A choice checked

At reference 1 I reported on making a choice about the provenance of an episode of Morse, ‘The Secret of Bay 5b’. I now report on what I found when checking the putative source, ‘The Secret of Annexe 3’.

The former started with a murder in (a bay of) a multi-story car park in the centre of Oxford, involved an architectural practice, an insurance agency, an alcoholic badger hugger and all their interconnected and more or less grubby goings on.

The latter started with a murder in (the annex of) a hotel in the course of a residential New Year’s Eve party on the outskirts of Oxford, and, slightly anachronistically, belonged to the murder-in-a-country-house genre in which one has a small closed population of people to check out, with much of the interest lying in all the grubby details of their private as opposed to their public lives.

Apart from the similarity of the names and the fact of their being a murder there was not all that much in common between the two stories. That said, some features had been lifted from Dexter’s novel and transposed to Cullen’s script. So we have a wife with a husband who drinks. She plays away. We have an excursion with a better class of prostitute, rather better in the adaptation than in the novel, rather in the way that houses always seem to get bigger & better when Jane Austen novels are adapted. We have Morse & Lewis getting the time of death wrong, wrong enough for them to get all the wrong alibis, thus allowing the yarn to be padded out with even more red-herrings. In the adaptation we have the suicide of one of the principals, in the story the near suicide of one of the principals, with this last, incidentally, striking me as a rather clumsy intrusion into the story. Cullen does rather better with hers.

Maybe Dexter had some deal with the television people which meant that they had to at least make a show of using all his Morse stories.

So I think that the choice that I reported on in the previous post turns out to be wrong. The television adaptation is not based on the Dexter story in the sense with which the choice was being made. So the choice, as it turns out, was the wrong choice. But that does not disturb the hypothesis about how such choices are made; rather it just reminds us that choosing is a fallible process.

In the future I dare say my subconscious will put a little less weight on the similarity of the names when making this particular sort of choice. The weights of this particular Bayesian operation will have been tweaked a bit in the light of experience.

PS: the script also removed, or rather omitted, most of the early sixties male seediness which pervades Dexter’s novels. A seediness which parallels Simenon’s earlier predilection for low bars, dives and brothels.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/a-choice.html.