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

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

One doesn't read detective fiction for its literary merit. And speaking for myself I find the consciously literary genre writers rather a pain. Sayers for instance. The early Wimseys are great, but the later ones- where she's also trying to write the definitive Oxford novel or whatever- are almost unreadable.

[goddlefrood.livejournal.com]

One doesn't read detective fiction for its literary merit.

True enough. I read it mostly because it's so far removed from what I see of the real legal world that it amuses me. I like the short Wimsey stories, but the books not so much.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Agatha Christie is the model detective story writer. She doesn't have pretensions to be anything other than a maker of tight, wonderfully constructed puzzles.

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

Some detective fiction is worth reading for literary merit--Chandler and Hammett were great stylists, and Conan Doyle's stories are the model of a clear, effective, simple yet strong style. Plus they feature the best rendered friendship in literature next to Johnson and Boswell's.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I thought someone might mention Chandler.

I approach the detective story as a British (or at least European) phenomenon. I have this feeling- I'm not sure whether I'm right or wrong- that the American, hard-boiled detective story is so different as to constitute a separate genre.