I approached this one with some trepidation. See, I read all the Morse books several times in my early to mid teens. I remember them quite affectionately in general, as clever, intricate works. But I also remember several really, ummm, dated details. Morse making some important inferences from the colour of victim’s knickers. Morse sussing out that the Rastafarian at college dinner was actually a white man in black face, due to his crucial mistake of eating the pork. And so forth. So, two related grounds for trepidation: what if they don’t deserve the affection in general? And what if there’s a lot more of that kind of thing specifically?
The affection turns out to be justified, more or less. The reservations might stand. This novel is kind of the opposite of the Dibdin one just past. Where that was unobtrusively fine, this is both good and irritating in noticeable, showy ways.
Irritating: Morse himself is really quite pervy. He spends most of this one in hospital. Within 35 pages, two different women in the orbit of his ward have been blandly described as “slimly attractive”, and halfway through all the nurses have epithets. Yet somehow, perhaps because he hides his salacious thoughts behind a diffident exterior, all these women end up eating out of the palm of his hand, and one of them at least ends up in his bed (I’ve moved to generics; so far as I remember, this happens in every single Morse book). What’s worse, you don’t get the impression that the author is standing too far behind the character here. After all, who wrote “slimly attractive” twice? There’s a little whiff of wish fulfilment about it all. (interesting question: at what point in this sequence do I stop giving books a partial pass on the basis that those were different times? Tempting to say quite soon, but apparently 1989 really was quite a while ago)
Besides the character, there’s the writing. Now, I’ll come to its good elements in a minute, but my, there are some irritating things about the writing. It’s deliberately, insistently stylish, often in the worst way: packed with literary allusions and alliterations and intrusive authoring (was this once my idea of smart? Oooof). There’s abundant overuse of italics, in a way that seems to belie a little anxiety, either that one’s own sentences don’t direct the emphasis to just the right place on their own, or, instead, that the reader might turn out to be a little slow and thus need a little help in appreciating the sheer quality of the prose. The literary epigraphs prefacing every chapter seal the impression that the author is both very pleased with himself and also trying a little too hard.
Alright, that’s what’s irritating. What’s good? Well, many of the good things are cousins of the bad. For all that Morse is a perv, he’s also a properly drawn character, not just an assembly of traits. For all that the prose is sometimes irritating, it’s also properly stylish, sentences clearly refined, nicely weighted.
Moving to content, the plot is excellently done, executed as a proper puzzle. It’s a very cold case, the murder of a young woman in the 1800s, which Morse pursues from his hospital bed by doing a bunch of reading and getting some of those slimly attractive women to do research for him. This allows Dexter to present subtle clues in the stuff Morse is reading, then alert you that a clue has been presented in the course of Morse’s musings without actually telling you what it is, thus sending you back a couple of pages to work it out. It’s a really neat trick, giving the novel the feel of a crossword (one of Morse’s preoccupations). Morse’s reading also allows Dexter to have fun, and show off, by presenting pastiches of various forms of writing, including stultifying academic prose.
Add a dash of humour that just skirts the right side of inappropriate, and you have a novel that’s fun, whatever its evident flaws. My teenage self was right in this case: this is really well made, clever, enjoyable stuff.