The Wench Is Dead
tmc...@gateway.net
IT is a curious paradox that the best crime fiction often offers a feeling of
reassurance rather than dismay, a sense of order rather than chaos. Unlike
real life, the loose ends get sorted out and neatly tied up. When the
insidious theme tune announces the imminent ending of each Inspector Morse
mystery, I always experience a slight wrench of loss. The beautifully crafted
idyll is over.
And now, it seems, the entire series is approaching its end. When the latest
Morse drama, The Wench is Dead, was filming this summer, there was much
speculation that it would be the last. Malcolm Bradbury, who has scripted the
new programme based on Dexter's 1989 novel, certainly contributes to this
feeling of the end of an era. The detective spends most of the action in
hospital with an ulcer and the final seconds seem positively valedictory.
This end-of-the-road melancholy is intensified by the fact that Kevin
Whately, for so long Morse's long-suffering sidekick Lewis, isn't appearing
in the programme. Instead, Morse will have a new partner, played by Matthew
Finney. The reasons for Whately's non-appearance have been shrouded in rather
tiresome mytsery. Whately himself has been evasive on the subject, while
indicating that he's taken the role as far as he could.
John Thaw is more blunt. "It's quite simple. They couldn't come to a
contractual agreement about what Kevin would get. He wanted X and they
weren't prepared to pay, though it isn't just the money. There you go. It's
sad, sad." I got the impression that behind the gruff words, Thaw was missing
Whately badly, and certainly The Wench is Dead seems diminished without him.
I travelled to Oxford to watch some of the filming and talk to Thaw and the
original begetter of Morse, Colin Dexter, who is recognised, to his own
barely concealed delight, almost everywhere he goes in the university city
that provides the background of all his novels.
In television's Inspector Morse, the sun is generally shining on mellow
stone, but it was the kind of day I remembered from my own time as an
undergraduate - damp, melancholic and with a few sad souls in subfusc
breakfasting in the covered market before drifting wanly down the High to sit
their finals.
In the latest episode (to be shown on ITV next Wednesday at 8pm), Morse is
investigating a 140-year-old crime on the Oxford canal, and there are a lot a
period costume flashbacks.
As always, the filming itself was unbelievably tedious, with endless hanging
around to get just a few seconds of the waxy-faced, bloody-shirted,
dangerously ill detective being carried out of a conference on a stretcher.
How intelligent actors like Thaw put up with the boredom, I will never know.
<Picture: Inspector Morse>At his best, Thaw has brought an extraordinary
quality of private pain to the role, the sense of a man both lonely and
wounded. After playing Morse for 64 hours on television ("Oh, God, is it
really that long," Thaw groaned) how does he feel about the character now?
"Well, I like the man or I wouldn't have done it. And I'm glad he's got a
girlfriend at last. The thing with Morse is if you just do the words on the
page, it's very flat. The trick is to lift it off the page and twist it
somehow. You are trying to create drama where possibly none exists."
I have rarely heard an actor so devastatingly nail a writer's weakness.
Indeed, I'd been planning to give Dexter a hard time myself, because he has
always seemed to me one of the luckiest writers alive. His Morse detective
novels are in the classic tradition of the English whodunnit, but they are
essentially dry, intellectual exercises. Like Agatha Christie, whom he
believes is "grotesquely undervalued these days", he favours ingenuity of
plotting over depth of characterisation.
Yet Dexter himself is delightful company. Now 68, he looks like an ugly,
mischievous garden gnome, and is amazingly hospitable and generous. No one is
quicker than him to downplay his own contribution and acknowledge that of
others.
Did he agree that the relationship between Morse and Lewis on the television
was deeper and more touching than it was in his own original books? "Oh yes,"
he said immediately. "Everyone involved from the director to the producer, to
the scriptwriters and the cast, adds so much to it. And the permanent
pervasive attaction of Oxford helps. The Americans love that." In theory,
Morse could go on for much longer. There have been 32 films, and Dexter has
only written 13 original novels, with the other stories being contributed by
such distinguished writers as Anthony Minghella, Danny Boyle and Julian
Mitchell - the whole series has always been out of the top drawer. Dexter,
however, agrees that both the novels and the television series are now
reaching the end of their natural lives.
"I've been bullied into writing one more," he said mournfully. "I made a
marvellous start but I keep getting distracted. I've killed 75 people on the
telly now and whatever amalgam of qualities I've given old Morse, I feel I've
rung the changes pretty thoroughly. The odd thing is that I never saw myself
as a full-time writer. I just started doing it after work [until 1988 he
worked for the Oxford University Examination Board] to fill in the time
between listening to The Archers and going out to the pub. I'm very proud of
the old boy, but writing is a long slog and a lonely business, and it's
getting harder."
The new novel, which appears to be giving him some trouble, is expected to be
published next autumn, and probably filmed in the year 2000. Is Dexter
tempted, like Arthur Conan Doyle, to kill off his hero in this final outing?
"The thought has crossed my mind," he said with a grin. "It is one way of
definitely ending the series. But I think a lot of people would be very sad
if I killed him off. One thing I'll never do is get him married. It was a
great mistake when Raymond Chandler, whom I admire more than any other crime
writer, married off Philip Marlowe. Independence is absolutely so important
to Morse's character."
But in last year's film, Death is Now my Neighbour, Morse became romantically
entangled with a music teacher. And it is a relationship that continues in
The Wench is Dead. One is glad for Morse, of course, but it means that some
of the edge has gone. It is surely right to bring the saga to a close.
"Interesting that you should say entangled," said Dexter. "What do you think
of this?" And, appropriately enough, this celebrated crossword addict wrote
an elegant clue on a scrap of paper: "Tec with no Mrs, so ripe for
entanglement (9,5)".
Maria, who can't figure out the clue. Anyone know?
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tmc...@gateway.net
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HelenS24
"Tec": informal, dated, "a detective"
Hint: leave in the "u".
Helen S.
:-)