In Memoriam Colin Dexter
De Britse schrijver Colin Dexter is gisteren op 86-jarige leeftijd in Oxford overleden. Colin Dexter, vooral bekend van “Inspector Morse”, werd geboren op 29 september 1935 in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Zie ook alle tags voor Colin Dexter op dit blog.
Uit: Death Is Now My Neighbor
“By one of those minor coincidences (so commonplace in Morse’s life) it had been just as most of the personnel from the media were preparing to leave, at almost exactly 8:30pm, that Mr. Robert Turnbull, the Senior Cancer Consultant, had passed her desk, nodded a greeting, and walked slowly to the exit, his right hand resting on the shoulder of Mr. J. C. Storrs. The two men were talking quietly together for some while — Dawn was certain of that. But certain of little else. The look on the consultants face, as far as she could recall, had been neither that of a judge who has just condemned a man to death, nor that of one just granting a prisoner his freedom.
No obvious grimness.
No obvious joy.
And indeed there was adequate cause for such uncertainty on Dawn’s part, since the scene had been partially masked from her by the continued presence of several persons: a ponytailed reporter scribbling a furious shorthand as he interviewed a nurse; the TV crew packing away its camera and tripods; the Lord Mayor speaking some congratulatory words into a Radio Oxford microphone — all of them standing between her and the top of the three blue-carpeted stairs which led down to the double-doored exit, outside which were affixed the vertical banks of well-polished brass plates, ten on each side, the fourth from the top on the left reading:
If only Dawn Charles could have recalled a little more.
If — that little conjunction introducing those unfulfilled conditions in past time which, as Donet reminds us, demand the pluperfect subjunctive in both clauses — a syntactical rule which Morse himself had mastered early on in an education which had been far more fortunate than that enjoyed by the receptionist at the Harvey Clinic.
Indeed, over the next two weeks, most people in Oxford were destined to be considerably more fortunate than Dawn Charles: She received no communication from the poetry lover of Pembroke; her mother was admitted to a psychiatric ward out at Littlemore; she was twice reminded by her bank manager of the increasing problems arising from the large margin of negative equity on her small flat; and finally, on Monday morning, January 29, she was to hear on Fox FM Radio that her favorite consultant, Mr. Robert H. Turnbull, MB, ChB, FRCS, had been fatally injured in a car accident on Cumnor Hill.”
Colin Dexter (29 september 1935 – 21 maart 2017)
John Thaw (Inspecteur Morse), Colin Dexter en Kevin Whately (Detective Sergeant Lewis)