Music to Die For

Professor Cole is an ageing Oxford don, a respected German history academic with plans for a Wagnerian festival. He is found garrotted, which is a very particular way to die, and the case gives Lewis a tenuous connection to his old boss Morse. That link is enough to make the enquiry feel personal, and enough to suggest the murder is not a simple campus affair.

The early clues point away from the dreaming spires and towards something grittier. Cole, it emerges, was a patron of an illegal boxing club, and suddenly the question is whether his death was an underworld killing dressed up in academic robes. Lewis has to hold both worlds in his head: the high culture of the college and the bare-knuckle reality of the club, and the episode enjoys pulling them together. The victim, it turns out, had rough edges that the lecture circuit never saw.

But Morse's name hovers over the case, and Lewis carries the memory of his old boss into rooms where other men would rather forget him. The connection is tenuous, as the episode admits, yet it gives the enquiry a personal undertow that the boxing club never could.

Colin Dexter and Dusty Hughes wrote the script, and Bill Anderson directed. Tom Goodman-Hill plays Richard Helm, Niall Buggy is R.G. Cole, Ben Batt plays Milo Hardy, Bradley James takes Jack Roth, Joanna Christie plays Sarah Kriel, Cheryl Campbell is Valli Helm, Rachael Blake plays Ann Kriel, Paul Venables takes Hansie Kriel, Andrew Knott plays Ryan Gallen and Hosh Kane appears as Tom Pettigrew.

This is the show's favourite trick in good working order: an intellectual life with a violent underbelly, and a detective who can walk between the two. The Wagnerian ambition and the boxing club sit oddly together, which is exactly the point. Even the most respectable lives, the episode argues, can have remarkably rough edges.