Colin Dexter

Norman Colin Dexter is the British author of the Inspector Morse novels. Dexter was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, on September 29, 1930. After studying classics at Cambridge University he taught at schools in the East Midlands. Forced in 1966 by the onset of deafness to retire from teaching he took up a post with an examinations board in Oxford.

The story about how he started writing the Inspector Morse mysteries has been told and retold many times: in 1972 Dexter was on a family holiday in Wales. The weather was persistently wet. After reading two mediocre mysteries, he decided that he could do better than that. Dexter has received a number of prestigious awards for the Inspector Morse mysteries.