Endeavour - the seventh series, one episode in

(WARNING: Here be spoilers – perhaps it’s best you don’t read this until you’ve watched ‘Oracle’, the first episode of the seventh series of Endeavour which was broadcast on Sunday…)

I was greatly looking forward to the new (seventh) series of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel which follows the early years of Colin Dexter’s great detective. Various interviews with people involved have stated that we are reaching the end of Endeavour’s run, although as an eighth series has already been commissioned by ITV it seems to be a case of not just yet. The original show ran for a total of 33 episodes, as did its sequel Lewis; the current series of Endeavour has just three episodes which will brings the prequel’s total up to 30, so I think we can safely assume that there will be a further three episodes next year and then that will be, as they say, that. Shame, but nothing lasts forever.

Fan of Morse that I am, I’ve always been pleased when younger versions of characters from the original series turned up in Endeavour (spotting them has been almost as much fun as spotting the many references to films and other British TV shows that have cropped in Endeavour from time to time). With not much left of Endeavour’s run, I wonder about a few seemingly prominent characters from Morse’s early life that have yet to appear. What of McNutt, mentioned as Morse’s mentor but in Endeavour seemingly reduced to a passing mention in favour of Fred Thursday, so wonderfully played by Roger Allam? What of Roland Marshall from the cricket episode? Or that curiously-named Machiavellian academic Clixby Bream? Most of all, what of Hugo de Vries, the con-man who was out to get Morse in one of the best episodes of the lot? 

(On a more superficial note, I was hoping that at some point we’d see Morse driving a Lancia as that was mentioned as his car of choice in the earlier novels before he got the trademark Jag, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that that probably won’t happen!)

In the world of Endeavour, it’s now 1970 and the new series kicked off with Morse seeing in the new decade in style, off to Venice for a night at the opera and getting lucky with the sultry brunette in the next box; compare that to Fred and Win Thursday who dined on chicken-in-a-basket at the WMC back in Oxford. Venice! Quite how a sergeant in a provincial police force who’s just bought a house can afford such a high-end break is a mystery in itself although to be fair, the house is very much a fixer-upper.

Elsewhere, the new year bought another murder, that of a barmaid by a canal – Oxford, not Venice – while another barmaid was acting a bit strangely.

In the first episode, the parallels between Venice and Oxford were played up for all they were worth, what with the waterways of La Serenissima contrasting with the Oxford Canal and a lingering shot of the Hertford Bridge, that bridge in Oxford that’s known as the Bridge of Sighs even though the Venetian bridge it actually resembles is the Rialto. Given this and the fact that the unmurdered barmaid was displaying seemingly psychic abilities in an early Seventies setting, Don’t Look Now obviously came to mind. Perhaps ‘Canal’ would have been a better title than ‘Oracle’?

To be honest, I’m not quite sure where the show was going with the psychic angle – both barmaids, it turned out, were test subjects in a serious university research project into extra-sensory perception, although that aside here was a typically back-biting academic set-up (are there any other sorts in the world of Morse? Perhaps surprisingly, this one was not associated with Lonsdale College). This being 1970, there was a heady dose of outright sexism; the men (headed by a professor who wouldn’t let his wife sign the cheques) were resentful of the fact that their department’s token woman, Dr Benford, got the Open University-style TV job they’d all auditioned for. Alas, she did not make it to the end of the episode.

In one of the more predictable murder cases that have come Morse’s way, the sexist prof turned out to be the murderer of poor Dr Benford, although the motive was unrequited love rather than professional jealousy and the fact that she knew something about the canal murder (actually, she knew someone – the apparently psychic barmaid – who reckoned she knew something). The canal murder which had kicked off the episode remained to all intents and purposes unsolved by the end – the psychic storyline was left hanging along with talk of a flasher operating along the canal (how very Seventies) and hints from the redoubtable Dorothea Frazil about cruelty to cats (hope the Castle Gate CID chaps catch that perpetrator). Then, just before the closing credits, a person unknown did for the flasher; clearly, we have a story arc…

More interesting was the character development. Fred Thursday, more cynical and much greyer than before under the trilby, is clearly feeling the strain – with Morse away in Venice, his investigation into the barmaid’s murder was decidedly slipshod (fingering the boyfriend as the murderer in the face of a seemingly decent alibi). Then he went and bought a couple of canaries (a bit random, that) and snapped at Win for no good reason (speaking of Thursday’s domestic arrangements, things have clearly changed as Win no longer makes his sandwiches, and when Fred had a go he made a mess of it; a good bit of realism, that, for many is the occasion when I’ve not done a good job of that task when the butter’s been too cold). Perhaps the events of the previous series, when he went a bit Gene Hunt by taking a bribe and beating up a suspect, have long-term consequences here (although, of course, he did give the money back). Anton Lesser got to do some pathos as Chief Superintendent Bright, nursing his dying wife (diagnosed with lung cancer in the previous series – what with all that smoking, I guess someone had to get that, just like Betty did in Mad Men) and worrying about his lack of faith in contrast the faith healers who’ve come round to pray with her.

Jim Strange, Morse’s future boss, has meanwhile reverted to type; having spent much of the previous series uncharacteristically pursuing the unofficial investigation into the murder of DC Fancy, he’s now back in careerist mode, berating Morse for taking crime scene photos home with him (his further criticism of Morse for highlighting Thursday’s rather slipshod investigation methods with regards to the initial canal towpath murder may have be a bit wide of the mark, but that’s in keeping with Strange as a bureaucratic yes-man).

And Morse? First of all, thank God he’s ditched the ’tache; that just didn’t sit well, last series. Aside from decorating his new house and doing typically Morse things like solving the crossword and rubbing colleagues up the wrong way while being three steps ahead of everyone else when it comes to figuring out who’s been doing the murders, he started the episode with blood on his shirt. Whose blood? At the end of the episode, we viewers are none the wiser but no doubt there are a few ideas as to what this all means. Perhaps not unrelated to this, Morse seemingly has a new friend. After getting pick-pocketed at an open-air concert (dangerous places, those Oxford colleges) he met Ludo, who introduced himself as an old pal from their university days before wining and dining the detective.

The kicker at the end, which is clearly something that’s going to run for this short series at least, was the revelation that Ludo’s wife is Violetta, Morse’s Venetian love interest, but my mind was on something else. Racing away and jumping to a couple of conclusions, possibly in the style of Morse himself (albeit without the help of a couple of pints). The blood on the shirt – does that concern this love-triangle? And this Ludo feller  – a highly cultured man with an ingratiating style and a taste for fine wine. Could he, I wonder, be Hugo de Vries?

I may be wrong, of course (even Morse got it wrong, sometimes – that’s one of the great things about him as a fictional detective, the fact that he was allowed to do so). But, one episode in, I don’t think I am…

Endeavour (the fourth series)

What with the excitement over the new series of Sherlock earlier this year, I criminally managed to overlook the latest series of Endeavour. Both shows had their fourth series on the telly back in January, and for what it’s worth some of the episodes of said series were broadcast on the same nights, and while the BBC’s modern-day reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes is the one that’s been getting all the attention (as well as more viewers) it has to be said that ITV’s depiction of a young Endeavour Morse as a junior police officer in Sixties Oxford is one of the best things on television.

[At this point, a spoiler alert is probably in order; if for some reason you’ve not yet seen the fourth series of Endeavour, please be advised that this blog-post contains information that you might not want to look at just yet. You have been warned.]

As well as making use of the central characters’ first names (even though Morse’s one in particular is hardly ever used, to the point where most of his colleagues don’t even know what it is), both shows take a format consisting of short series of long episodes (ninety-minute ones in both cases). In terms of British crime drama, this was a format pioneered, back in the late Eighties, by Inspector Morse and subsequently followed by the likes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Jonathan Creek and many others. Sherlock started back in 2010 and now has thirteen episodes under its belt, while Endeavour began in 2012 with a one-off pilot and is now seventeen episodes old. Sherlock is full of references to the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and subsequent adaptations, while Endeavour’s focus of reference is the enormously popular original series, Inspector Morse, which was based on the novels by Colin Dexter and ran from 1987 to 2000. Both centre around gentleman-detectives, socially awkward but very clever individuals who can infuriate others as well as catch the criminals. Both are very well-acted – in terms of the support cast as well as the leads. Yet, for all the fuss about Sherlock, I’m finding myself preferring the more understated Endeavour. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this. When I was a teenager I read and greatly enjoyed Conan Doyle before I discovered Colin Dexter, but when I read the latter I found Morse – the beer-drinking opera buff who was allowed to get it wrong and have romantic feelings about the women he encountered while investigating his cases (however unrequited they may have been) to be a much more rounded, human and in his own way likeable individual than the emotionally cold, cocaine-taking Holmes.

A recap of Endeavour is perhaps in order. The third series, which aired last year, skipped over an immediate follow-up to the second series which ended with Morse’s mentor Fred Thursday getting shot and Morse himself getting arrested; it was instead briefly explained that the former survived, the latter spent a month or so in prison before being released without charge and the institutional corruption they’d uncovered got brushed under the carpet. Instead, writer Russell Lewis used the third series to experiment with pastiches of The Great Gatsby (with a disillusioned Morse in the Nick Carraway role), Dirty Harry (all that running around between phone-boxes) and Jaws (although, what with Oxfordshire being landlocked, the man-eating animal at large was a tiger rather than a shark) which were much more enjoyable than they had any right to be. A minor character in the tiger episode happened to be the father of James Hathaway, the sergeant in that other Inspector Morse spin-off, Lewis. The last episode was dominated by a bank robbery which went wrong; Morse and Thursday’s daughter Joan were among those taken hostage in the bank. On borrowed time in all sorts of ways, Thursday literally coughed up the bullet that had been in his lung since the end of the second series (in the plausibility stakes, that’s right up there with a man-eating tiger on the loose in the Thames Valley, but it didn’t seem to matter as much as it should’ve done) before tooling up and storming the building, leading to a tense denouement in which he opted to arrest rather than kill the villain (whose eventual funeral is depicted at the start of the Inspector Morse episode where Morse and Lewis go to Australia). Traumatised by those events, Joan, who’d been making eyes at an oblivious Morse even though she clearly had a thing for bad boys, left Oxford.

In a departure from the previously-established format, the fourth series was set mere weeks after the third rather than the following year, so in the Endeavour universe it’s still 1967. This allowed Endeavour to fully explore the impact of Joan’s disappearance on her family (young women leaving home without telling their parents where they were going was a common enough feature of the time to inspire one of the songs on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, released in 1967); being of the stoical, buttoned-up generation that came of age in the Second World War, Fred and Win don’t handle things well as their once-happy family falls apart. Morse, having belatedly realised his own feelings for Joan, is badly affected too but he’s also not the type to go in for heart-to-heart discussions about said feelings, and Joan’s eventual return doesn’t really resolve this by any means. We viewers know, though, that for Morse and Joan there won’t be a happy-ever-after, for like many a great literary detective Morse is fated to be unlucky in love (and besides, she doesn’t even know his first name while he can’t bring himself to address her by hers even when he’s proposing to her).

Another story arc is the ongoing development of Morse’s simmering resentment against the powers-that-be, be it via his ongoing alienation from the conformist careerist Jim Strange (his future boss) or his anger over his missing sergeant’s exam paper (he, and everyone else, was convinced that he’d aced it, but his paper mysteriously got lost in circumstances that one assumes have a lot to do with his having got on the wrong side of those in high places) which resulted in a will-he-leave-Oxford sub-plot in which he was offered (via Strange, interestingly) a guaranteed promotion and pay-rise in return for transferring to a police unit in London. We viewers know that Morse will stay in Oxford (and not marry Joan Thursday or anyone else); although Shaun Evans could never be accused of merely impersonation John Thaw, it is however important for there to be markers for the viewer to see how this intellectual junior officer becomes the gruff, curmudgeonly DCI we all know and remember from the old show. But, what with that show having run its course some seventeen years ago, there may well be viewers of Endeavour who have no knowledge of what the young Morse will become (although I doubt that; as Inspector Morse gets regularly repeated on ITV3 it wouldn’t be hard for viewers who’ve been drawn to Endeavour with no prior knowledge of the original series to watch the late, great John Thaw as the older Morse).

Did I say the acting was first-rate? Shaun Evans as the young Morse and Roger Allam as Fred Thursday are both superb in their respective roles and deserve all the praise they can get. The support cast does a thoroughly good job too, notably Abigail Thaw as the journalist (who deserves better than to be referred to as John Thaw’s daughter every time her being in Endeavour is mentioned), James Bradshaw as the pathologist (getting the best lines and clearly enjoying himself more than he ever did in The Grimleys) and Dakota Blue Richards as WPC Trewlove. Some minor characters have developed a lot as the show has progressed, not just Joan Thursday (Sara Vickers is brilliant in her scenes with Shaun Evans) but also the straight-laced, old-colonial Chief Superintendent Bright who has become a more rounded character than the usual bewildered police chief trying to keep his detectives in order (which is what he was, more or less, in the first two series). He’s played by Anton Lesser, a solid character actor who’s been in a lot of good stuff in recent years – he was also the boss in that sadly short-lived BBC series The Hour, Sir Thomas More in Wolf Hall and Fagin in Dickensian, and he’s really good in Endeavour (in which he shot the man-eating tiger, and how many actors can say they’ve played a character who’s done that?).

The fourth series saw an emphasis on aspects of the Sixties which moved more towards the popular perceptions of the decade than has hitherto been the case in Endeavour. The ‘white heat of technology’ (previously glimpsed at in the first-series episode set in the armaments factory) was represented by a very big computer designed by some Oxford boffins to beat a visiting professor from the Soviet Union at chess (although Morse also used it to find someone’s address) and a nuclear power-station (the focus of the climax in the last episode). At a local hospital, some Carry On-style goings-on between a doctor and a student nurse soon gave way to something much more sinister. The Cold War put in an appearance, what with the Russian professor and references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of nuclear fall-out in the episode with the power-station. Morse, we learned, can speak Russian which I don’t think ever came up in the original series. 

Then, of course, there was the culture clash of the second episode as pop music interrupted the classical music which Morse prefers. A caricature of Mary Whitehouse locked horns with the Wildwood, a rock band which was a fictional composite of various real-life outfits (there were nods to, among others, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and early Pink Floyd). Both were of interest to the Oxford City Police’s finest – the former had been receiving death threats while the latter popped up on the police radar when some dope was found in a dressing-room they’d used, but they were later connected to a dead builder who’d become more involved with them and their groupies than anyone was prepared to admit to. The uptight Morse – seen as an oddity by the band members, what with his being a young man in a suit – was shocked by a gem of a revelation from Thursday about smoking dope during the North African campaign. The Mary Whitehouse character’s daughter – a smoker and a vodka-drinker behind her mother’s back – declared her love for Morse (he, being pre-occupied with Joan, didn’t reciprocate) and then fell out with her bigoted, domineering mother. The band’s manager’s alibi fell apart when it was revealed that the Kinks were banned from playing in the USA, so he couldn’t have been on the phone to someone in New York discussing their forthcoming tour (nice try, thinking the police wouldn’t know that; good thing WPC Trewlove’s got her finger on the cultural pulse). Bright and Thursday, their status as men from a bygone age emphasised more than ever in this episode, got to discuss the changing times and the nature of hatred. The pop music, brilliantly, was all done specially for the show by the people normally responsible for the classical music in Endeavour. The highlight of that episode, though, had to be the bit when Morse was forced to face his inner demons when he got drugged and started hallucinating (no Sherlock-style mind-palace for him, alas, although in Morse’s case it would probably be more of a mind-pub). 

The series concluded with an investigation into the disappearance of an academic in a rural village which seemed at first glance to be going the way of The Wicker Man (not a good setting for an earnest and determined copper) although in the event the villagers’ neo-paganism was a red herring; it was actually good old-fashioned jealousy that did for the academic, and in any case the nearby nuclear power-station was where the action really was. It was as a result of the finale in the power-station that Morse finally got his promotion – Hornblower-style, on the basis of action above and beyond the normal call of duty rather than by way of the exam – and he and Thursday both got medals, leading to a fine cine-footage-style shot of Fred and Win smiling outside Buckingham Palace. Does a well-deserved retirement now beckon for the character who’s been played so well by Roger Allam? With Morse now a Detective Sergeant, maybe it’s time for DI McNutt, named as Morse’s old boss in the original TV series, to enter the stage – although maybe not, as it’s already been announced that Roger Allam will be in the fifth series which is in the pipeline. There were a few questions that viewers might raise (the Thursdays’ son not being mentioned at all amid the furore of Joan’s disappearance, the Wildwood’s sleazy manager not being arrested for perverting the course of justice, Bright’s wife not visiting him in hospital, the lack of follow-up regarding the discovery of a dead Scottish hit-man in the boot of a car, how the GPO was able to replace or repair Morse’s phone so quickly after he threw it against the wall), but all in all I found the fourth series of Endeavour to be thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable viewing (once I finally got round to viewing it) and I am now looking forward to the next series. In the meantime, I might as well work my way through some old Inspector Morse episodes via the ITV Hub.

This year being thirty years since Inspector Morse first aired, there were nods a-plenty to the original show and it was fun trying to spot those in addition to trying to work out who the murderer was. I once again managed to miss Colin Dexter’s background appearances, but then I’ve always had as much success at spotting those as I have had solving cryptic crossword clues (in any case, author-spotting has been much harder this time around as the old boy’s now 86 and doesn’t appear in person any more). What with getting kidnapped by one of Oxford’s many serial killers and sneaking Morse into the power-station, Abigail Thaw’s character had more to do this time (I’d like to think that that was because Russell Lewis realised he was under-using such a good actress), and her father’s second wife Sheila Hancock made a much-publicised appearance as the Tarot-reading old lady in the last episode. There was a reference to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (the first film that John Thaw starred in), while I presume that the unnamed London unit which offered Morse a job was a nod to The Sweeney. I took a reference to what someone was ‘last seen wearing’ as evidence that they were attempting to do something silly like crow-barring all of the Morse novel titles into the dialogue in some way, although this turned out not to be the case (Thursday did mention Cain but not any daughters he many have had, and no-one spoke about a jewel that had been theirs or death having recently become their neighbour). That said, when Bright was hospitalised it was with a bleeding stomach ulcer, the same as what Morse had in The Wench Is Dead (both the novel and the TV adaptation). Actors who’d previous been in either Inspector Morse, Lewis or both were in evidence (the obvious one – Roger Allam – aside, there was among others James Laurenson, who’d been in the first-ever episode of Inspector Morse and who now played the wheelchair-bound professor in the computer episode). As with Sherlock, even the most trivial things are deliberately placed, such as lines and sub-plots which refer to minor characters from Inspector Morse (including Susan, the woman who Morse fell in love with as a student), music (always an important aspect of anything Morse-related), the made-up yet very plausible Oxford college names and all sorts of little puzzles; my favourite (now that it has been pointed out to me) is the name of the Abigail Thaw character, Dorothea Frazil – the word ‘frazil’ means ice crystals, so ‘D. Frazil’ means de-ice or, of course, thaw.

The latest series of Sherlock was good, after a mediocre start. But Endeavour is better.

More studies in Sherlock

Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four Sherlock Holmes novels and 56 short stories, the adventures of this great fictional detective in print do not end there. Since the demise of his creator, many authors have taken up the pen (or the typewriter, or even the laptop) to continue the great detective’s career. Strictly speaking, these are regarded as ‘non-Canonical’ adventures (the ‘Canon’ in a Holmesian context being the works of Conan Doyle and no-one else).

This even happened during Conan Doyle’s lifetime. When his friend William Gillette asked him for permission to write a Sherlock Holmes stage play in 1899, in which he wanted to take a few liberties with the character, Conan Doyle famously replied: "You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him"; incidentally, that play, which was called Sherlock Holmes, was the first time that the phrase "elementary, my dear Watson", later popularised by the Basil Rathbone filmes, was used.

Of the various Holmes pastiches over the years, two have really stood out for me – a short story and a novel. The former is Colin Dexter’s ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’, not a stab at telling one of the many ‘untold’ tales that Conan Doyle alluded to in Dr Watson’s narratives but never wrote (which is what most would-be Holmes authors do, most notably June Thomson who has written a very good series of books) but a clever retelling of ‘A Case of Identity’ which is buried in the short story collection Morse’s Greatest Mystery. The novel is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, which purports to have been written by Watson in old age and tells the ‘real’ story behind the Great Hiatus (the gap in the adventures between Holme’s ‘death’ in ‘The Final Problem’ and his return in ‘The Empty House’); in Meyer’s version, Watson becomes so concerned about Holmes’s drug problem that he and brother Mycroft trick the great detective into travelling to Vienna, where he becomes a patient of Sigmund Freud.

Other stories have him involved in various crossovers with other works of late nineteenth-century fiction, getting involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper (a particularly popular subject-area), going to America for a whole series of adventures, fathering a child with Irene Adler (it’s a boy, who grows up to become Nero Wolfe) and continuing to solve crimes after retiring to do some beekeeping in a cottage on the Sussex Downs. A recent fictional biography – a work of fiction written in the style of a biography of a famous fictional character, taking the conceit of said character being a real person to the extreme – by Nick Rennison has him playing a key role in the early development of MI5 and MI6 (in this interpretation, Professor Moriarty becomes an Irish nationalist whose importance is overstated by the Holmes brothers). Many well-known people from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make guest appearances, and in turn Holmes and Watson have themselves made a cameo appearance in one of the Flashman books. Recently, and rather timely given the impending centenary of the First World War, there’s even one in which Watson rejoins the Army in 1914 and ends up investigating a series of murders committed on the Western Front.

This brings me to the main subject of this post, which is a review of two Holmes pastiches, namely The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz and The Holmes Affair by Graham Moore.

As with the novels mentioned above, The House of Silk is presented as having been written by Watson in old age (and subsequently consigned, as these things are, to his tin dispatch box in the vaults of Cox & Company at Charing Cross), when he looks back on a case that he couldn’t write about in the 1890s because of the sensitive nature of the case, although there are no Victorian celebrity appearances here. Moriarty plays a cameo role, but he’s not central to the plot.

Instead, the sensitivity concerns the nature of the mysterious establishment of the title – which I will not divulge here for fear of spoiling what is a pretty good plot, but safe to say that it’s a dark secret that is as offensive to our own time as it would have been to the Victorians.

When it comes to crime writing, Horowitz has a good pedigree, having worked on the screenplays for TV shows like Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Foyle’s War in addition to his fiction which is mostly aimed at the teenage market.

Conan Doyle’s style was well-mimicked, although some modern-day sensitivities did creep in. For example, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes’s gang of cheeky street-urchins, are portrayed in a way that shows the harshness of their lives, living rough on the mean streets of late-Victorian London.  Indeed, this version of Watson makes much of the social issues of the day which adds a new dimension to the story.

My quibbles are minor. Horowitz says in the notes at the end that he wanted to portray Holmes going into an opium den because Conan Doyle had never done this, although I seem to recall Watson discovering Holmes undercover in one in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (which in turn formed the basis for the crack-house scene in the most recent series of Sherlock). He also presents a list of rules for anyone else wishing to have a go at writing their own Holmes adventure, although he does spoil the effect of these by admitting that he didn’t entirely keep to them himself.

All in all, a good effort that is certainly superior to most Holmes pastiches that have been published over the years.

Moore takes a different approach, balancing two parallel plots – the first is set in 1900 and involves Conan Doyle himself, while the second is set in the present day (well, 2010) and concerns members of a Sherlock Holmes appreciation society (itself quite the contemporary topic, what with the increase in interest in the stories thanks to the TV series). In 1900, Arthur Conan Doyle (he didn’t get knighted until 1902) investigates a series of murders in London after receiving a letter-bomb in the post; meanwhile, in 2010 avid Holmes fan Harold White attends a prestigious ‘Sherlockian’ gathering in a New York hotel, which is marred when one of the society’s leading members is found dead in his room; this leads onto a hunt for a missing part of Conan Doyle’s diary which covers the part of his life which is being played out in the 1900 plot.

Now I’m not a fan of this split-plot device – I’d much rather just have one thread to concentrate on. That said, it can make for a very good story if it’s done well.

This, alas, isn’t. Of the two plots, I personally preferred the 1900 adventure with Holmes’s creator. Still trying to move away from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes seven years after killing him off, Arthur (as he is referred to throughout the proceedings) finds himself having to use the detection skills he bestowed upon his fictional creation, with his friend Bram Stoker acting as a sort-of ‘Watson’. Throughout his adventure, during which he visits Whitechapel, dresses up as a woman to infiltrate a women’s suffrage meeting and is temporarily incarcerated in Newgate Prison, he meets people who tell him how much they enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, much to his own irritation.

By contrast, the 2010 plot stutters and I for one found it to be less interesting; like Arthur back in 1900, Harold is forced by circumstances to have a go at being a detective, and uses his knowledge of the afore-mentioned Canon to make his deductions while dealing with a freelance journalist (who, naturally, may not be all that she seems) and a (fictional) descendant of Conan Doyle himself.

Stories centring on Conan Doyle are not unknown – these are usually about how he came to write The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first Holmes adventure he wrote since he’d given the detective the Reichenbach Falls treatment. Moore’s story touches on this, as the events that take place do indeed prompt Conan Doyle to resurrect his famous detective.

There are also a few things Moore gets wrong; American words and spelling abound, and while I don’t find this as distracting as I used to there are a couple of howlers which jar the 1900 plot; Moore manages to have a London policeman in 1900 addressed as ‘officer’ rather than ‘constable’, and there’s a laboured joke at the expense of women’s suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett that centres on the assumption that Londoners in 1900 would have used the word ‘faucet’ instead of ‘tap’. More seriously, in the present-day story Moore somehow manages to have the body of a man found dead in suspicious circumstances in New York repatriated to Britain and buried within two days. This is obviously impossible, and it’s the sort of detail that a crime novelist needs to iron out before their books are sent to the publisher.

In conclusion, I’d be interested if Horowitz writes another Holmes adventure. Not sure I’ll be on the look-out for any of Moore’s other works, though.

Endeavour

Much though I used to like Inspector Morse, I never could get the crossword clues. It didn’t stop me from enjoying both the books and the TV series, though.

In print form, Morse – whose first name was not revealed until Death is Now My Neighbour (1996) – was killed off in 1999 in The Remorseful Day (as with Hercule Poirot in Curtain, the great detective left a letter to his less intelligent sidekick explaining the mystery), and he duly died on the telly when that novel was adapted the following year; John Thaw, the man who’d played Morse, died fifteen months later. His creator, Colin Dexter, vowed that he wouldn’t write another Morse adventure, although in 2008 he did write a short story, about Morse when he was a student, for the Daily Mail.

Its spin-off, Lewis, has been pretty decent but without John Thaw solving crosswords, driving his Mk. 2 Jag, drinking beer and, during the first half at least, jumping to the wrong conclusions (this may be why I liked Inspector Morse so much, as I am an habitual jumper-to-conclusions when watching detective shows), it just wasn’t the same. It was, therefore, with some trepidation that I heard that ITV were planning on a prequel, centring on Morse himself in his early years as a police detective. It was to be called Endeavour, after his barely-used first name. Why are we revisiting him, I thought? Can’t we just let Morse lie, and move on?

The pilot aired in 2012, and was followed earlier this year with a four-part series. I didn’t get round to seeing any of it until ITV3 had an ‘Endeavour Week’ this week, showing all five episodes.

Guess what? I loved it. Shaun Evans does a great turn as the rookie detective (has there ever been a detective series concentrating on an inexperienced youngster rather than a cynical veteran?) with just enough hints at Thaw’s Morse to keep us going. No point going for a full-blown impersonation, after all, as this can be where we see the character traits form. I also liked Roger Allam as the down-to-Earth mentor, Inspector Thursday (more of a stage man, apparently, although I vaguely remember him from the second series of Ashes to Ashes and, appropriately enough, from an Inspector Morse epsiode). The mid-Sixties setting, cleverly removed from the ‘Swinging Sixties’ stereotype by virtue of going for classical music rather than the usual pop (this is Morse, after all) and also for its fairly drab-looking costumes (just how many shades of brown were there, back then?) reminds me strongly of the BBC’s sadly short-lived series The Hour, albeit with slightly less smoking.

I failed to spot Colin Dexter’s Hitchcock-like cameo appearances, though. I guess that means I’ll have to watch the show again.