The
Endeavour
Series
A lifelong lover of mystery and true crime stories, I challenged myself to design six book covers based on the prequel series (Endeavour), based on the sequel series (Lewis), based on the original television series (Inspector Morse), based on the award-winning Inspector Morse novels written by Colin Dexter.
Put on your favorite opera and let’s break it down.
Inspector Morse
From 1975 to 1999, Colin Dexter wrote 13 stories of Detective Chief Inspector Morse, a snooty, opera-loving policeman, solving dizzyingly convoluted mysteries in and around Oxford, from the city streets to the college classrooms to the rolling countryside. His novels were adapted for the silver screen in 1987 with the Inspector Morse TV series, and continued until 2000. From 2006 to 2015, Morse’s underling Lewis got his own sequel series, Lewis. During the airing of Lewis, a prequel series detailing Morse’s early years, titled Endeavour, was also proposed, with the pilot airing in 2012. Here is where I found my inspiration for this project.
Endeavour
The young Detective Constable Morse first comes to Oxford in the early 1960s. The show is artfully atmospheric and finds its success through the period costumes, set designs, props, and social and historical themes that take center stage in each episode. (I SO recommend giving it a watch, it’s available on AmazonPrime!) So strong are the 60s themes that I wanted to pay homage to some of my favorite episodes by honoring those themes as well as returning to the medium the source material was presented in: books.
Concepts, Sketches and Process
I picked these episodes (later swapping Fugue out for Canticle) not only because they’re some of my favorites, but also for the striking imagery and symbols I knew I could utilize on the covers. And the wonderful thing about mystery novels is that a reader can never be sure whether they are being led astray by the cover art or not. Are these dead giveaways? Red herrings? Just for the aesthetic? You’ll have to read to find out.
Because there is also an unavoidable level of camp in each episode (what’s a good mystery without some suspension of belief?) I thought it would be fun to run with a rainbow color scheme to off-set the gritty textures and darker neutrals I’d be using.
My original intent was to illustrate and hand-letter the six covers, but the vision I had in my head and my drawing abilities just weren’t cooperating. I took my original sketches and, keeping the color schemes and general compositions, started hunting for common-use images to edit into convincing 1960s-era pulp novel artwork.
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After picking a sinisterly slanted typeface, editing my images and writing original copy (except the front-page summaries, which are the episode summaries as listed on Google), I knew I had to make these books look their age. I added every kind of wear and tear imaginable to my clean vector designs—light damage, water damage, scratches, dirt, dust, and crumpled edges.
All that was left were the finishing touches. I whipped up a fake publishing company logo, slapped a price tag and a barcode on the back, and then photoshopped my own disastrously worn paperback mockup, using my 1985 copy of The Fellowship of the Ring I bought at a library sale for 30 cents.
And with that, six episodes of Endeavour were turned into vintage paperbacks from the early 60s.
(And before you say anything—yes, I know there was no Internet in the 60s, and that I wrote ‘.com’ instead of ‘.co.uk.’ I just got too excited about my fake publisher. That’s why we should pay copywriters more!)
