outdated and surpassed by others
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I love the Morse TV series, one of the best TV detective dramas ever, so the books on which it's based must be great.............well no.
The characters of Morse and Lewis are removed from those in the TV versions, Morse especially comes accross as a bad tempered, slightly perverted, misoginistic, racist, womanising alcoholic - the attitudes shown by Morse (and dare I say , Dexter) are very outdated and in some cases just downright offensive - this is especially true in the earlier books.
But a detective series stands of falls on the stories, the mystery, the puzzle......those on display here are simply to complicated and too often solved by Dexter revealing a startling revelation at the end that the reader could not possible predict from what has gone before (in some cases even introducing new characters right at the end simply to solve things), to put a twist in a story like this is fine, but to put 5 or 6 in the same book is just annoying and unneccesary - it feels like Dexter is patronising the reader and simply showing off how clever he is.
To be read as a curiosity, nothing more, stick to the TV Morse or read another more accomplished thriller/detective author.
Very much of their time. Nothing special (in fact, rather substandard) when compared to more recent detective fiction.
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A wonderful collection
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The Inspector Morse complete boxed set is a wonderful collection of top-notch detective fiction. Colin Dexter routinely stuns the reader with above average twists and turns, portraying Inspector Morse as a wistful bachelor whose life is sometimes taken over by the crimes he is investigating. Every novel is a winner, and every character is considered and detailed on each page. The plots are not farcical - they do not allow characters to do the impossible, unlike some detective fiction available nowadays. Indeed, the plots are equally as considered and viable as the characters who are written about.
Colin Dexter does a marvellous job portraying Oxford as a glorious city. He writes with passion and knowledge, and invites the reader to hold in his imagination every street, pub, hotel and college in which the plot is developed.
Each and every summer, as more and more works of cheap beach fiction in the crime genre are released, the chapters are shortened, the paragraphs simplified and the plots and speech Americanised and sensationalised beyond belief. Colin Dexter never committed such literary crime; he maintained dignity in all of his works, and allowed for a great deal of enjoyment to be felt as one reads these fantastically written novels.
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