Inspector Morse (TV Series) - Morse's Interests

Morse's Interests

Morse had 'highbrow' passions: music (especially opera; Mozart and Wagner among his favourites), poetry, art, classics, English real ale, classic cars and cryptic crossword puzzles. When seen at home, Morse is usually listening to music, solving a crossword, reading classic literature, or drinking ale. While working, Morse subsists on quickly downed pints of ale in pubs, usually bought by Lewis who struggles to keep up. Many of his cases touch on Morse's interests and it is often his knowledge that helps him solve them.

In "The Death of the Self", the episode ends with Morse seeing one of the characters, an opera singer recovering from a long absence through stage-fright, make her 'comeback' performance at the amphitheatre in Verona, while in "Twilight of the Gods", he investigates the life of one of his opera idols, Gwladys Probert, a world-famous soprano. In "Who Killed Harry Field?", the murder victim is a painter, and in "The Way Through the Woods", Morse researches the pre-Raphaelite movement to aid his investigations.

In several episodes, Morse's crossword-solving ability helps him to spot where people have changed identities by creating a new name which is an anagram. In "Masonic Mysteries", he is maliciously implicated in the murder of a woman when his Times newspaper is placed in the victim's house, with his handwriting filling in the crossword. In the same episode, the writer names Morse's old Inspector from when he was a detective sergeant as 'Macnutt' in homage to D.S. Macnutt, better known as the famous and influential Observer puzzle setter 'Ximenes'.

In "The Sins of the Fathers", he investigates a murder in a brewery-owning family while, in the first episode, "The Dead of Jericho", he compares the life of a dead woman with that of Jocasta, the mother of Oedipus. The same episode also introduced his Jaguar Mark 2 car (which is damaged at the start and end of the story). His interest in classic cars is also explored in "Driven to Distraction" where, he suspects a car-salesman of murder. He so strongly seems to dislike Jeremy Boynton that he refers to Morse's own Jaguar as "she", which makes Morse convinced of his guilt.

In "Cherubim and Seraphim", he investigates the suicide of his niece and discusses with her English teacher her interest in the poet Sylvia Plath, who also killed herself. The teacher defends the teaching of Plath's poetry to students and says that her suicide will not influence students to do the same. In "Second Time Around", investigating the killing of a retired detective, Morse is haunted by an early case of his in which a young girl had been murdered and an obvious suspect could very well be innocent.