Mortimer, an author and playwright, was also a barrister by profession. This legal experience became useful when he created the character that he is best remembered for - Horace Rumpole, who features in a series of very funny books. The first, Rumpole of the Bailey, introduces us to this aging defender of the downtrodden:
"I, Horace Rumpole, barrister-at-law, 68 next birthday, Old Bailey Hack, husband to Mrs Hilda Rumpole (known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed) and father to Nicholas Rumpole (lecturer in social studies at the University of Baltimore, I have always been extremely proud of Nick); I, who have a mind full of old murders, legal anecdotes and memorable fragments of the Oxford Book of English Verse (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's edition) together with a dependable knowledge of bloodstains, blood groups, fingerprints, and forgery by typewriter; I, who am now the oldest member of my Chambers, take up my pen at this advanced age during a lull in business (there's not much crime about, all the best villains seem to be off on holiday in the Costa Brava), in order to write my reconstructions of some of my recent triumphs (including a number of recent disasters) in the Courts of Law, hoping thereby to turn a bob or two which won't be immediately grabbed by the taxman, or my clerk Henry, or by She Who Must Be Obeyed, and perhaps give some sort of entertainment to those who, like myself, have found in British justice a life-long subject of harmless fun."
I have a collection of the Rumpole series in two books on my shelves - The First Rumpole Omnibus (Rumpole of the Bailey, The Trials of Rumpole, and Rumpole's Return) and The Third Rumpole Omnibus (Rumpole and the Age of Miracles, Rumpole a la Carte, and Rumpole and the Angel of Death). You can probably tell that I just can't get enough of this character.
Mortimer's dry wit comes into play in his non-fiction as well. His Murderers and Other Friends - Another Part of Life, first published in 1994, is full of hilarious anecdotes of his life, including his childhood. He writes about his producer/director friend Tony Richardson: "Tony was a tall, angular man whose long limbs were curiously uncoordinated; but he was resolutely, if not always successfully, athletic. He only learnt to swim in middle life and, although he spent more hours practising on the tennis court than Nastase before Wimbledon, he was easily beaten by a one-armed player who had to throw the ball into the air and then grab his racket from between his legs when he served." Of his own attitude towards sports, Mortimer says, "An English middle-class education has made me allergic to sport and my only interest, when forced to take part in any sort of game, is to lose it as quickly as possible in order that it may be over."
In the book, he gives a glimpse of his courtroom tactics: "Boredom is a weapon you can use in court; given sufficient endurance you can bore a judge into submission by going on until he's in real danger of missing his train to Hayward's Heath and is ready to submit." As a barrister, Mortimer had the opportunity to travel to Singapore in the 1970s to defend opposition leader Ben Jeyaretnam in a libel suit issued against him by none other than the Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. He describes the city-state: "... that Reader's Digest of a city, linked by a causeway to the wilder shores of Malaysia, where they discuss making chewing-gum illegal, where Chinese families burn paper Mercedes, paper TV sets and paper video tapes to placate the spirits of the dead, and where Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who was allergic to opposition politicians, was prime minister for many years and thought that the words law and order were in the wrong position. Order has always seemed more important to Mr Lee than law." The outcome of the trial was predictable, of which Jeyaretnam wrote, "Mr John Mortimer's oratory at the trial won the admiration of many Singaporeans, but did not win my case."
Published in 1986, Character Parts is a book of Mortimer's interviews with famous men and women, including Christine Keeler, Sir Alec Guinness, Boy George and Raquel Welch. Of his meeting with Boy George, he writes: "After a lifetime acquaintance with some fairly dotty Judges, not a few lunatic lawyers, a smattering of eccentric businessmen and pop-eyed politicians, it was refreshing to take a cup of morning coffee with a chap who is articulate, reasonable and possessed of a robust common sense. That fact that the chap in question appeared to be got up as Madam Butterfly at eleven o'clock in the morning came as no particular surprise to me. After all, I have been used to carrying on conversations across crowded court rooms with elderly men in scarlet, fur-trimmed frocks and white curly wigs."
Raquel Welch, he tells us, "has written a book. It is the sort... that is likely to go straight to the head of every best-seller list. It consists of many photographs of Miss Welch in various yoga positions, and much cheerful advice of how to achieve physical perfection and enjoy life. It will no doubt be read by countless Americans as they munch through their generous helpings of ground beef on a bun and apple pies, as they absorb their French fries and Pepsi-Colas, and wonder why is it they don't look like Miss Welch." His interview was over dinner in a restaurant, during which he "found her to be quite small, extraordinarily pretty, and wearing a black dress that seemed to have been clawed in front by some giant cat so that more of the undoubted perfection of Raquel Welch might meet the eye."
Mortimer's The Summer of a Dormouse - A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully came out in 2000. It is a humorous account of a year in his life, no doubt inspired by the fact that, to the young and middle-aged, "the day will most probably dawn when your pale foot will wander through the air, incapable of hitting the narrow opening of a suspended sock."
He writes, "The ageing process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous." Thus the tone of the book is set. There are some privileges for the aged, for example, when in a wheelchair at airports: "Claiming a wheelchair on account of the leg and a blind eye has improved my experience of airports 100 per cent. I have been pushed by retired businessmen eking out their pensions, students in their gap year or, occasionally, beautiful girls in uniform."
In the book's last chapter, he approaches the subject of death: "The trouble is that you have no idea what it's going to be like, and there is no one to tell you... The worst thing would be a death which is a sort of joke. When we were in the South of France one year, there were widespread forest fires and small planes were used to scoop up water from the sea and, flying inland, dump it on the blazing pines. An innocent tourist was snorkelling harmlessly and happily watching the fish. He was scooped up by a plane, flown inland and dropped, from a great height, on to the forest fire. He became the subject of a law suit with an insurance company as no one could decide whether he had been killed by fire or water."
And if Mortimer's books haven't made you a fan of British humour, perhaps this will:
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