Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse Books in Order

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The British author Colin Dexter (1930-2017) is responsible for creating one of the most iconic fictional detectives: Endeavour Morse, known to millions around the world as ‘Inspector Morse’ (although Morse was always, in fact, already a Chief Inspector). Dexter’s novels, and the ITV drama series that they inspired, helped to make Oxford ‘the murder capital of the world’.

Morse’s penchant for cryptic crosswords, real ale, opera, and poetry, his bachelordom and his pedantic habit of correcting his sidekick Sergeant Lewis’s grammar, were all established in Dexter’s novels, which began to appear in the mid-1970s, before the hugely popular TV series inspired by Dexter’s creation appeared on our screens in 1987, with the wonderful John Thaw in the title role.

Oxford had had its fair share of fictional detectives before Morse – Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen is one notable example – but Morse is now synonymous with the city with its cloistered medieval colleges and notable landmarks such as the Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera.

But in many ways, Morse is as well-known for his wrong deductions as he is for being correct. Often he stumbles down the wrong path, pursuing a flawed line of enquiry before having to rethink his theories midway through an investigation. He is cantankerous, waspish, and ungrateful. But these flaws help to make him all the more human and relatable.

Colin Dexter wrote 13 Inspector Morse novels in all, between 1975 and 1999. Below, we introduce all of the books, in order.

1. Last Bus to Woodstock (1975).

The novel that introduces us to Morse and Lewis surprises many fans of the TV show, since Lewis is actually older than Morse here – and he’s Welsh, rather than Geordie. Morse is also a rougher, ruder man than in the TV series.

The pair team up to investigate the murder of a young woman named Sylvia Kaye, with a red car (in which the victim was seen accepting a lift) providing a key detail …

2. Last Seen Wearing (1976).

The second Morse mystery focuses on the two-year-old case of a missing schoolgirl, Valerie Taylor, whose disappearance was being investigated by a detective who has recently died in a car accident. Enter Morse and Lewis, who endeavour (no pun intended) to get to the bottom of it.

3. The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977).

This novel has one of the more ingenious plot devices in Colin Dexter’s Morse novels: a key plot point turns on the reliability (or not) of lipreading, as the murdered man, who worked for an exams syndicate, was deaf. Had Quinn overheard (or rather, over-seen) his colleagues plotting to sell the answers to their exams?

4. Service of All the Dead (1979).

This is the ‘church’ mystery in the Dexter canon: the plot centres on a number of murders which take place in the fictional St Frideswide’s Church in Cornmarket. The first victim appears to have been a man named Harry Josephs; but is all as it seems?

But perhaps the most distinctive thing about the book is how structurally innovative it is: divided into four books, each named after a book of the Bible, with each book written in a different style (including a witness statement and court proceedings).

5. The Dead of Jericho (1981).

It was this book which became the first Colin Dexter novel to be adapted for television, and the story involves one of Morse’s more personal attachments to a case: the victim, Anne Scott (changed to Stavely in the TV version), was someone Morse had met and taken a romantic interest in, before she is found dead, having supposedly taken her own life.

This book features one of Dexter’s most dextrous (!) incorporations of literature and myth into the Morse world, as the tale of Oedipus becomes the focus of Morse’s thinking …

6. The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983).

Adapted as ‘The Last Enemy’ for the TV series in 1989, this book fuses college politics with a dark event from the Second World War in which one of three brothers was killed in action. After the glorious trilogy of mysteries Dexter had written directly prior to this, it is – plotwise – a bit of a retrograde step, but entertaining nevertheless.

But perhaps the most notable aspect of the book is the backstory Dexter gives us for Morse: like A. E. Housman, Morse was a student at St John’s College, Oxford, where he failed his classics degree (or ‘Greats’) because – in Morse’s case at least – he was reeling from his break-up with a woman, a fellow student named Wendy Spencer.

This woman actually features in a later Morse episode, ‘Dead on Time’ (in which she is renamed Susan): Morse and Susan even end up rekindling their love affair, albeit briefly (we know what happens when Morse gets too close to a woman!).

7. The Secret of Annexe 3 (1986).

This novel takes its title from the hotel room where one of the guests is found dead on a bed soaked with blood. Who was he, and how will Morse get to the bottom of it? The novel is a solid whodunnit, and Dexter’s flair for providing literary epigraphs to his chapters (a signature feature of many of the later novels) works well here to provide thematic context.

8. The Wench is Dead (1989).

This novel was adapted into an Inspector Morse TV episode in 1998, although it works better on the page than on the screen. It’s essentially a ‘cold case’ involving the mysterious events surrounding the death of a woman in Victorian Oxford, her body having been found in the canal.

Laid up in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Morse sets about examining the evidence to try to solve a 130-year-old mystery which ended with two men being convicted and executed for the crime. Were they guilty, or was this a gross miscarriage of justice?

9. The Jewel That Was Ours (1991).

This book is an exception in Colin Dexter’s Morse canon, in that rather than being adapted for television, it was a novelisation of an original 1987 episode of the TV series, ‘The Wolvercote Tongue’ (for which Dexter had written the script).

A wealthy American tourist arrives in Oxford with a precious jewel, the Wolvercote Tongue, which she intends to donate to the Ashmolean Museum. But she is found murdered, and her handbag containing the jewel has gone …

10. The Way through the Woods (1992).

Its title taken from a Rudyard Kipling poem, The Way through the Woods is one of our favourite Morse novels. It contains a poem in the form of a riddle, for starters. We also learn of the death of Max, the pathologist, who had also featured in the first few series of the TV adaptations.

11. The Daughters of Cain (1994).

This novel is so named because three of the main suspects for the murder are women, but the book opens with the murder of a man, Dr Felix McClure, for which no murder weapon has been found, and there is no apparent motive for the crime. There are no suspects at first, either …

12. Death Is Now My Neighbour (1996).

We don’t want to offer any spoilers in this introduction to Dexter’s books, so we’ll just say that this novel contains an inspired case of mistaken identity based around housing; to say any more would be to say too much. It’s also the novel in which Morse’s first name is revealed.

13. The Remorseful Day (1999).

The final Morse novel appeared a year before it was adapted for television as the final episode. Morse, famously, is killed off at the end, a lifetime of heavy drinking (and smoking in the novels) having caught up with him.

The investigation itself is fair enough but the book is most noteworthy for the poignancy of Morse’s death and the way this is foreshadowed throughout the book. The novel’s punning title is taken from Dexter’s (and Morse’s) favourite poet, A. E. Housman.