The Wench Is Dead

The oddest of all the Morse specials begins with its hero on the floor of a public lavatory. At an exhibition on Victorian crime in Oxford, Morse collapses; Chief Superintendent Strange finds him, and the hospital delivers its verdict: a bleeding ulcer, the predictable bill for a lifetime of beer and brandy and neglected meals. Confined to a ward and threatened with retirement, Morse does what he always does — he picks up a book. Dr Millicent Van Buren's study of nineteenth-century detection tells the story of Joanna Franks, found drowned in the Oxford Canal in 1859 after travelling aboard a fly-boat towards her husband in London. Three boatmen — Rory Oldfield, Alfred Musson and Walter Towns — were convicted of her murder; two were hanged, and Towns, reprieved at the last minute, was transported. It is, on the face of it, an old and closed case. Morse, with nothing else to do and everything to prove, decides it was a miscarriage of justice.

Malcolm Bradbury, the comic novelist, adapts Dexter's eighth book — itself a Gold Dagger winner — into a film almost entirely without the series' usual furniture: no chase through the colleges, no crossword, no Lewis. Kevin Whately is away on an inspector's course, the only episode of the entire run without him, and Morse makes do with a borrowed constable. PC Adrian Kershaw, played with eager intelligence by Matthew Finney, is a graduate with a historian's mind, and the two of them — one in a hospital gown, one in a uniform that fits badly — reconstruct a Victorian trial from its surviving exhibits. The shoes in the evidence box are wrong for walking; the torn drawers were cut with a knife; the dress was altered; the physician's measurements do not match the corpse. And the carpetbag, Morse notices, is missing from the trial record entirely.

The truth he assembles is an elegant fraud. Joanna Franks was not murdered; she staged her own death, with her husband's connivance, for the insurance — a policy bought for eight pounds that paid out three hundred. The husband was not Charles Franks at all but F. T. Donavan, her first husband, a stage conjuror presumed dead; the mysterious witness Don Favant who vanished after the inquest is an anagram of the same name. The body in the canal was someone else's, and the boatmen hanged for it. Morse's last stop is a grave on the west coast of Ireland, opened without warrant, which proves to contain no human remains at all. Robert Knights directs the reconstruction sequences — the fly-boat, the towpath, the noose — with a sober period fidelity, and Juliet Cowan's Joanna, glimpsed in flashback, keeps the mystery's human cost in view.

The film works because it is a detective story about detection itself: a sick man, stripped of his rank and his routines, re-proving his own method from a bed. James Grout's Strange hovers in the ward with his usual blend of concern and exasperation; Judy Loe's Adele Cecil brings the book that starts it all; Lisa Eichhorn's Van Buren supplies the scholarship and the challenge; and Clare Holman's Dr Hobson performs the modern forensics with dry relish. Morse is discharged at the end, told to rest, and immediately starts planning his next case — which is, of course, exactly what the doctors feared. More than twelve million viewers watched the premiere, proof that a Morse without Lewis, without even a proper crime scene, could still hold the nation's Thursday night.