Even if he's been on a case a couple of minutes. "He'd have ideas though, wouldn't he, Morse? Always did have. But their joint boss, Chief Superintendant Strange, has confidence in Morse and wants to give him some leeway, The reason for this assertion, seemed entirely to hinge on the verses. Unsurprisingly, he does not take kindly to Morse's being given charge of it, or the insistence of Morse that if there was a body to be found, it would not be on the Blenheim Estate, where all the previous investigation had been concentrated, but in Wytham Woods. The crime had previously been the responsibility of Chief Inspector Harold Johnson of Thames Valley CID. He thus becomes involved with the unsolved case of the Swedish girl Karin Eriksson, a secretarial student, who had disappeared a year previously. Such clues could almost have been designed to intrigue Morse, the crossword puzzle fanatic. The cryptic clues seem to imply that the missing girl has been murdered. The police have requested help from Howard Phillipson, the Times's literary correspondent. She tells him she works for a model agency, intrigued despite herself by his, "keen blue eyes." He in turn, notices that her eyes partially obscured by make-up, "seemed somehow darkened by a sadder, more durable shadow." And inevitably she does later have a connection to the case in which he becomes involved.ĭuring the course of this, Morse's attention is caught by an anonymous riddle, in the form of a five-stanza poem in "The Times" newspaper.
He then tries putting his detective and deductive skills to use by covertly watching and finding out about a woman in the hotel, Louisa, to whom he is attracted. Bored out of his mind, he is repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to follow the "Coleridge Trail" to Ottery St. (which significantly is a chapter heading), also exemplifies Morse's attitude to vacations. "A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell" However George Bernard Shaw's expressed view that, Much as in an earlier story when Morse becomes intrigued in a case from his hospital bed, in this novel he is reluctantly on holiday in Lyme Regis. We are moved into the story step by step. In terms of the story itself, the plot is typically complex, and only to be hinted at here. Many eminent scholars present their views in the newspaper. The reader is implicitly invited to spend a great deal of thought deconstructing the cryptic poem which is presented, and assessing the various theories as to what the "clues" are. When the detectives, and the reader, solve the puzzle, then we believe the explanation to the story - the disappearance of a young woman from Uppsala in Sweden - will be clearly revealed. In addition to these stylistic devices, one satisfying element of this novel is the inclusion of many possible solutions to an intellectual puzzle - a devious conundrum which forms part of the plot. For instance, one is from the magazine, "Homes and Gardens", but it does relate to the Oxford properties and social groupings which comprise the setting of the following chapter. They can be taken from anywhere, as long as the author considers them pertinent to the context. They are not all from literary sources, however. In the novel Colin Dexter continues his predilection for starting each chapter with a quotation. It is perhaps the quintessential Morse novel. They can be taken from anywhere, as long as the auth The Way Through the Woods is the tenth novel in the Inspector Morse series, and won the Gold Dagger Award in 1992. Its title, part of the couplet, "There once was a way through the woods Before they planted the trees" is taken from a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
The Way Through the Woods is the tenth novel in the Inspector Morse series, and won the Gold Dagger Award in 1992.
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