Inspector Morse - Habits and Personality

Habits and Personality

Morse is ostensibly the embodiment of white, male, upper-middle-class Englishness, with a set of prejudices and assumptions to match. He may thus be considered a late example of the gentleman detective, a staple of British detective fiction. This background is in sharp juxtaposition to the working class origins of his assistant, Lewis (named after another rival clue-writer, Mrs. B. Lewis); in the novels, Lewis is Welsh, but this was altered to a northern English (Geordie) background in the TV series. He is also middle-aged in the books.

Morse's relationships with authority—the establishment, bastions of power, and the status quo—are markedly ambiguous, as sometimes are his relations with women. Morse is frequently portrayed in the act of patronising women characters, to the extent that some critics have argued that Morse is a misogynist.

Morse's appearance of being patronising might have been misleading; he habitually showed empathy towards women, once opining that the female sex is not naturally prone to crime, being caring and non-violent. He was also never shy of showing his liking for attractive women, and often had dates with those involved in cases.

Morse is extremely intelligent. He dislikes spelling and grammatical errors, demonstrated by the fact that, in every personal or private document he receives, he manages to point out at least one mistake. He claims his approach to crime-solving is deductive, and one of his key tenets is that "there is a 50 per cent chance that the last person to see the victim alive was the murderer". In reality, it is the pathologists who deduce; Morse uses immense intuition and his fantastic memory to get to the killer.