Absolutely Elsewhere

あの角曲がってく緑のバスが器用に

狭い路地を抜ける自由に走る? 

「スカイ・ブルー」(Garnet Crow)

 

That bus going around the corner is expertly

Passing through that narrow road - Is it moving around freely?

"Sky Blue" (Garnet Crow)

Sometimes, I read books not written in Japanese.

After leaving the Black Prince pub in Woodstock near Oxford, a young man finds the dead body of Sylvia Kaye lying a corner of the car park next to the pub. It's soon discovered by the police that Sylvia had been spotted at a bus stop the day before, trying to catch the last bus to Woodstock, but that she and an unknown companion had decided to hitch a lift to Woodstock. There are signs of sexual assault, so it appears something must have gone wrong on her way to Woodstock, but who picked the two young women up and where has Sylvia's companion gone too? Inspector Morse and his new partner Sergeant Lewis decide to tackle the problem from two sides: they want to track the driver who picked the girls up, but also suspect the unknown companion seen at the bus stop might be one of the girls of her work, so they want to see who might have hitched that lift with Sylvia that fateful night, and why they are keeping quiet. Lewis has not worked with Morse before however, and sees a man who can at times seem brilliant, but at times somewhat eccentric with a tendency to snap at his partner for no reason. As the investigation goes on however, the two detectives stumble upon more secrets than they had initially suspected in Colin Dexter's Last Bus to Woodstock (1975).

Allow me to confess right away: I have never ever seen a whole episode of Inspector Morse or any of its spin-offs. In my whole life, I might have seen 10 minutes in total of Inspector Morse, and my record on Midsomer Murders isn't that much better either. So no, I don't really have a connection with the British police procedural. So why did I try the first novel in the Inspector Morse series, the one that sparked that long-lived television series? To be honest, I don't really know. I had written the title down and judging from the other titles I wrote down around the same time, I was looking for puzzler-type mystery novels, but.... this isn't really one. So either it was a misinformed recommendation somewhere, or I had jotted it down for some reason, but either way, I can't really say Last Bus to Woodstock convinced me to read or watch more of Inspector Morse, as it's not exactly the type of mystery fiction I commonly read.

The writing and Inspector Morse's not really likeable personality (despite the weirdly inserted romance subplot) is a thing your mileage may vary on, and let's say that some of the views presented by the characters in this book on women and rape are dated, but as for the core plot of Last Bus to Woodstock, I can't say it really made an impression. I think I can best describe it as a plot that has a few okay ideas here and there, which are however overshadowed by some moments that seem so out of place and forced, it's hard to take the story really serious. For example, one of the earliest moves Inspector Morse takes in this novel, is to check out all of the private correspondence of the victim's female collegues received at their workplace, in an attempt to find the mysterious companion who hitched a ride. Only this action doesn't make any sense at all. It's a looooong shot that such a search would yield results and there's no reason why the police would need to not only check the private mail of the victim, but of every female colleague at her workplace on the off-chance something of interest might be there. If the police would go through the private mail of the victim's colleagues every time someone is murdered for no specific reason at all, well, that's a full-time job there. Of course, Inspector Morse's nonsensical move does lead to a certain clue because the author decided so, but it doesn't make any sense at all from a narrative point. And that happens few other times too in this novel, where Morse makes outrageous guesses based on flimsy foundations, which are of course rewarded by the author but never do these moments feel satisfying. The way Inspector Morse stumbles upon the trail of the person who picked the girls up for example is supposed to be very convincing, only the method sounds as convincing as me predicting the weather tonight based on how the tea in my tea cup looks like at this moment.

Strip the plot of the details, and Last Bus to Woodstock has some okay ideas: Dexter manipulates his web of characters to create a base that could serve as an interesting whodunnit game, with several developments shifting suspicion from one character to another consistently and enough puzzling facts and incidents that don't seem to mesh entirely until you see the correct shape of the puzzle. But fill in the details, and you'll notice that so many moments and actions feel rather artificial, and not in a "natural artificial" manner. Meaning that even within the logic of the artificial world that is this novel, people's behavior and actions to be supported enough by the way they are actually portrayed and described. Ultimately, I didn't enjoy reading this novel, because many of the major moments of the book felt to come out of nowhere, and Morse was constanty rewarded for his deductions/guesses plotwise despite the fact they shouldn't. The puzzle of whodunnit just never clicked with me because of this.

So yeah, Last Bus to Woodstock was my first foray into the world of Inspector Morse, but it's likely I won't return. As a police procedural, I didn't find this one satisfying or convincing at all, and I'd muuuuch rather read Inspector French's adventures then. It may be the book that started the famous series, but it's not one that managed to capture me. As a whodunnit puzzler, it's just not plotted tightly enough. Perhaps there are other Morse novels that are more satisfying? If anyone has a recommendation or anything, feel free to leave a comment!