The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter****

Reading dates: 21 January–16 February 2025

I love the character of Morse. Of all the detectives, he is the closest to me on so many levels (usually enhanced ones). I like the erudition, the love of art, the moroseness, the directness, the skewed diagonal thinking … The Remorseful Day, the last in the 13 novel series, is not as good as The Way Through the Woods in its plotting and style but it is nonetheless neat and very sad, as well as interesting. It is as much driven by character as by plot and there are many different wrong turns which feels true to any investigation I have been involved in. No straight lines.

And I love Oxford, the real one and this seedy one without the dons and the quadrangles.

I love that I always expand my vocabulary with Morse. I learned:

prognathic
homodyned
sesquipedalian

I might read a palate cleanser next (and in Spanish too) because I am already feeling sad that I only have 11 books left in the series.

She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to light another cigarette. “No. Let’s get the inquisition over. Where’s the bedroom, by the way?”
He pointed to a door on his left. “Top sheet turned back in a very neat hypotenuse.”

So many times had he been counseled that beer made a lumpy mattress, that spirits made a hard pillow, and that in general alcohol was the stuff that nightmares were made of.

I walk about; not to and from.
(Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia)