Read all
Inspector Banks novels … Inspector Rebus done, too … done with Wallander too … Inspector
Beck, well, only 10 of them and I am still waiting for some more … I felt like
I cleared all backlogs and was now facing long empty days with nothing to read
… I searched and found a lot of ‘Inspectors’ … read one Inspector Montalbano
novel which failed to grip me … searched among the Inspectors from Great
Britain and decided to try Inspector Morse … I read about the Inspector Morse
series on the www and what I read sounded good …
And only 13
novels in the series! … aah … why not … and made into a TV series too … and
quite interestingly all the above Inspectors have their TV avatars too … amazon to the rescue again and to my delight
and chagrin, found all 13 novels on its used books portals … I realized I was
doomed … so, Jai, no searching and
waiting and hunting pleasure here, eh, like those Inspector Beck novels … I
checked the prices … five were available for 70 each, one for 65, one for 45,
and two for 35, and three went slightly above 100!! This was great going and all books were
available with one seller, except one novel … and at this point I didn’t want
to hesitate and procrastinate and bought all of them in two instalments …
The novels
were written between 1975 and 1999 and it is only I who discovered them 40
years later … so the period feel is there … and everything appears steady … and
one starts to wonder how they ever managed without mobile phones and the
Internet!! And Inspector Morse is an ardent
beer lover and he is found in pubs most of the times and actually, all these other
‘British’ Inspectors too love their pints and malts … and now I know why I feel
so thirsty while reading Robinson or Rankin and now Dexter … and when I started
reading from the first in the series, I discovered soon enough that the Morse
series is not a ‘police procedural’ as I anticipated … that was a bit of a blow
… Morse is an ‘Inspector’ and he works from the police station, and he has a ‘sidekick,’
Sergeant Lewis … that is all the ‘police’ that is there … the collecting of
evidence, forensics, post mortems, and other ‘procedural’ matters all happen ‘behind
the scenes’ … Morse thinks and talks to the key witnesses and basically ‘works out’
the case … and goes to the pub for beer on a regular basis … so, what I realized
was that Morse was a ‘lone-ranger’ detective who happened to be working in the
police force …
I have already read four
of the ‘Inspector Morse’ novels, and he is very cerebral and smart … and I am
glad that I put behind my slight disappointment and persisted with the novels …
and I do love the atmosphere … the description of those oxford evenings,
especially … and the buildings and churches and pubs and roads and buses … the
reading is slow, I realized … and I feel that may be because there are no
multiple focal points and one has to follow the trajectory of Morse’s
cerebrations and the investigations that follow … Morse’s deductions fail
spectacularly most of the times and its back to the drawing board again … the reader is not
given a chance to shift his/her focus or is even given a major change of scene …
even if there is some minor scene change, Morse claims our attention soon
enough … I could be completely wrong, of course …
No comments:
Post a Comment