Endeavour, Dalgliesh and the Gentleman Detective
By Will Barber Taylor
The detective is as much a concept as it is a title. To detect is less to directly act and more to understand the actions of others; to reconstruct their movements and to understand why they committed the crime they did. The perception of the detective is distinct, at least to the mind of early readers, to that of the police man.
Indeed, this distinction is summed up in the Morse episode Second Time Around when Morse is characterised by Chief Inspector Dawson (via his wife) as a “Poor policeman but a good detective.” Morse is just that. The role of the policeman, the scanning of documents, the everyday mundane world of crime statistics is not the same world as the one Morse inhabits. He is, as with all examples of the gentleman detective, someone who wants to solve crime not because it is his job but because it is a passion, an intellectual challenge, a way to not only prove the power of his brain but to also to do something good. Morse is at his core a character that is defined by his intelligence and his innate sense of justice. For him, resolving a case is not necessarily the same as seeing a conviction through. His sense of duty is much more to the truth than it is to basic police procedure as is evidenced throughout both the series of novels written by Colin Dexter and the television series that was inspired by them. Whether it be in Driven to Distraction where his own quest for the truth causes him to make a terrible mistake of judgement or Deceived by Flight, Dead on Time or Cherubim and Seraphim where Morse’s own personal life become intertwined with the cases he is investigating and Morse’s innate desire for the truth, for enacting justice, overrides all else.
Morse’s core characteristics are atypical of a particular type of detective, the type of detective that gave rise to the genre and was at the core of its initial success — the gentleman detective. As referenced at the start of this piece, the mind of the detective and their activities were seen as distinctly different from the work of the police. In the mind of most late Victorians, characters who were heroic did not tend to be working class. As I explored in a previous piece, the working class professional detective was best portrayed by Dickens in Bleak House. Yet, Inspector Bucket was a side character — he is pivotal to the plot of the novel but he is not its emotional or moral core in the way that the wards of Jarndyce and Jarndyce or Esther Summerson are. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that more often than not Dickens’ heroes are middle class even if they don’t know it (Oliver Twist perhaps the perfect example) so it is understandable that the dogged Bucket, whilst an intriguing character, is not at the heart of the novel and serves as much as a plot device as an innovative addition to the Dickens canon.
Professional police men were therefore always going to be consigned to the background of works of popular fiction. Yet, the popularity of crime fiction throughout the Victorian era only increased as the sensational press began to expand its outreach and literacy rates grew. This meant that a compromise was naturally going to occur — the gentleman detective. Poe would pioneer this with his short stories of C Auguste Dupin, first in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Dupin is not an excessively wealthy man; indeed, he has little in the way of mass capital or luxuries but his family is one that was once wealthy and Dupin has clearly received an education worthy of a minor member of the French gentry. As such his interest in crime is not seen as sordid or perfunctory in the way that a professional police man’s, at least to the minds of many Victorian readers, would be. Dupin is as interested in solving the case from a purely intellectual perspective as he is from any sense of justice, although this does play a part in his actions.
Dupin may have been the first (or at least a worthy prototype) gentleman detective but he was far from the best known. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a languid, learned and at times lazy member of the upper middle class. (Holmes’ rather slothish demeanour could, had Conan Doyle intended it to be so, a uniquely perfect example of the decadency of the bourgeois at the expense of working class men like Lestrade or Gregson — if this article does anything to inspire such a critical reading of Conan Doyle’s work it can be but worth it!) Holmes is classically educated, his brother effectively runs the government and it is clear that whilst he is willing to accept payment, he too often dismisses it or does not truly need it in order to survive. Holmes represents the gentleman detective more perfectly as an example than any successor could. He has his faults and yet he is strikingly moralistic, passionate, and engaged in righting wrongs in a way that his professional counterparts seem incapable or unwilling to do. His role as judge, jury and executioner is most apparent in The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Here Holmes ensures that the fallen gentleman, the undoubtedly wicked Grimesby Roylott receives his just reward. Roylott stands in stark contrast to Holmes as a prime example of the corrupt gentleman — he is venal, cruel, crass and a murderer to boot. For Conan Doyle, as well as presumably his audience, it is important that Holmes the gentleman detective is the one who is responsible for Roylott’s ultimate fate rather than leaving it up to the police. This may in part also be a means of demonstrating Holmes’ distinction from the police, which Roylott infers upon his unexpected arrival at Baker Street:
“Ha! You put me off, do you?” said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. “I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
My friend smiled.
“Holmes, the busybody!”
His smile broadened.
“Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!”
Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,” said he. “When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.”
The accusation that Holmes is a “jack in office” (effectively a pompous minor official) is one that should not be taken lightly; Roylott is insinuating that Holmes is by definition not a member of the gentlemanly fraternity but effectively a member of the police, something which the gentleman detective at least at this point would not want. Dupin and Holmes acted less from the seemingly “vulgar” reasons of wanting to simply solve a case because it was their job but because they wanted to be challenged and they wanted to right a wrong. The mixture of morality and intellectual curiosity at the core of the characterisation of these types of detectives made them all the more compelling and why they were so instantly popular.
The role of the gentleman detective would grow over the coming decades. The likes of Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion, Hercules Poirot, Parker Pyne and the queen of the lady detectives Miss Marple would all emerge as entertaining and influential figures on the literary scene. As the decades progressed however, it soon became apparent that attitudes had changed. The idea of a gentleman being a paid police detective didn’t seem as alien as it did during Conan Doyle’s day. Ngaio Marsh, the New Zealand born writer, would introduce one of the first and most popular in the form of Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Alleyn, the younger son of a baronet is both a representation of the traditional virtues of the gentleman detective with the authority to act as a police officer. Alleyn’s first appearance in 1934 could be seen as the beginning of the end of the “traditional” gentleman detective — a man of leisure who whilst enjoying receiving compensation for solving mysteries was not reliant upon it.
By the time of the 1970s, the Golden Age of Crime was long over with only Christie and Marsh of the true golden age writers were still producing novels (Sayers having died in 1957 and Allingham in 1968). Whilst Christie’s Poirot was still read his adventures seemed displaced, almost out of time. Liked Wodehouse (who kept writing and publishing books up to his death in 1975) there was something alien about these works of fictions, cast in amber as they were in the public’s mind in the 1920s and 30s. In 1975, the year Christie would publish Curtain the final Poirot novel and Wodehouse’s death would mean that Aunts Aren’t Gentleman, published the year before, would become his final completed work a new figure entered the literary scene. Colin Dexter’s Chief Inspector Morse was first published in 1975 with his debut story Last Bus To Woodstock proving to be a hit.
Morse’s arrival was both the last hurrah of the gentleman detective but also the start of something new. As the detective genre would expand over subsequent years the crime procedural would become king. Today our TV and film screens are dominated not by talented amateurs, solving crime because they have nothing better to do but grizzled professionals who are concerned with various issues going on in their private lives as well as the dark cases they have to solve. This is partly seen both in the Morse novels and the TV series — Morse chafes at the bureaucracy that surrounds him and wishes to give a free hand to solve cases his own way. Morse’s gut instinct, his memory for detail and his innate chivalry all combine to make him much more of a gentleman detective than his more recent contemporaries despite not having a similar origin. Morse is, in this respect, a more realistic gentleman detective than some others — he combines their qualities with a realism of having to work and a background that is more interesting than being a scion of some noble family. The son of a cab driver, an Oxford drop out with a bitter relationship with his stepmother (in the TV series this background is more fleshed out than in Dexter’s original novels) Morse’ love of Wagner and his hatred of poor spelling and punctuation are as a result of his own interests and desires rather than a coded nod to his class.
Despite the popularity of the crime procedural, the gentleman detective has endured. Morse is as popular today as he was when first published in 1975. The success of ITV’s series starring John Thaw and Kevin Whately, airing from 1987 to 2000 was such that it spawned two spin offs — Lewis (2006–2015) and Endeavour (2012–2023) both of which kept, as closely as they could, to the ideal of the gentleman detective, albeit one who had to function in the world of modern policing.
Indeed, the success of Morse and his near contemporary, the poetry loving Commander Adam Dalgliesh who first appeared in 1962 (and is no relation to the Scotland international rugby player) have meant that the gentleman detective as a genre has survived.
Which of course begs the question as to why it has survived. Why are the works of Christie reproduced again and again and again? Why is Dalgliesh, Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of the novels of PD James, one of Channel 5’s most successful series? Why has the world of Morse been able to captivate viewers so much to the extent that at one point two shows related to the character were airing at the same time?
The answer may not simply lie in the compelling plots that these series have but in the characters. Audiences will generally tend to engage with a character who is selfless, one who seems to care not for the sake of a paycheck or because they have to solve a case so it can become another statistic but because they are emotionally invested. Because they want to help other people. This may, in some ways be an overtly simplistic reading of the gentleman detective’s appeal but it is perhaps truthful to say that they, unlike their more forensic and CCTV concerned procedural contemporaries, they are concerned with the basic emotions of individuals. They are as compelled to solve a crime to understand how one human can commit an act of barbarity against another as they are in solving the case in a procedural sense; achieving an end goal of convicting someone for a particular crime.
The reason that Endeavour was such a popular series, like its predecessor (though perhaps, it may be justifiably said not quite to the same degree) is because in sharp contrast to the world of supposed realism that is often attached to procedural police dramas, it was fundamentally about the ability of one man to want to change the world through righting wrongs, through believing in doing what was right. A major plot line throughout Endeavour is Morse’s quest to finally resolve the case of Blenheim Vale boys’ school which had, throughout the course of the series, not only resulted in him being physically assaulted but also held back in his career and framed for murder.
Morse’s insistence on doing what was right, regardless of the detrimental impact on his own life is a prime example of why the gentleman detective has endured as a concept. Regardless of whether it refers to an actual gentleman or not, whether it refers to a paid police man or not, it is about a belief in doing the right thing. In a world where too often we are given cynical reasons for why people act as they do, the gentleman detective’s refreshing unambiguous determination to do the right thing is not only refreshing but a necessary counter balance to that cynicism. That’s why, despite the popularity of procedural crime there will always be a desire for something with a bit more heart to it.
