The Way Through the Woods is Russell Lewis's sole contribution to Inspector Morse, and it's a beauty, an adaptation of Dexter's 1992 novel, as Morse believes the confession of a dying man and goes looking for a body - much to the upsetment of Lewis, Strange and former DI on the case played by Malcolm Storry. This is additional to the novel, as is Lewis's suspenseful ending. Chris Fairbank, Michelle Fairley and Neil Dudgeon appear.
A year later in November 1996, another late Dexter adaptation, The Daughters of Cain hit the screens, written by Julian Mitchell and directed by Herbert Wise. I wonder if Dexter was beginning to tire of all the films that had been made from original ideas and wanted to stake his claim again. This is a great story about domestic abuse, with Gabrielle Lloyd, Phyllis Logan and Tony Haygarth as the unspeakable monster. This is all mixed up with the death of a college professor and a missing dagger from the Pitt-Rivers Museum.
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Morse riffs on William Wordsworth: " Bliss was it that dawn to be alive, But to be in bed was very heaven!"
Another year flies by before Dexter's 1996 novel Death Is Now My Neighbour is brought to the screen, again by Julian Mitchell. This is the one where suburban neighbours keep getting shot, and there's a college election competition going on between Roger Allam and John Shrapnel, resided over by the deliciously evil 'Sir Clixy Bream' played with relish by Richard Briers. Wives are Holley Chant, and Maggie Steed, who looks familiar and so she should be - Silent Witness!
In !998 we received Malcolm Bradbury's adaptation of Dexter's 1989 novel, The Wench Is Dead, a delightfully playful Victorian mystery which Morse solves from his hospital bed, aided by girlfriend Judy Loe, author Lisa Eichhorn and graduate DC Matthew Finney (Lewis is absent - he's away at an Inspector's course).
And finally after a two year wait, perhaps for Dexter to finish his final Morse novel the year before, we are brought to The Remorseful Day, adapted by Stephen Churchett. Mitchell did not get his wish to polish off Morse - though he hadn't retired (is now 91). Thaw died two years later.
Whately's delivery of the line 'Inspector Morse is dead!' is a real kicker. As Morse collapses in the college grounds (the way Lewis made Thursday do in Exeunt - the sneaky bugger!) we hear Fauré's Requiem, the same music that was used both in the pilot and the last ever scene of Endeavour.
James Grout as Strange is well to the fore in these last films.
Talking of which, as we had missed the pilot of Endeavour on our last rerun, we did agree to put it on when Morse was over. So we did. It was bloody good just how well Lewis took all the elements of the original and reinterpreted it all so well.
The only one of Dexter's Inspector Morse books that wasn't filmed is 'The Riddle of the Third Mile' (1983). 'The Jewel That Was Ours' was based on the 1987 film The Wolvercote Tongue so I guess he supplied that story to Julian Mitchell then wrote it up as a novel later (in 1991).
