Principal Series Characters:

Horace Rumpole spends much of his time as a London barrister representing petty criminals and the underprivileged, people scorned by his law chambers colleagues. Refusing to kowtow to the privileged, such as judges and other of society’s elites, Rumpole has never “taken silk” (risen to the rank of Queen’s Counsel) but regularly outsmarts those who theoretically are his betters. He is somewhat less successful besting his wife, Hilda, who has tried vainly for years to advance his position in the legal hierarchy and to whom he secretly refers as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Ben Glazier, almost sixty, and Maggie Perowne, about thirty, work for the London branch of Klinsky’s international auction firm, he as an art expert and she as head of the Old Masters department. Although Glazier would like a closer relationship, the two are just close friends. They work together to authenticate art objects that come to Klinsky’s, searching the art underground and its byways in England and abroad. Not all their cases involve uncovering criminal behavior. Occasionally, they let their enthusiasm and suspicions involve them in futile chases after nonexistent crimes.

Contribution

John Mortimer created in Horace Rumpole a character who stands apart from other memorable fictional detectives—Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Peter Wimsey—because he is more than just a brilliant and resourceful solver of mysteries. Though a self-described Old Bailey hack, he has such keen legal and ratiocinative skills that he is an effective advocate and exceptional courtroom presence. His sympathetic understanding of people, strong social conscience, and disdain for empty pomp and circumstance inform not only his legal work but also his jousts with colleagues, politicians, and other members of the establishment. Within a format combining mystery and humor, Mortimer presents an insider’s view of the British legal system, notably its hypocritical barristers and biased, sometimes ignorant, judges. Iconoclast and nonconformist Rumpole often seems to be tilting at windmills, but his frequently successful struggles on behalf of society’s outsiders and oppressed imbue these comic mysteries with a thematic substance rare in genre fiction. The recurring cast of characters—the Timsons, whose generations of petty criminals have helped support Rumpole over the years; his second-rate colleague Claude Erskine-Brown; the bemused head of chambers Soapy Sam Ballard; a parade of injudicious judges; and Rumpole’s somewhat shrewish wife, Hilda—creates a perfect backdrop for Mortimer’s social and legal satire, as compelling as the courtroom scenes that are the climax of every Rumpole story and novel.

Biography

John Clifford Mortimer was born in London on April 23, 1923, the only child of Kathleen May Smith Mortimer and Clifford Mortimer, a barrister, and was educated at Harrow and Brasenose College, Oxford. Because of weak eyesight, he was exempt from World War II military service and instead made documentaries and training films with the Crown Film Unit. His first novel, Charade (1947), is based on this experience.

In 1948, Mortimer began practicing law in London as a barrister in divorce cases. The following year he married novelist Penelope Fletcher; they divorced in 1972, and he married Penelope Gollop. He has two children from each marriage. After becoming Queen’s Counsel in 1966, he specialized in criminal law, often arguing for the defense in censorship cases, and partly through his efforts, the Lord Chamberlain’s authority to censor plays was abolished in 1968. Mortimer pursued two careers, law and literary, until he retired from the former in 1986 to write full time.

Having written six novels by 1954, the next year he turned to a different genre, the radio play, adapting his 1953 novel Like Men Betrayed. His first original drama for radio, The Dock Brief (1957), won the Italia Prize in 1958, the year he debuted as a stage dramatist with a double bill including a revised The Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline?, his first original stage play. Over the next two decades, he wrote radio plays as well as original scripts and adaptations for motion pictures and television, but he did his most important work for the stage, primarily comedies of manners and sex farces. The autobiographical A Voyage Round My Father (1970) is his major play, and he adapted it for television in 1982. Though he continued to do stage adaptations and translations and write a few original plays, starting in the 1980’s he focused on other literary forms, including newspaper interviews of public figures and four autobiographical volumes.

In 1978 Mortimer started writing a series of witty detective stories about Horace Rumpole, which he adapted for television and which brought him his greatest popular success; created Under the Hammer (1994), a television series and collection of short stories featuring employees of an auction house who become part-time sleuths; and after almost three decades, resumed writing serious novels. Asked by Thames Television for something on post-World War II England, Mortimer decided that instead of adapting a book, he would write his own and then adapt it. The success of both versions of Paradise Postponed (1985) led to two sequels, Titmuss Regained (1990), again as a novel and television miniseries, and The Sound of Trumpets (1998), which satirized 1990’s British politics. As in his early novels, these Rapstone Chronicles include mysteries and detection, as do his other non-Rumpole novels since the mid-1980’s: Summer’s Lease (1988), about an English family that rents an Italian villa and becomes consumed by strange circumstances surrounding the absent owner (Mortimer did a four-part television adaptation in 1989); Dunster (1992), set both in Italy and in familiar Mortimer milieus: a corporate boardroom, an English country house, and a London law court; and Felix in the Underworld (1997), whose hero, suspected of murder and charged with fathering an illegitimate son, joins London’s street people.

Mortimer served on the National Theatre Board and the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal Court Theatre. He received a knighthood in 1998. Mortimer died at his home in Oxfordshire on January 16, 2009.

Analysis

John Mortimer, who claimed to have been inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, wrote dozens of humorous detective stories and a few novels featuring Horace Rumpole, who specializes in crime cases—such as shoplifting and petty burglaries—that his colleagues shun. Though his wife frets about his failure to rise to Queen’s Counsel, he is satisfied with his lot, perhaps because he usually prevails over his nominal superiors, including judges and Queen’s Counsels. Readers quickly become familiar with his rejuvenating visits to Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, where he drinks cheap claret; his penchant for small cigars whose ashes cloak his weskit; his love for simple food like steak-and-kidney pie; his habit of quoting from William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth; and his dislike of ceremony.

The stories and novels have multiple plots, professional and personal, the latter either a domestic crisis between the old barrister and his wife or a problem with the courts or a colleague. The personal elements not only entertain and provide filler for an occasionally simple crime plot but also are complementary, offering a different take on the same theme. In addition, they further characterize Rumpole, an unlikely hero who selfishly rescues the reputations and careers of hapless colleagues and whose insight and slyness enable him to shape people and events to his own ends. It is in the courtroom, however, where he really comes alive and is most happy. His advocacy, often on behalf of unworthy clients, does not rely as much on legal knowledge as on detection skills and an ability to judge character, and he is an exemplary cross-examiner. A moral center, sophisticated comic voice, and timeliness are hallmarks of the stories.

Mortimer’s vast practical legal experience is obvious throughout, and Rumpole is his creator’s spokesperson on such issues as political correctness, animal rights activism, euthanasia, penal reform, and British politics. Though Mortimer used a standard template (for easy adaptation to television), he also provided variety. For instance, in Rumpole à la Carte, a 1990 collection, the crusty barrister is put in unfamiliar milieus. In the title story, Hilda’s expatriate cousin takes them to a three-star restaurant where Rumpole must deal with what he calls the curse of nouvelle cuisine. In “Rumpole at Sea,” Hilda books them on a cruise over his objections, Mr. “Miscarriage of Justice” Graves turns out to be a fellow passenger, and these erstwhile adversaries are caught up in a shipboard mystery that the judge bungles but Rumpole solves. In “Rumpole for the Prosecution,” as the title reveals, he becomes, for the first time in his career, a prosecuting attorney, and despite his unfamiliarity and unhappiness with the role, he follows his conscience and secures an acquittal of murder for his client. In Rumpole and the Angel of Death (1995), Mortimer again departs from his template, which always has had Rumpole as narrator. “Hilda’s Story” is in the form of a letter that She Who Must Be Obeyed writes to an old school friend, and “Rumpole and the Rights of Man” takes him to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where he confronts the reality of an international tribunal taking precedence over decisions of British courts. Of special interest in this 1995 collection is “Rumpole and the Little Boy Lost,” one of many stories in the Rumpole canon about the Golden Thread that is central to English law: the presumption of innocence until a fair trial determines otherwise.

Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

The first full-length Rumpole novel, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (2004), is about a case (to which Rumpole alludes in previous tales) in the early 1950’s in which two World War II heroes were killed, apparently by a son of one of them. Rumpole, an Old Bailey novice and newcomer to the law chambers where he would spend his career, takes on the defense though the incriminating evidence seems overwhelming and others despair of saving their client. He unexpectedly triumphs, becomes an instant star, and marries the boss’s daughter.

Rumpole and the Reign of Terror

Mortimer’s tendency to keep pace with the times informs the Rumpole novel Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (2006), in which a Pakistani physician in London is suspected of aiding terrorists linked to Al Qaeda, arrested without being specifically charged, and held for trial before a special tribunal that flouts hallowed legal traditions. Balancing this case against a more typical one involving a Timson, Rumpole successfully manages to finesse both, strikes a blow in behalf of the Magna Carta, and regains the respect and devotion of Hilda, who ends a brief dalliance with a judge and reveals to her husband that she too has been writing memoirs.

Under the Hammer

Less enduring than the Rumpole tales is Under the Hammer, a 1993 television series of just six episodes that Mortimer expanded for a collection of short stories published as a Penguin paperback the following year. The episodes revolve about employees of the London branch of Klinsky’s auction house, an international conglomerate presided over by a former supermarket magnate. Ben Glazier and Maggie Perowne, art experts at Klinsky’s, join forces to check the authenticity of items that come to the firm, becoming involved in escapades that take them not only to aristocrats’ homes but also to the criminal underground of London and Moscow. They also must deal with the questionable ethics of coworkers and art-world colleagues. Ben in particular develops a cynicism and iconoclasm similar to that of Rumpole, but lacks a social conscience that would foster action against the system. The stories also have a dollop of romantic adventure and comic relief, as in the Rumpole stories, but the adventures of Ben and Maggie have a pervasive frivolity and focus almost exclusively on people’s acquisitiveness and the mega-rich. Absent the social issues that pervade the Rumpole stories, the Klinsky adventures are little more than entertaining capers.

Further Reading