The Wench is Dead by Colin Dexter***
Reading dates: 16 December 2025 – 11 January 2026
Inspector Morse novels in order:
- Last Bus to Woodstock ****
- Last Seen Wearing***
- The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn***
- Service of All the Dead **
- The Dead of Jericho ***
- The Riddle of the Third Mile **
- The Secret of Annexe 3**
- The Wench is Dead***
- The Jewel That Was Ours
- The Way Through the Woods*****
- The Daughters of Cain
- Death Is Now My Neighbour
- The Remorseful Day****
The Wench is Dead came highly recommended as it had won various awards. Morse is in hospital and someone gives him a true crime book. Out of boredom, he starts to read it and gets the feeling that those hanged for this crime in the nineteenth century were wrongly convicted. He sets to find out what happened. While it was enjoyable and I greatly admired Dexter’s willingness to innovate and change his narrative pattern (unlike Lee Child) for me, this novel was too close to my beloved Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. If you are going to copy a plot, at least copy the best crime novel as voted by the British Crime Writer’s Association!
Still, More himself was great. I discovered make quirky things about him (synoptic as another favourite word, Bleak House as a favourite book – maybe that will encourage me to finish it). There were may fun epigraph and the resolution was very well conceived if, as always it was drenched with misogyny.
The Greeks had a word for it—parakrousis—the striking of a slightly wrong note in an otherwise tuneful harmony.
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What he really needed was to stand that bit further back from the picture to get a more synoptic view of things. ‘Synoptic’ had always been one of Morse’s favourite words.
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He remembered when he’d first read Bleak House (still to his mind the greatest novel in the English language) he’d deliberately decelerated his reading as the final pages grew thinner beneath his fingers. Never had he wanted to hang on to a story so much!
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All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been, it is all lying in magic preservation in the pages of books
(Thomas Carlyle)
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Magnus Alexander corpora parvus erat (Even Alexander the Great didn’t measure up to the height-requirement of the Police Force)
(Latin Proverb)
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Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time
(G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Netting Hill)
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All right!’ Morse needed no further excuses. Having dipped the thermometer into the water, he’d found the reading a little too cold for any prospect of mixed bathing.
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Stet Difficilior Lectio
(Let the more difficult of the readings stand)
(The principle applied commonly by editors faced with
variant readings in ancient manuscripts)
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What was the average height of women in the nineteenth century?’
‘Which end of the nineteenth century, Morse?’
‘Let’s say the middle.’
‘Interesting question!’
‘Well?’
‘It varied, I suppose.’
‘Come on!’
‘Poor food, lack of protein—all that sort of stuff. Not very big, most of ’em. Certainly no bigger than the Ripper’s victims in the 1880s: four foot nine, four foot ten, four foot eleven—that sort of height:
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[…] past the North Oxford Conservative Association premises, in which he had never (and would never) set foot; past the Spiritualist Church, in which he had never (as yet) set foot; past the low-roofed Women’s Institute HQ, in which he had once spoken about the virtues of the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme; and finally, turning left, he came into South Parade, just opposite the Post Office—into which he ventured once a year and that to pay the Lancia’s road-tax.
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