Perhaps (I hope) the most sensible way for me to write about Chief Inspector Morse is to try to answer some of the many questions that have been put to me most frequently by audiences and correspondents. Then, at least, I can believe that my answers will be focused upon things in which people seem genuinely interested.

But first, a few brief words about myself. The whole of my working life was spent in education: first, as a teacher of Latin and Greek in English grammar schools; second, with increasing deafness blighting my life, as a senior administrative officer with the Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations, in charge of Latin, Greek, Ancient History, and English.

Well, here goes!

What emboldened you to enlist in the rather crowded ranks of the crime-writing fraternity?

It is not unknown, even in midsummer, for the heavens to open in North Wales; and there are few things more dispiriting than to sit in a guesthouse with the rain streaming in rivulets down the windows, and with offspring affirming that every other father somehow manages to locate a splendid resort, with blue skies and warm seas, for the annual family holiday. That was my situation one Saturday afternoon in August 1973. Having rather nervously asserted that we were not planning a premature return to Oxford, I shut myself up in the narrow confines of the kitchen with a biro and a pad of ruled paper-with only a very vague idea of what I was intending to do. I had already finished reading the two paperback detective stories left by previous guests, and I figured that if I tried hard, I might possibly do almost as well in the genre myself. So for a couple of hours I tried very hard, resulting in how many paragraphs, I cannot recall. I doubt more than two or three. It was, however, that all-important start: Initium est dimidium facti (the beginning is one half of the deed), as the Roman proverb has it.

Had I any reason other than vanity for wishing to see my name on the jacket of a detective story? Not money, certainly, since I was fortunate enough to enjoy a well-paid university post, annually climbing a little higher up the salary scale. If, as Dr. Johnson remarked-in an uncharacteristically cynical vein-“no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” then I was one of the blockheads. And not because I thought I had anything of criminological, psychological, or sociological import to communicate to my fellow man. I had just one simple aim in mind-an aim to which I have always held firm in my subsequent writings: to tell a story that would entertain whatever readers might be coming my way.

It would be pleasing to report that later on that August Saturday afternoon the sun broke through the lowering clouds. Yet, as I recall, it didn’t. What I can report is that my first work of fiction, Last Bus to Woodstock, originated on that day, and was finally published by Macmillan in 1975. It featured a detective named Morse. “Just call me Morse!” as he was to say so many times when some delicious and desirable woman asked him for his Christian name. And that is how I shall refer to him throughout this article.

Which crime writers and what kind of crime writing have influenced you?

First memories for me are of Sexton Blake and Tinker, then Edgar Wallace (“King of Thriller Writers”), with his racy and uncluttered style. Next Agatha Christie, pulling the wool over my eyes from page one in myriad imaginative and ingenious plots, and almost invariably baffling the delighted reader until the last chapter, last page, last paragraph.

And she more than any other writer determined the direction of my writing, with an emphasis more on “who” perpetrated the dreadful deed, rather than “why” or “how.” For some “dreadful deed” it had to be, since no reader will be overlong enthralled by the theft of a tin of salmon from the supermarket. It was Christie, then, who motivated my eagerness for surprise endings in the Morse novels. Other writers of course were influential, and like most teenagers I was a great fan of Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes. But more important, I should mention John Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson), with his wonderfully “impossible” locked-room puzzles. I was never able to write such a mystery for Morse to solve, but again it was the “puzzle” element that delighted me so hugely. And it is not unfitting that in his book Bloody Murder, Julian Symons writes of “the puzzles set by Colin Dexter,” gently adding that “perhaps it is churlish to wish that motives and behaviour were a touch nearer reality.” So often have I listened to some of my crime-writing colleagues arguing about the respective merits of “plot” versus “characterization.” But I have always viewed such discussions as somewhat phony, since the totality of a good story subsumes them both, and the greatest accolade that any of us can hope for is to hear one’s partner’s plea from a room downstairs: “I’ll be up in a few minutes, darling. Just let me finish this chapter first.”

Furthermore, in this connection, there is little doubt in my mind that Homer and Ovid would have been the top earners in Hollywood. One other major influence: I had long envied the ability of some few writers, Simenon and Chandler in particular, to establish in their novels a curiously pleasing ambience of a city, a street, a bistro, etc. And I have ever hoped that the physical sense of Oxford, and the very spirit of the city, has permeated the pages in which Morse is summoned to so many (mostly fatal) scenes. Perhaps my one wholly legitimate claim to notoriety is that single-handedly I have made Oxford the murder capital of the UK -and probably of the EU.

What sort of man was Morse? Was he like you?

Of Morse’s physical presence, I had very little idea. I had assumed, I suppose, that (unlike me) he measured up to the height specification for the police force; that his incurable addiction to real ale and single-malt scotch whiskey was gradually but inevitably adding a few inches to his girth; that unlike his creator he had a good head of hair; that to the world at large he paraded no deformities. He was in no way likely to be confused with the description I once gave of myself to a Finnish journalist: “short, fat, bald, and deaf,” on which the lady in question congratulated me warmly, saying that because of this she had recognized me “immediately”!

Morse’s other qualities? Well, unless one is a genius, which I am not, a writer will tend in many respects to be semi-autobiographical in the delineation of the character and temperament of the detective hero. As such, Morse changes very little throughout the novels, betraying the same qualities displayed in my first and, and as I thought at the time, my only one. He was, and remained, a sensitive and sometimes strangely vulnerable man; always a bit of a loner by nature; strongly attracted to beautiful women (often the crooks); dedicated to alcohol; and almost always on the verge of giving up nicotine. In politics, ever on the Left, feeling himself congenitally incapable of voting for the Tory party; a “high-church atheist” (as I called him), yet with a deep love for the Methodist Hymnal, the King James Bible, the church music of Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, etc., the sight of candles, and the smell of incense. Finally, like me, he would have given his hobbies in Who’s Who as reading the poets, crosswords, and Wagner.

And what of his negative qualities? He was quite unwilling to give thanks to any of his hardworking underlings (especially Lewis) and had little or no respect for most of his superior officers. He was unorthodox, with little knowledge of police procedure and only minimal respect for forensic pathology. He was often pig-headed and impatient, a man with alpha-plus acumen, normally six furlongs ahead of the whole field during any investigation but so often running on the wrong racecourse. And has there ever been a fictional detective so desperately mean with money?