Colin Dexter

This is the thrid time I have read the Silent World and I think it is the best of all the Morse novels that I have read. However, even though it's not that long since I last read this book, I think, I remembered virtually nothing of it. Really, nothing, yet I liked it so much.

Silent World is a standard detective novel with a murder or two, some other chicanery, Morse leering after one or two women, Lewis being thick but then suggesting something that Morse considers brilliant.

As I read more of these Morse novels the more I see that Morse isn't the celebate character that was portrayed on the telly: every half pretty woman that Morse meets has his lascivious eye drooling all over her. This book was no exception: he fancied the first woman he met but fairly quickly took a dislike to her so didn't pursue that fantasy.

The deafness of a victim is a crucial element in this story you will not be surprised to learn and Dexter has used a number of aspects of how deaf people live and cope in a hearing world as Morse plods his way through the case. Lewis is flummoxed at almost every turn but Morse is made more brilliant in this novel than any other.

One point that struck me, though, is that we are led to believe in the Morse books that the Police carry out no more than, say, a dozen or so interviews and the case is cracked, give or take a few reinterviews and a lot of beer being drunk. In reality, murder cases engage potentially hundreds of coppers carrying out thousands of interviews and reviews. Just a point and I realise that taking us through such a scenario would probably be tedious but at least it could be suggested from time to time. Don't you think?

Anyway, Nicholas Quinn is murdered and Morse has to find out why. There is the sub plot of an examination taken in a far off land that is important to the cracking of the case but that isn't fully used: or that I was waiting to assume a greater significance, perhaps I should say.

The unravelling of the case, with the deafness issue and the other parts of the plot is well done and if I were a service policeman I would be reading these novels avidly as coppers of old read Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot novels ... and Sherlock Holmes before them. It's the trains of thought that are interesting although it is clear that they are not that memorable as I had forgotten everything about this story.

Well, not entirely everything: there is a crossword clue given in this book that I liked and that I have remembered and have used myself. Where are the Islets of Langerhans is the essence of the clue and your task is to find out where they are and let me know.

The answer to the question is in the book and I recommend you read the whole thing since it's a good story let alone as the source of the answer to that question.

© Duncan Williamson

27 June 2004

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