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Inspecting Oxford
By ROBERT N. JENKINS © St. Petersburg Times, published February 18, 2001
A bit of a pressure front herself, Nuola Young presses on. Unlike the 15 or so of us dutifully trailing her in this walking tour of Oxford, the middle-age Nuola (call her by her first name, she directs, and that is pronounced NOO-lah) does not acknowledge the rain. Besides, we have each paid our 6 pounds, 35 pence to be led around Inspector Morse's Oxford, and Nuola is set on giving us our money's worth. It seems so, well, so British -- work to be done, and all that. * * *
Invariably, before he could solve the first murder it would be followed by at least one more in the 13 novels and several short stories fashioned by Morse's creator, Colin Dexter. The fictional detective's fame rose far wider when the British television series Inspector Morse began in 1987, 12 years after the first novel was published. The shows proved so successful -- on America's PBS Mystery! series, in Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere -- that Dexter and other writers ultimately cranked out 33 two-hour episodes. Dexter based Morse in the real-life Oxford suburb of Kidlington, with most of the plots taking place in and around the university town itself. As one satisfied British television executive acknowledges in a recent documentary on the Morse phenomenon, "We made Oxford, city of gleaming spires, the murder capital of the world." Dexter, with a coy smile in the same documentary, calculates the carnage at "80, 81 body bags." * * *
Oxford is not a university as Americans know the term but rather is the collective name for "39 colleges scattered about the city," our guide relates. "They are residences for students for two to three years." Among the college structures are some built centuries before England lost the American colonies. There are now too many cars for the old streets, too many people for the old sidewalks, maybe even too many remarkable old buildings. As we would see, there are certainly too many alluring pubs beckoning us to dry our outer selves and wet our inner ones. Nuola begins her tour at Worcester College, founded in 1714 -- nearly 450 years after the original Oxford college -- but the one featured in the first Morse novel, Last Bus to Woodstock. Like the rest of the ancient heart of this city, the locale seems almost gray, the auto traffic constant. But the magic of Oxford is just beyond the gateway through the stone walls: As with most of the colleges, Worcester boasts a large green lawn in its quad, or courtyard. It is an immediate refuge from not only the workaday bustle but also from even the sense of modern times.
A little while later Nuola is holding forth on the steps of the famed Ashmolean Museum, across the street from the Randolph Hotel, which figures often in Morse stories. In The Jewel That Was Ours, this hotel hosts a busload of stereotypical American tourists, one of whom mysteriously dies just after checking in. Some personal research the night before our walking tour has disclosed that most pubs in town acknowledge that Colin Dexter is or was a customer. Nuola, an acquaintance of Dexter's, now pinpoints his favorite: "He likes the bar at the Randolph, it's very accessible." " . . . In Service of All the Dead, that church in which the service takes place, is just across the street and down the block from the Randolph."
"The Riddle of the Third Mile is the best book to learn of Morse's Oxford years. This is where Morse lived when he was a student at Oxford, over there," about a block from the theater and three blocks from the opera house, both of which he frequented. "The death of a neighbor girl distracted him at exam time," which led to his poor grades and eventual life as a policeman. As she walks a little farther, the woman who originated the Morse Walking Tour announces, with what passes for excitement, "Once, the crew discovered that a man living next to the site being filmed shared the name of a character in that book!" It was a coincidence, but the sort of situation that helps blend authenticity into the novels and TV shows. We pause an extra minute or two in one quad. It is here where the climactic scene of the final episode, The Remorseful Day, was filmed. The quad is empty of students, probably because of the rain, and the emptiness emphasizes the feeling recalled from reading that book.
* * * Nuola continues effortlessly to weave reality, filming locations and novel sites as she herds us to a traffic island or a street corner, then drops an anecdote about that very spot. She leads us into this or that college quad -- after asking permission at the college porter's office to let us intrude and gawk. All of these places figure in the Morse series because author Dexter lives here, too. A 1953 graduate of rival Cambridge, studying Latin and Greek, Dexter moved to Oxford in 1966. "He has lived for decades in a house in the 300 block of the Banbury Road," Nuola discloses. Before retiring in 1988, Dexter was involved with creating university examinations. He was also a three-time national champion in crossword puzzle clue-writing competitions. Though Morse is not his alter ego (for instance, Dexter has been married for years while Morse never was), Dexter did mix heaps of his own life with the character's. Both love Wagnerian opera, the long-running radio serial The Archers and those crossword puzzles. And as Nuola tells it: "In Death Is Now My Neighbor, Dexter and Morse are diagnosed as diabetic. Soon after, Morse refrains from ordering a beer and orders a spinach lasagna instead." That was an odd moment, Morse fans recognized, because the Great Man was fond of his pint or three, often making beer or ale his lunch or dinner, and seldom passing a pub during a road trip searching for clues. At home, listening to his opera or reading his favorite poet, A.E. Housman, Morse's only companion is his single-malt scotch. * * *
"Nearly every pub in Oxford has had scenes filmed in it for the series," Nuola informs us as she leads us through one of them. (I have never felt more like a tourist than when race-walking through a perfectly good pub to follow her back out into the rain.) Two hours and 20 minutes after we began the tour, the rain has not let up, nor has Nuola Young. Where I am not covered by my small pop-up umbrella, I am wet: my left forearm, bottoms of both pants legs, shoes and -- yes, I can feel it now -- even my socks. Nuola has brought us back to the starting point. It is a remorseful day, indeed, for the time has ended when we could slosh in the chief inspector's footsteps. If you goOxford is about an hour's drive or train ride from London. The Inspector Morse Tour steps off on Saturdays at 1:30 p.m.; extra guides are added if the number of walkers becomes too large. The tour lasts about two hours and includes 19 stops. The price is 6 pounds, 35 pence (about $9.40, depending on the exchange rate) for adults and 3 pounds, 50 pence (about $5.15) for children 6-16. Tours operate year-round; reservations are recommended. For more information on this and other walking tours -- all are wheelchair-accessible -- as well as much more information on Oxford and maps, see the city's Web site, http://www.oxfordcity.co.uk/guide/infotours.html. A handy, inexpensive guide is The Oxford of Inspector Morse, by Richards and Attwell. Crammed with Morse trivia as well as legitimate history of the city, it was published by Irregular Special Press to help participants in the Inspector Morse Society's weekend gathering in 1997 but was updated in 1999. The 46-page paperback is 3 pounds, 50 pence at Oxford's famed bookshop, Blackwell's. Blackwell's also offers a free map of the city's prime sites. A far-weightier look at the city is the authoritative Blue Guide, Oxford & Cambridge, published by W.W. Norton, $16.95.
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