The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  So it was possible that the rogue cop lived near the river in Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester, or New Jersey.

  This narrowed the list to four detectives: from the Bronx, Diego Sanchez; from New Jersey, Carl Sibiewski; from Westchester, Peter Antonini and Eddie Yu.

  But there the case stalled. The evidence wasn't strong enough to get a warrant to search their houses for the clothing fibers, tools, cooking oil, and guns.

  They needed to flush him out. And Rhyme had an idea how.

  The killer would know that Rhyme was investigating the suicide--it was an official case--and would know that the criminalist had some evidence. They decided to give him the perfect opportunity to steal it or replace it with something implicating someone else.

  So Rhyme arranged his own death and had the chief send out the memo about it to a number of officers, including the four suspects (the others were told of the ploy, and they agreed to play along). The memo would mention the memorial service, implying that at that time the lab would be unoccupied.

  Sellitto set up a search-and-surveillance team outside the town house, and while Rhyme remained in his bedroom, Sachs and Sellitto played the good mourners and left, giving the perp a chance to break in and show himself.

  Which he oh so courteously had done, using a screwdriver that appeared to be the same one that had left marks on the windows of prior victims' residences.

  Rhyme now ordered, "Get a warrant. I want all the clothes in his house, cooking oils and soil samples, other tools too. And any guns. Send 'em to ballistics."

  As he was led to the door, Peter Antonini pulled away roughly from one of the officers holding him and spun to face Rhyme and Sachs. "You think the system works. You think justice is served." His eyes were mad with rage. "But it doesn't. I've been a cop long enough to know how screwed up it all is. You know how many guilty people get off every day? Murderers, child abusers, wife beaters... I'm sick of it!"

  Amelia Sachs responded. "And what about those innocent ones you killed? Our system would have worked for them. Yours didn't."

  "Acceptable losses," he said coolly. "Sacrifices have to be made."

  Rhyme sighed. He found rants tedious. "It's time you left, Detective Antonini. Get him downtown."

  The escorts led him out the door.

  "Thom, if you don't mind, it's cocktail hour. Well past it, in fact."

  A few moments later, as Thom was fastening a cup of single-malt scotch to Rhyme's chair, Lon Sellitto walked into the room. He squinted at Rhyme. "You don't even look sick. Let alone dead."

  "Funny. Have a drink."

  The chunky detective pursed his lips, then said, "You know how many calories're in whiskey?"

  "Less than a doughnut, I'll bet."

  Sellitto cocked his head, meaning good point, and took the glass Thom offered. Sachs declined, as did Pulaski.

  The rumpled detective sipped the whiskey. "Chief of department's on his way. Wants to thank you. Press officer too."

  "Oh, great," Rhyme muttered. "Just what I need. A bunch of sappy-eyed grateful visitors. Hell. I liked being dead better."

  "Linc, got a question. Why'd you pick the Watchmaker to do the deed?"

  "Because he's the only credible perp I could think of." Rhyme had recently foiled an elaborate murder plot by the professional killer, who'd threatened Rhyme's life before disappearing. "Everybody on the force knows he wants to kill me." The criminalist took a long sip of the smoky liquor. "And he's probably one of the few men in the world who could."

  An uneasy silence followed that sobering comment, and Pulaski apparently felt the need to fill it. "Hey, Detective Rhyme, is this all accurate?" A nod at the memo that contained his obituary.

  "Of course it is," Rhyme said, as if the comment were absurd. "It had to be--in case the killer knew something about me. Otherwise he might think something was up."

  "Oh, sure. I guess."

  "And by the way, do you always get your superior officers' attention with 'hey'?"

  "Sorry. I--"

  "Relax, rookie. I'm a civilian, not your superior. But it's something to ponder."

  "I'll keep it in mind, sir."

  Sachs sat next to Rhyme and put her hand on his--the right one, which had some motion and sensation. She squeezed his fingers. "Gave me kind of a pause." Looking down at the sheet. "Lon and I were talking about it."

  It had given Rhyme some pause too. He felt the breeze from death's wings nearly every day, closer than to most people. He'd learned to ignore the presence. But seeing the account in black-and-white had been a bit startling.

  "Whatta you gonna do with it?" Sellitto asked, glancing down at the paper.

  "Save it, of course. Such beautiful prose, such pithy journalism... Besides, it's going to come in handy someday."

  Sellitto barked a laugh. "Hell, Linc, you're gonna live forever. You know what they say. Only the good die young."

  COLIN DEXTER

  Born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1930, Colin Dexter graduated from Cambridge University and spent most of his professional life as an educator in his beloved Oxford. He came comparatively late to crime writing, being already in his forties when he attempted his first novel, Last Bus to Woodstock, which was accepted by the second publisher to which it was sent. It introduced Inspector Morse, the somewhat curmudgeonly senior officer in the Criminal Investigator Department with the Thames Valley Police, and Sergeant Lewis, who appeared in every one of Dexter's thirteen novels and most of the short stories collected in Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (1993).

  Among his numerous awards are Gold Daggers from the British Crime Writers' Association for The Wench Is Dead (1989) and The Way Through the Woods (1992) and the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, presented to him in 1997.

  The hugely successful Inspector Morse television series, produced by ITV in England and shown in the United States on PBS, was based on the books and additional stories; it starred John Thaw and Kevin Whateley, running for thirty-three episodes from 1987 to 2000. Like Alfred Hitchcock did in his films, Colin Dexter made brief cameo appearances in most of the episodes.

  INSPECTOR MORSE

  BY COLIN DEXTER

  Perhaps (I hope) the most sensible way for me to write about Chief Inspector Morse is to try to answer some of the many questions that have been put to me most frequently by audiences and correspondents. Then, at least, I can believe that my answers will be focused upon things in which people seem genuinely interested.

  But first, a few brief words about myself. The whole of my working life was spent in education: first, as a teacher of Latin and Greek in English grammar schools; second, with increasing deafness blighting my life, as a senior administrative officer with the Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations, in charge of Latin, Greek, Ancient History, and English.

  Well, here goes!

  What emboldened you to enlist in the rather crowded ranks of the crime-writing fraternity?

  It is not unknown, even in midsummer, for the heavens to open in North Wales; and there are few things more dispiriting than to sit in a guesthouse with the rain streaming in rivulets down the windows, and with offspring affirming that every other father somehow manages to locate a splendid resort, with blue skies and warm seas, for the annual family holiday. That was my situation one Saturday afternoon in August 1973. Having rather nervously asserted that we were not planning a premature return to Oxford, I shut myself up in the narrow confines of the kitchen with a biro and a pad of ruled paper--with only a very vague idea of what I was intending to do. I had already finished reading the two paperback detective stories left by previous guests, and I figured that if I tried hard, I might possibly do almost as well in the genre myself. So for a couple of hours I tried very hard, resulting in how many paragraphs, I cannot recall. I doubt more than two or three. It was, however, that all-important start: Initium est dimidium facti (the beginning is one half of the deed), as the Roman proverb has it.

  Had I any reason other than vanity for
wishing to see my name on the jacket of a detective story? Not money, certainly, since I was fortunate enough to enjoy a well-paid university post, annually climbing a little higher up the salary scale. If, as Dr. Johnson remarked--in an uncharacteristically cynical vein--"no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," then I was one of the blockheads. And not because I thought I had anything of criminological, psychological, or sociological import to communicate to my fellow man. I had just one simple aim in mind--an aim to which I have always held firm in my subsequent writings: to tell a story that would entertain whatever readers might be coming my way.

  It would be pleasing to report that later on that August Saturday afternoon the sun broke through the lowering clouds. Yet, as I recall, it didn't. What I can report is that my first work of fiction, Last Bus to Woodstock, originated on that day, and was finally published by Macmillan in 1975. It featured a detective named Morse. "Just call me Morse!" as he was to say so many times when some delicious and desirable woman asked him for his Christian name. And that is how I shall refer to him throughout this article.

  Which crime writers and what kind of crime writing have influenced you?

  First memories for me are of Sexton Blake and Tinker, then Edgar Wallace ("King of Thriller Writers"), with his racy and uncluttered style. Next Agatha Christie, pulling the wool over my eyes from page one in myriad imaginative and ingenious plots, and almost invariably baffling the delighted reader until the last chapter, last page, last paragraph.

  And she more than any other writer determined the direction of my writing, with an emphasis more on "who" perpetrated the dreadful deed, rather than "why" or "how." For some "dreadful deed" it had to be, since no reader will be overlong enthralled by the theft of a tin of salmon from the supermarket. It was Christie, then, who motivated my eagerness for surprise endings in the Morse novels. Other writers of course were influential, and like most teenagers I was a great fan of Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes. But more important, I should mention John Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson), with his wonderfully "impossible" locked-room puzzles. I was never able to write such a mystery for Morse to solve, but again it was the "puzzle" element that delighted me so hugely. And it is not unfitting that in his book Bloody Murder, Julian Symons writes of "the puzzles set by Colin Dexter," gently adding that "perhaps it is churlish to wish that motives and behaviour were a touch nearer reality." So often have I listened to some of my crime-writing colleagues arguing about the respective merits of "plot" versus "characterization." But I have always viewed such discussions as somewhat phony, since the totality of a good story subsumes them both, and the greatest accolade that any of us can hope for is to hear one's partner's plea from a room downstairs: "I'll be up in a few minutes, darling. Just let me finish this chapter first."

  Furthermore, in this connection, there is little doubt in my mind that Homer and Ovid would have been the top earners in Hollywood. One other major influence: I had long envied the ability of some few writers, Simenon and Chandler in particular, to establish in their novels a curiously pleasing ambience of a city, a street, a bistro, etc. And I have ever hoped that the physical sense of Oxford, and the very spirit of the city, has permeated the pages in which Morse is summoned to so many (mostly fatal) scenes. Perhaps my one wholly legitimate claim to notoriety is that single-handedly I have made Oxford the murder capital of the UK--and probably of the EU.

  What sort of man was Morse? Was he like you?

  Of Morse's physical presence, I had very little idea. I had assumed, I suppose, that (unlike me) he measured up to the height specification for the police force; that his incurable addiction to real ale and single-malt scotch whiskey was gradually but inevitably adding a few inches to his girth; that unlike his creator he had a good head of hair; that to the world at large he paraded no deformities. He was in no way likely to be confused with the description I once gave of myself to a Finnish journalist: "short, fat, bald, and deaf," on which the lady in question congratulated me warmly, saying that because of this she had recognized me "immediately"!

  Morse's other qualities? Well, unless one is a genius, which I am not, a writer will tend in many respects to be semi-autobiographical in the delineation of the character and temperament of the detective hero. As such, Morse changes very little throughout the novels, betraying the same qualities displayed in my first and, and as I thought at the time, my only one. He was, and remained, a sensitive and sometimes strangely vulnerable man; always a bit of a loner by nature; strongly attracted to beautiful women (often the crooks); dedicated to alcohol; and almost always on the verge of giving up nicotine. In politics, ever on the Left, feeling himself congenitally incapable of voting for the Tory party; a "high-church atheist" (as I called him), yet with a deep love for the Methodist Hymnal, the King James Bible, the church music of Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, etc., the sight of candles, and the smell of incense. Finally, like me, he would have given his hobbies in Who's Who as reading the poets, crosswords, and Wagner.

  And what of his negative qualities? He was quite unwilling to give thanks to any of his hardworking underlings (especially Lewis) and had little or no respect for most of his superior officers. He was unorthodox, with little knowledge of police procedure and only minimal respect for forensic pathology. He was often pig-headed and impatient, a man with alpha-plus acumen, normally six furlongs ahead of the whole field during any investigation but so often running on the wrong racecourse. And has there ever been a fictional detective so desperately mean with money?

  On this latter point, I was encouraged by my editors to exemplify any fault rather than merely stating it. And I think that readers began to expect such exemplification in each novel. For example, in The Remorseful Day, the pair of detectives are the first customers in the bar of Oxford's Randolph Hotel at 11:00 a.m., and Lewis's eyebrows are raised a few millimeters when, throwing the car keys to him, Morse suggests that it's high time he, Morse, bought the drinks: a large Glenfiddich for himself and half a pint of orange juice for Lewis--only for the unfortunate barmaid to tell Morse that she cannot find sufficient change so early on for the fifty-pound note proffered. Whereupon, patting his presumably empty pockets, Morse asks his sergeant if by any chance he has some appropriate small change on his person. (Here, I must admit, I had little difficulty in finding exemplars, with advanced symptoms of this odious trait, among a few of the Oxford dons I worked with.) But let me insert a caveat. Mrs. Valerie Lewis (alas killed in a hit-and-run accident) always knew whenever her husband had been selected as Morse's lieutenant: there was a perceptible change in his step--if less change in his pocket.

  How did you get your first Morse novel published?

  I have ever maintained that luck, good and bad, plays a considerably larger part in our lives than most people are prepared to acknowledge. It was not always so. The Romans, for example, as well as regularly pouring their libations and sacrificing animals to their traditional pantheon, were also very careful to appease and to seek the approval of the goddess of good luck (Fortuna). We can all accept that a little talent and a lot of hard graft are indispensable concomitants in any worthy enterprise. But what a blessing if the gods collectively are occasionally smiling on us! As they were, after a few early frowns, upon me.

  I had my manuscript typed up, with just the one heavily corrected and smudged carbon copy, and asked around for the best bets among the publishing houses. Collins, Gollancz, and Macmillan, in that order, topped the list. I had no agent (still haven't) and I posted the typescript to Collins--from whom, after a chivvying letter from me, I received a letter about four months later. It was a pleasantly argued letter of the kind that so many hopeful, budding authors have come to know only too well: an "if-ever-you-write-anything-else" kind of letter. A rejection letter. So, leaving out my second choice, I parceled up Last Bus to Woodstock once more and sent it to Macmillan, a publishing house with, as I learned, an increasingly prestigious crime list.

  Within forty-eight hours I received a phone call from the se
nior crime editor there, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, asking me to get up to London posthaste. He had read my novel and was prepared to publish it without further ado (and without alteration!), "warts and all." Later I learned that he had been suffering from a serious bout of flu at the time and had requested that any new stories should be brought to his bedside. Whether or not his illness was impairing his judgment in any way, I just don't know. What I do know is that the gods were smiling benevolently on me that particular weekend. Incidentally, when I say that I have never had an agent, that is strictly true. But I have ever stuck with Macmillan. And for over thirty years now, successive crime editors--George Hardinge, Hilary Hale, Maria Rejt, and Beverley Cousins--have handled my literary affairs wonderfully well. I have been, let me repeat it, a very lucky writer.

  How did you come up with the names of Morse and Lewis?

  Strangely enough, I spent eighteen months in the Royal Signals Regiment doing my National Service, and became a high-speed Morse code operator, serving most of the time in West Germany (1948-50). That, however, had nothing to do with Chief Inspector Morse, whom I named after Sir Jeremy Morse, a man with as sweet and clear a brain as I have known. He was a former chairman of Lloyds Bank; key member of the Bank of England and the IMF; Fellow of All Souls, Oxford; Warden of Winchester College, etc., etc., regularly parading his genius in chess problems and crossword puzzles. Indeed, it was in the crossword world where, as early as the mid-1950s, we became keen competitors--and later good friends. And when I wished to introduce a detective-hero of consummate mental caliber, the surname was staring me in the face, was it not?