The Wench is Dead

Colin Dexter

sept 2008 · Pan Macmillan

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Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger award, The Wench is Dead is the eighth novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series. As portrayed by John Thaw in ITV's Inspector Morse.

That night he dreamed in Technicolor. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings. And in Morse's muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks . . .

Early in the morning of the 22nd of June, 1859, the body of Joanna Franks was found floating at Duke’s Cut along the Oxford Canal – an event which led to the trial and hanging of two suspected murderers.

A hundred and thirty years later Chief Inspector Morse is bedbound and recovering from a perforated ulcer at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital when he is handed an old book to read, one that recounts the trial of a murder aboard the Barbara Bray canal boat: the murder of Joanna Franks. Investigating the account of the trial, Morse begins to question whether the two men hanged were truly guilty and sets out to prove his suspicions from the confines of his hospital bed . . .

The Wench is Dead is followed by the ninth Inspector Morse book, The Jewel That Was Ours.

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Colin Dexter graduated from Cambridge University in 1953 and moved to Oxford in 1966, where he lived until his death in 2017. His first novel, Last Bus to Woodstock, was published in 1975. There are now thirteen novels in the series, of which The Remorseful Day is, sadly, the last. He won many awards for his novels, including the CWA Silver Dagger twice, and the CWA Gold Dagger for The Wench is Dead and The Way Through the Woods. In 1997 he was presented with the CWA Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature, and in 2000 was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. The Inspector Morse novels have been adapted for the small screen with huge success by Carlton/Central Television, starring John Thaw and Kevin Whately. Spin-offs from Dexter’s much-loved novels also include the popular series, Lewis, featuring Morse’s former sergeant, Robbie Lewis, and Endeavour, a prequel starring the young Endeavour Morse.