Larger than life
Sir: James Delingpole's irritation with Inspector Morse (Arts, 9 March) does not allow for the whodunnit writer's desperate search for originality. Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Cadfael, etc. were all remote front real-life detection, and Morse's surliness and vaguely scholastic past are a genuine attempt to make him different. P.D. James rightly reacted against a directive from the Crime Writers' Association to replace her poetic detective, Dalgleish, with a political- ly correct working-class policeman investi- gating squalid inner-city crime, where the murderer is predictably a WIM (white indigenous male) and the plot obvious. Writers have to live on the sale of their books, so their detectives must in some way be more interesting than the real police.
Gordon M.L. Smith
9 Greenfield Way, Storrington, West Sussex
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