The Way through the Woods by Colin Dexter *****
Reading dates 11 September – 22 October 2024
The Way through the Woods is Inspector Morses’s 10th novel. I have never read any of Dexter’s work before but I love Oxford so I knew this was one of the Macmillan Collector’s Edition I had to get. And what a pleasure it was!
I get from the introduction to this volume that the quality of Dexter’s writing is variable and that towards this time in the series, he was influenced by the successful TV adaptation. This particular novel, though, is great on many levels: the scenes are short, but perfectly paced; it has a reasonable number of interesting characters and a good plot; I love Morse.
My favourite parts of The Way through the Woods are the beginning, when Morse is on holiday in Lyme Regis and the epigraphs (see below), most of them spot on in relation to what the chapter reveals. It has good, intelligent humour, the sort to make me smile rather than laugh, and which I prefer in crime novels. Maybe I will read more in the series …
In modern mathematics (as I understand the situation) pupils are asked, before tackling any problem: ‘What roughly do you think the answer might be?
What sort of answer might you logically expect?’ If, say, the problem involves the speed of a supersonic jet flying the Atlantic, the answer is perhaps unlikely to be 10 m.p.h., and any pupil coming up with such an improbable answer is advised to look back through his calculations and find out where he might have dropped a couple of noughts. If we are set to discover the time taken by those famous taps to fill the family tub, the answer is still rather more likely to be ten minutes than ten hours. Permit me then to make a few general comments on what would appear to be the sort of solution we might expect.
What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary
(Richard Harkness,
New York Herald Tribune, 15 June 1960)
Words! Someone – a Yank I think – said you can stroke people with words. I say – sod words!
Especially sod the sight of words. They’re too powerful
‘Naked’s powerful. ‘Breasts’ are powerful. Larkin said he thought the most splendid verb in the language was ‘unbutton’.
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does
(Stewart Henderson Britt,
New York Herald Tribune, 30 October 1956)
Men are made stronger on realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own right arm
(Sidney J. Phillips, speech, July 1953)
It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but those things of which we are ashamed
(Rousseau, Confessions)
