The Wench is Dead

By: Colin Dexter

Narrated by: Samuel West

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.

Critic reviews

Traditional crime writing at its best; the kind of book without which no armchair is complete

No one constructs a whodunit with more fiendish skill than Colin Dexter

Dexter has created a giant among fictional detectives

A character who will undoubtedly retain his place as one of the most popular and enduring of fictional detectives (P. D. James, Sunday Telegraph)

The writing is highly intelligent, the atmosphere melancholy, the effect haunting

The triumph is the character of Morse

Colin Dexter’s superior crime-craft is enough to make lesser practitioners sick with envy

[Morse is] the most prickly, conceited and genuinely brilliant detective since Hercule Poirot