Colin Dexter. The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983)

    Colin Dexter. The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983) Another over-elaborate crime. There are five corpses, three murdered, one a suicide, and one dead of natural causes. The mess includes mistakes about past events, excessive ambition, academic feuds, a Soho nightclub, erotica, conspiracy to commit murder, University examinations, red herrings strewn about by the conspirators,  and  the usual bit players. Dexter’s trademark characterisation-by-tic is front and centre here, as is his schtick of anticipating events. “Little did he know...” that this would begin to wear down my patience. I mentally rewrote a couple of the short chapters omitting those foreshadowings, and felt a bit better.
     Still, by giving us the unriddling via Morse’s and Lewis’s peregrinations, false starts, discovery of small details, and sudden shifts of view, Dexter compels us to read on. The solution is, as already mentioned, too complicated by half. That the perpetrators won’t be brought to justice because they’re all dead is just another twist in an overly twisted tale. **