John Mortimer

John Mortimer (1923-2009), English lawyer, dramatist, and novelist, best known as the creator of the fictional character Horace Rumpole, a grumpy criminal lawyer. Rumpole was featured in a popular series of television programs, Rumpole of the Bailey.

John Clifford Mortimer was born in London and attended Harrow School. In 1940 he entered Brasenose College at the University of Oxford, where he studied law. He began practicing law in 1948, arguing for the defense in several landmark freedom of speech cases. The most notable was an obscenity trial in 1971 against the editors of an underground magazine called Oz. In this and other cases, Mortimer was an advocate against censorship and for civil liberties. Some of the people he defended later showed up in the Rumpole series.

Writing was at first a sideline for Mortimer. His early works include the novel Charade (1947) and the stage plays Dock Brief (1958) and The Wrong Side of the Park (1960). He followed them with English translations of farces by French playwright Georges Feydeau and an autobiographical play, A Voyage Around My Father (1970), about his relationship with his blind father who was a divorce lawyer. A Voyage Around My Father was adapted for television in 1982 and starred Alan Bates and Laurence Olivier.

Cigar-smoking, wine-loving defense counsel Horace Rumpole made his first appearance in a 1975 television play Mortimer wrote for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Rumpole of the Bailey, played by Australian actor Leo McKern, went on to become a regular series on Britain’s independent television channel (ITV) from 1978 to 1992. Mortimer also published numerous short stories featuring the Rumpole character who must placate his wife, Hilda, to whom he refers as “she who must be obeyed.”

Mortimer also wrote three popular novels that follow the resistible rise and fall of fictional conservative politician Leslie Titmuss. This trilogy on British politics, known as the Rapstone Chronicles, consists of Paradise Postponed (1985), Titmuss Regained (1990), and The Sound of Trumpets (1998). The first two books in the trilogy were turned into television series. Mortimer’s other novels include Summer’s Lease (1988) and Dunster (1992).

Mortimer wrote three volumes of autobiography: Clinging to the Wreckage (1982), Murderers and Other Friends (1994), and Summer of a Dormouse (2000). He wrote the highly successful television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1981), from the novel by English author Evelyn Waugh, and the screenplay for the motion picture Tea with Mussolini (1999), directed by Franco Zeffirelli. His later plays include Naked Justice (2001) and Full House (2002). Mortimer was knighted in 1998.