The death of Colin Dexter has rightly brought tributes from the literary community, but the writer also has a very special place in the history of television. Apart from Charles Dickens – whose use of the serial format and exaggerated characters anticipated the demands of popular TV drama – Dexter is the novelist who has had most individual impact on the medium’s fiction output.
This impact is partly measured by volume. Dexter’s 13 books about the operatic, alcoholic, argumentative Oxford detective Endeavour Morse, have resulted in 93 peak-time dramas on ITV: 33 episodes of Inspector Morse, 42 of the sidekick spin-off Lewis, and 17 so far of a prequel, Endeavour. Dexter lived to 86, and it would be a fitting tribute if the TV afterlife of his characters reaches at least 100.
But beyond those numbers, the Morse franchise, which began on television 30 years ago, was largely responsible for making detective fiction the centrepiece of mainstream British schedules. When producer Kenny McBain and dramatist Anthony Minghella premiered their first adaption of a Morse novel, The Dead of Jericho in January 1987, it was considered revolutionary (and by some in broadcasting, reckless) to hand over two hours of airtime to a police procedural – a length previously reserved for bought-in movies, or perhaps a Christmas or Easter special.
It soon became clear, though, that the extra time allowed a luxurious visual slowness – and an intensely deliberative performance from John Thaw in the title role – that took the genre into new areas of writing, direction, acting, and, with its shots of historic Oxford, location filming. The lessons it taught about place and pace have never been forgotten. In the leisurely, immersive experience it offered, Inspector Morse was box-set television long before the concept existed.
It was a sadness for Dexter to have long outlived McBain, Thaw and Minghella, who all died cruelly young, and the death of the novelist now means that all of the key creative founders of this remarkable TV drama dynasty have gone.
But, as well as changing the form of TV crime fiction, the Morse franchise also expanded the range of sources. Many of the crime writers who have flourished in screen adaptation – Arthur Conan Doyle, Georges Simenon, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin – were already recognised bestsellers before television interest, and it is still possible, as Peter James has shown with his Roy Grace series, to be a super-selling novelist without being eligible for a Bafta.
Dexter, however, is a prime example of a writer whose reputation and readership were largely dependent on the TV visibility of the stories. This had creative advantages: with the bulk of the audience having little ownership of the characters, it was easier for Minghella and McBain to make large departures from the originals. Morse and Lewis (played on screen by Kevin Whately) were written more subtly for screen than page, although the key aspect of the books – the ingenious plots constructed by the crossword-obsessed novelist – were sensibly preserved intact. And some of Dexter’s literary inventions gained from visualisation: notably, a mystery that turned on mistaken lip-reading.
So, not having known of Morse until they saw him played by Thaw, TV writers and producers started trawling libraries and second-hand bookshops for little-known or now out-of-print books that might be popularised or resurrected by television. Beneficiaries included Caroline Graham, whose novels inspired Midsomer Murders, and Alan Hunter, creator of the George Gently mysteries, a largely forgotten crime sequence from which the writer Peter Flannery has now spun seven BBC1 series.
Other types of literature have also gained from the evidence of the Dexter case that little-known books can become must-know shows. Two trilogies of period memoirs – Jennifer Worth’s Call the Midwife and Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford – were turned, by the writers Heidi Thomas and Bill Gallagher respectively, into Sunday-night blockbusters for BBC1. In both cases, broadcasting has brought the authors a posthumous fame that they would have found astonishing in their writing lives. This happened because those series are examples of books from the past being perfectly placed to serve a present need in television: in this case, stories with strong central female roles.
Recently, the crime writer Ann Cleeves, whose Vera and Shetland series have both become staples of peak-time, has come closest to Dexter in the beneficial effects of TV on a writing career. Both of the Cleeves series, though, are occupying a space that Morse helped to create in the schedules. Each offered, as Dexter’s Oxford had, a camera-friendly setting: Northumbria and Shetland.
There is still a snobbery among some readers and literary critics that most fictions are reduced by filming. But Colin Dexter was a novelist whose stories proved to be peculiarly suited to TV, in allowing unusually detailed examination of faces and places. His Morse and Lewis changed TV crime drama for the better, and forever.
