Both the title and the dedication of the story are taken from the sermon on the mount, as recorded by St. Matthew in verse 41 of chapter 5 of his gospel. See bottom right of the illustration left. We also have the story arranged in three miles.
Checking up has reminded me of what a big advance the hoped for morality of the Christians was on that of its place and time. On the other hand, I was left with the feeling that it was all rather strained. As if the author had wanted to appear a bit literary, rather in the way that Agatha's works are littered with quotes from the bard, but he did not quite pull it off.
While I did not quite pull off keeping both versions of the story in the head at the same time and had to resort to a spreadsheet. I associate to the well know difficulty of learning two slightly different languages, say Dutch and German. So while on previous occasions, with other stories, a diagram in Powerpoint did the trick, on this occasion a four sheet Excel workbook seemed right. One sheet for the chapters of the book, one for the places, one for the people and one for the gospel. Maybe it is not so much the workbook as that the act of writing the thing down gets it more firmly stuck into the head.
With the result that I now know that the adaptor took considerable liberties. Two large story lines from the book are completely removed. One revolving around strip clubs and hostesses and the other around a troubled family of removal men. Perhaps the requirements of family viewing did for the first, although I seem to recall that some of the dropped material resurfaced in a later episode. Perhaps that was a few years later and ideas on family viewing had moved on a bit. Not sure why the second story line was dropped: maybe until Midsomer Murders paved the way with such stuff, having some introductory material about the Battle of Alamein was thought to be too difficult.
The strip club and hostess stuff in the book reminded me of the seediness of London in the fifties and early sixties, that is to say before I knew it, but when the author would have known it. The similar seediness of cheap novels of the same time and place. There was, for example, a casual reference to a sex book shop selling paedophilia. Mixed up with this was the fact that there were a lot more people, Morse included, who smoked. He also drove a Lancia rather than a Jaguar, this last perhaps intruded into the television version to make way for all those young people for whom Lancia was not a name to conjure with.
Strip club etc replaced, in large part, by a new story line about a girl student with whom the master was having an adulterous affair. Also, I imagine, completely forbidden by the sorts of codes of conduct for such activities now in place in all respectable institutions of education.
Then there was a second new story line about a (non-appearing) chap called Ballerat, which came with some material having fun at the expense of a pompous civil servant, to vary the diet a bit from dodgy Oxford dons. Ballerat was then added into the heavily permuted mix of murders.
The third mile of the book was swapped for a quite different biblical quote about the last enemy, this requiring a change of name. Or was it that having made so many other changes, the adaptor did not think it right to keep the original name and associated quote?
Quite a lot of stuff about plagiarism, as there in the Morse and Lewis programs generally. Is it really something that academics get so fired up about?
The relationships between Morse and his colleagues far more believable in the book than on the screen, where I have often found his behaviour improbably rude.
All in all, after the event, both versions seemed rather far fetched, but they both worked well enough, on page and screen respectively. Not much further ahead on how adaptors go about their business, but I expect that we will see more Morse going forward than we will read.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/inspector-morsoleum.html.
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