John Mortimer’s fictional barrister was—like his creator—a rogue redeemed by a fierce commitment to the presumption of innocence.
Horace Rumpole deserves a place alongside Bertie Wooster, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, James Bond, and Father Brown as one of the best creations in all of British popular fiction. The fact that he began his career as a made-for-TV character rather than in the pages of a book, or even a magazine, seems to have worked against him. The brainchild of barrister-turned-writer John Mortimer, Rumpole first appeared on television on December 17th, 1975, in a BBC anthology series called Play for Today.
Mortimer was born 100 years ago this month, and when Rumpole first appeared, he had already been earning a living as a writer since the 1940s. He graduated with a law degree from Oxford in 1943, but then immediately went to work writing documentary films for Britain’s Ministry of Information. His first novel, Charade (1947), was based on that experience. The following year, aged 25, he was called to the bar. For the next 35 years or so, he pursued dual careers, as a barrister specializing in the defense of free speech and criminal defendants, and as a writer of stage plays, radio plays, teleplays, essays, memoirs, and novels. After retiring from the bar in 1984, Mortimer continued to put out a book or two a year—most but by no means all of which featured Horace Rumpole—until his death at 85 in 2009.
Read Full Article »
