Endeavouring to Become Inspector Morse

“Inspector Morse is dead!” Sergeant Lewis shouts to one of the murderers at the end of the Inspector Morse episode “The Remorseful Day”. But the grumpy, pedantic inspector has been a continuing presence since crime writer Colin Dexter killed off his famous character in the novel and John Thaw as Morse played one of the small screen’s great death scenes in the television adaptation.

The memory of Morse haunts the spin-off series Lewis. The inspector’s Sergeant Lewis has at last been promoted and applies the skills and wisdom he has acquired from his old mentor. Judging from the episodes I have been able to see, Lewis succeeded in capturing the sense of loss we all experience on losing a valued colleague and friend. The series also created some satisfyingly tricky puzzles for the protagonists to solve.

These series have proved so successful that Morse himself has been recreated in an elaborate prequel that imagines what the character was like as a young man. The setting is 1960s Oxford and young Morse is a detective constable with a mentor of his own, Inspector Fred Thursday, played splendidly by Roger Allam. Thursday is the sort of character who might have been played in the 1950s by Jack Warner or Jack Hawkins. He is avuncular, has a family that includes a spirited daughter to tease the young constable, and watches Morse’s back—all familiar to those of us who remember 1950s British cinema, and of course very enjoyable.

However, crafting a prequel to the great Morse series of the 1980s and 1990s must have posed a considerable challenge. Certainly each of the thirty-three Morse telemovies, including the specials after the main series finished, are in various ways about Morse and his relationship with Sergeant Lewis (Kevin Whately). So exploring the character’s back-story provides many dramatic opportunities. But the style of the original films varied over the years. The first episodes followed the convoluted puzzle plots of Colin Dexter’s novels fairly closely and some were shot in a film noir style. The Oxford locations were exploited from the outset but in the early films the architecture was often made to appear positively sinister. There has always been a touch of cruelty in church architecture, and in episodes like “Service of All the Dead” this is skilfully exploited. Contrasting the beautiful settings in and around the university city with the dark plots came later.

One of the great strengths of the series was that it was multi-layered. The talented writers had a lot of fun with Morse’s love of opera, his erudition, addiction to crossword puzzles and boozing—“I don’t drink for pleasure, Lewis, I need to think.” The plots that were either suggested by Colin Dexter or based on the novels were enjoyably outrageous. But even though each film was structured like a jigsaw puzzle, the writers who crafted the twenty original screenplays often tackled quite serious themes.

One of the best episodes was “Cherubim and Seraphim”, written by Julian Mitchell and directed by Danny Boyle (who later made Slumdog Millionaire) in which Morse and Lewis confront the youth culture when Morse’s niece dies of a drug overdose. Essentially it is a “whydunit” with the solution as disturbing to Lewis the family man as it is to Morse himself. There are no picturesque shots of Morse’s red Jaguar driving across the countryside or sequences featuring Oxford’s architecture—just a straightforward exposure of an all-too-believable evil villain. Here Morse is not just a clever sleuth but a compassionate decent man seeking the truth.

“Cherubim and Seraphim” is by no means an isolated example. Child abuse, violent sexism and medical malpractice were at one time or another the subject of different episodes. Increasingly motivation became vital, rather than the solution of some crossword-like puzzle. There were still alibis and timetables; after all, Morse remained a British detective story in the great tradition, but motive and character increasingly took precedence over the still intricate plotting.

So could Endeavour pull it off? The deviser and principal writer, Russell Lewis, began with a very effective pilot. The young Detective Constable Morse, played by Shaun Evans, is contemplating leaving the force when he becomes involved in the investigation of the murder of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl and the apparent suicide of her boyfriend. In the best tradition of the film noir there is far more underlying corruption than meets the eye: under-age sex parties, the chief superintendent is being blackmailed, and MI6 is snooping around. The resolution is borrowed from an original script—with a new twist—and strikes just the right note of melancholy.

The producers were not certain the pilot would be a success, which is probably why they included so many allusions to the original series. Most of these would be picked by Morse fans, but to make sure it seems that the publicists put them on Wikipedia. There is Constable Jim Strange (Sean Rigby) who calls everyone “matey” and is clearly meant to be a young version of Chief Superintendent Strange played by James Grout. A flashback to a woman with long blonde hair represents Morse’s lost love Susan Fallon, who appears in “Dead on Time” played by Joanna David. Abigail Thaw, John Thaw’s daughter, makes a brief appearance as a reporter, and very good she is too. Colin Dexter is glimpsed briefly as a beer garden patron. In the final moments Thursday asks the young Morse where he sees himself in twenty years and we see in the rearview mirror the face of John Thaw and the original theme music by Barrington Pheloung swells up on the soundtrack. It was a tribute to Shaun Evans and Russell Lewis that the allusion only enhanced what we had just seen.

The next episode, “Girl”, was filmed in late 2012, eleven months after the pilot episode was broadcast in the UK and proved to be a success. It was an interesting blend of the fantastic and realistic. There was a complicated code for Morse to decipher, a vulnerable girl to be protected and a nasty blackmail scheme to be exposed. (I’m trying to be as ambiguous as possible in case the reader hasn’t seen the episodes and wants to watch the DVD.) There are also allusions to the Ban the Bomb movement and 1960s homophobia, indicating the series has retained its social conscience.

In some ways “Fugue”, the next episode in the first series, is a throwback to the elaborate contrivances of the Colin Dexter originals. A serial killer seemingly uses allusions to opera and music to pick his victims and play a macabre game with the police. But “Fugue” also becomes a portrayal of devious wickedness that is horribly credible and adds new dimensions to Morse’s character and his relationship to Thursday.

The last two of the four-episode series, while not as spectacular, were equally entertaining. “Rocket”, featuring a nicely feline performance from Jenny Seagrove, is a good old-fashioned whodunit that echoes perhaps the episode “Happy Families” from the original series, but is less melodramatic. “Home” portrays not only Morse’s early life—first explored in “Cherubim and Seraphim”—but also problems in Thursday’s background. It is all interwoven with local government corruption involving an Oxford college—of course—London gangsters and a mysterious murder. At the climax Morse is shot in the leg by the murderer, thus explaining Chief Inspector Morse’s occasional limp in the original series. John Thaw had a limp that he covered skilfully as a young man in series like The Sweeney where he was required to be very physical, but used when Morse was supposed to be tired and frustrated.

The great strength of Endeavour is that it leads viewers to the extraordinary achievements of the original, not just in details, but in the exploration of a character of whom it can be said, as Raymond Chandler wrote of Philip Marlowe, “If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.” Happily, at the time of writing, a new series of Endeavour is being filmed for release in 2014, and the existing episodes, along with the entire Morse series, are available on DVD.