The headquarters of the Thames Valley Police are now as they were then in Kidlington, a very large village in the north of Oxford.

It can be called contemplative, not a place for crime.

A stone's throw away is Blenheim Palace, the castle of the 1st Duke of Marlborough, where Churchill was born and is buried in the neighboring village of Bladon.

In the south, the venerable university town, which was given a prominent place on the crime scene map, not least because of Colin Dexter's thirteen novels and a volume of short stories.

And to this day it still attracts tourists who comb the city in the footsteps of Dexter's investigator Chief Inspector Morse.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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Dexter's writing career was due to a rainy vacation in Wales.

The library in the holiday home offered only weak crime fiction, so Dexter decided, out of frustration, to write one himself.

This debut, The Last Bus to Woodstock, was released in 1975. A scantily clad young woman is found murdered in the parking lot of a pub in Woodstock.

“How he hated sex murders!” Thinks Inspector Morse, while a sergeant named Lewis conducts interviews at midnight to devote himself to the “Times” crossword puzzle - 14 vertical essence of potency, three letters.

SEX.

"Nice definition, don't you agree?"

A choleric inspector

Dexter, born in 1930, came from Stamford, a two-hour drive northeast of Oxford.

After studying Classical Philology at Cambridge, his professional career took him to various schools, until the beginning of a deafness forced him to work in his mid-thirties in the Examinations Office at Oxford University.

Chief Inspector Morse is, as Dexter has admitted, a semi-autobiographical figure, choleric, brooding, inveterate bachelor with an interest in the female sex, mostly over-smoking and always over-drinking decipherers of the most tricky cases.

It has to be, because in few crime stories the police are so unrestrainedly duped as by representatives of the academic world of Oxford.

The neighbor as a role model

Specific references to the author's day-to-day work can be found in “The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn” (1977). It is by no means squeamish, Morse has to do with decapitated water bodies, porn clubs, drugs, diabolical priests and again and again with very seductive women, but Dexter saves firefights, action stunts and appearances by Superman, because he does rather creates the tension by increasingly complicating the plot according to the pattern: Nothing is thinning out, everything is becoming more and more opaque.

As a reader, you watch Morse think, often cannot follow him and end up sitting in front of a tangle of potential perpetrators that only one person is able to unravel.

The figure that the author offers his readers as a discharge is that of Sergeant Robbie Lewis.

A man with a family life, a good investigator who has his heart in the right place, but who is not inclined to ingenious gaps in thought.

Lewis never gets the solution to the riddle until the end of the novel - usually at the bar of a pub.

Dexter Universe on TV

The Inspector was modeled on Dexter's neighbor, Sir Jeremy Morse, a major banker who reorganized Lloyds, worked for the Bank of England and was Chancellor of the University of Bristol.

Like Dexter, Morse was a crossword puzzle inventor under the pseudonym Esrom - English: cruciverbalist - as well as an important chess composer.

Dexter once called him the smartest mind he had ever known.

When Dexter died on March 21, 2017, the whole of Oxford was in mourning, at the Randolph Hotel, whose bar the author liked and regularly frequented, a display case was set up with all of his books and memorabilia, and the porter took care of all of the guests to point out the famous regular customers with due respect.