The Wench is Dead is the eighth novel in Colin Dexter's "Inspector Morse" series. It is one of the most intriguing so far, as it is a story within a story. The mystery itself is based on a true unsolved crime which had been researched by Dexter. In part then, it is an historical novel. The novel received the British Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award, for the best Crime novel of the year, in 1989.The phrase "The Wench is Dead" is often quoted, but originally was a quotation from Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta, written around 1590. "Friar Barnardine: Thou hast committed...Barabas: Fornication: but that was in another country;And besides, the wench is dead."Colin Dexter again uses his favoured form for this Inspector Morse novel. Each chapter is satisfyingly headed with an apt literary quotation. In this one however, there is another layer - a "framework" story within this structure. It starts with Inspector Morse being admitted to hospital with a ruptured stomach ulcer. He becomes very aware of his own mortality, and begins to feel very low and vulnerable. This first part of the book deals with the situation Morse finds himself in. He recognises that he has has to lay off his beloved whisky, and idles away his time between watching the patients around him and admiring what he sees as the comparative charms of his nurses. He is frustrated to be trapped, and becomes very aware of his age, and how he is beginning to appear to others - particularly women. He is particularly pleased to see Lewis, who visits him bearing gifts such as lemon barley water, books and illicit booze. The readers' world becomes very small, as we match our viewpoint to that of Morse, as he variously enjoys the dubious pleasure of a sordid paperback or critiques a terminally boring pseudo-academic textbook, full of "pompous polysyllaby". One slight book, however, does intrigue him. "Murder on the Oxford Canal", which had been given to him by the widow of a fellow patient, Colonel Deniston.The middle part is given over to the tale of a murder that had happened in 1859, described in the booklet Morse was reading as "a tale of unbridled lust and drunken lechery." (view spoiler)[A young woman, Joanne Franks was on her way to London to meet her husband. She was travelling by barge which was manned by a crew of four - the captain Oldfield, Musson, Towns and a youth called Wootton. All the crew were uneducated, and described as coarse and brutally uninhibited boatmen. She was later found murdered, floating alongside the canal bank. (hide spoiler)]
Even though I barely remember it, I'm pretty sure I had watched some of the TV versions of Morse. Anyway, I recently ran into this again via a BBC4extra audio, where they turned the book into an audio, which I loved a lot. Buying the book was a good choice, for one, Colin Dexter's English is a different style than I'm used to. Might be due to historical reasons, as the author grew up in a different time than me and thus his vocabulary does contain a few words I'm not used to hearing - no clue. Anyhow, this book was an easy read and if I were near a library that had the other Morse stories, I'd borrow them. Unfortunately, my local one doesn't - nor does it have much of Dexter's work in translations. *shrug*So, if you look for something different, this is the guy to turn to.
Do You like book The Wench Is Dead (1998)?
Interesting bit of a read…Morse the modern day Inspector is laid up in hospital with an ulcer from too much drink & during his recuperation he muses over a book about a murder than happened over 100 years previously and sets out to prove, if only to himself, that the men hanged for the crime were innocent men. As with previous Morse stories Dexter uses the quotations to start off each chapter – though perhaps with this slim volume 41 chapters are too many – it made the first 120 pages long i
—Em
Josephine Tey did it in Daughter of Time. Now Dexter does it in this book--puts his detective, in this case Inspector Morse, in the hospital and gives him an historical mystery to rethink. Morse has a perforated ulcer, and a yen for some of the nurses, when he's given a book that describes a Victorian murder. The perpetrators were convicted and hanged, but something seems off about the whole case to Morse, who manages to investigate while he's in the hospital, and follows up on the case--to no end but the satisfaction of his own curiosity--when he's out of the hospital.
—Susan
He is hardly the model of good health, what with his incorrigible smoking and drinking, but a bleeding ulcer proves too much for Chief Inspector Morse. With some reluctance, he is taken to hospital, earning himself the sympathy of those around him, as well as some small gifts. Among aforementioned small gifts is a small self-published volume on a murder which happened in the Oxford Canal about a hundred years before Morse's time. Although put off, at first, by the dense writing style, Morse soon realises that there is a good solid mystery nestling within those covers.But the more he reads, and the more he thinks about it, the more he realises how amazingly wrong the author had been about the true culprits of the murder. The Wench is Dead is a fine example of a story within a story, a tactic used to great effect here. This may not be action-packed, nor does it have the typical urgency of so many murder mystery novels nowadays (personal revenge! lives at stake! professional reputations!), yet Dexter creates a satisfying, even surprising mystery.
—Hope
