavian magazines and barely represses the urge to pocket one, he sends Lewis to do some detecting and passes the afternoon in a strip club, he appraises women in a way that may have been less offensive in 1976 than it is now.

Also he drinks too much. I don't know where the drink driving laws stood in the mid 70s but there's no doubt if he were around today he'd be persistently over the limit.

A bit of a saddo really. I suppose that's the point. He's a crap policeman who gets his results by woolgathering. A not uninteresting conceit.

The Oxford setting goes for less than I imagined it would. A lot of places are name-checked but otherwise this could be anywhere in middle England.

The final test of a whodunnit is whether it foxes you or not. I already have my eye on a suspect- and not the one that's been foregrounded to put us off the scent.   We'll see...

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

You know what I love about the TV series? Seeing all the actors drafted in to play villains and corpses and hapless witnesses and saying "Cor, wow, what did he used to be in before, you know, the funny cop programme with whozit and thingummybob..." It works also for Begerac, which we have been watching at home. Bit parts by Warren Clarke and Greta Scacchi among others.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's a small world, the world of TV drama. It's always fun- with the big budget series- to see which of the neighbours they've invited round to guest this week.