The Jewel that was Ours by Colin Dexter****
Reading dates: 12 January – 04 February 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****
I really enjoyed The Jewel that was Ours (finally!). The setting (an American tour, the Ashmolean, the Randolph Hotel) is perfect for a crime novel and the plot – two deaths and a theft – is well outlined and resolved. I really enjoyed the last scene, where Morse reveals what happened. It is surprising and full of changes of heart from this reader. Yet, the final solution made a lot of sense. The topic too is very moving. My only issue with it – with the whole series, really – is the misogyny, again. I mean, see this quote: ‘Six extra personnel: Sergeant Dixon, three detective PCs, and two WPCs for the telephones’. And of course, the character of Sheila Williams, a drunk lose woman, made to look desperate and unhinged … Two to go and I am glad I read the last one before or I would have been in floods of tears at Morse’s demise.
Solvitur atribulando(The problem is solved by walking around)
(Latin proverb)
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“There’s something in one of Kipling’s stories about a fellow who says he knows his soul’s gone rotten because he can’t get drunk any more. You know it?”
Morse nodded. “ ‘Love o’ Women.’ ”
“Yeah! One of the greatest stories of the twentieth century.”
“Nineteenth, I think you’ll find.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Not a literary copper!” She looked down miserably at the table-top; then looked up again as Morse elaborated:
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“It was Mulvaney, wasn’t it? ‘When the liquor does not take hold, the soul of a man is rotten in him.’ Been part of my mental baggage for many a year.”
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“I’d say ‘no,’ my lovely girl. Because if I’m not reasonably careful, if I do have another drink, in fact if I stay a further minute even without another drink—then I shall probably suggest to you that we proceed—don’t forget that we don’t ‘progress’ in the police force, we always ‘proceed’—to, er …” Morse waved a hand vaguely aloft, drained his glass, rose from the settee, and walked to the door.
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Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely being “sent” to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel
(John Ruskin, Modern Painters)
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Her husband! God! A quietly cultivated, top-of-the-head English don, incurably in the grip of the Oxford Disease—that tragic malady which deludes its victims into believing they can never be wrong in any matter of knowledge or opinion.
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Nothing, as both men knew, could be quite as sombre and sickening as a suicide (or, as here, an attempted suicide), for it spoke not only of unbearable suffering but also of a certain misguided fortitude.
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Whilst he was gone, Morse turned to the back of The Times and had filled in the whole of the bottom right-hand quarter of the crossword when Lewis returned two minutes later.
“Do you always do crosswords that way round, sir?”
“Uh? Oh, yes! I always try solving problems by starting at the end—never the beginning.”
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Some circumstantial evidence is very strong—as when you find a trout in the milk
(Henry Thoreau, unpublished manuscript)
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Six extra personnel: Sergeant Dixon, three detective PCs, and two WPCs for the telephones.
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And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too
(Thomas Hardy, “The Convergence of the Twain”)
Sergeant Lewis had been
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It’s this Roscoe woman. Very able little lady! Did you know that a lot of ’em have been little—these big people: Alexander, Augustus, Attila, Nelson, Napoleon … ”
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