Sir John Mortimer, the preternaturally prolific English author who died Friday at 85, created two unforgettable characters: One was the irascible barrister Horace Rumpole; the other was himself.
Rumpole, the craftily disheveled Old Bailey "hack," is probably best known through Leo McKern's portrayals on television. As a barrister, he is distinguished by his reverence for the common law, his contempt for judges and his refusal ever to prosecute or to enter a guilty plea.
Mortimer was one of his country's best-known literary celebrities, first as a highly successful playwright -- part of the so-called new wave with his friends John Osborne and Harold Pinter -- then as writer of radio dramas, screenplays, novels, short stories and surprisingly first-rate journalism.
For most of his career, he also was a practicing barrister and Queen's Counsel, the foremost free-speech advocate of his generation at the English bar, a notable divorce lawyer and a formidable criminal attorney, who -- like Rumpole -- accepted only defense briefs.
Mortimer plucked Rumpole from his own experience. Not long after branching into criminal trials in the early 1970s, he was defending one of a group of soccer hooligans. Another defense lawyer remarked, "I'm really an anarchist at heart, but I don't think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot."
"And there," Mortimer subsequently said, "I had Rumpole."
In court, Mortimer was -- like Rumpole -- an inveterate needler of judges; they often responded in kind. During one closing argument, Mortimer apologized to the jury because they'd had to sit "through the most boring trial ever to have been held in the criminal court."
The judge began his own summation by noting, "It may surprise you to know, members of the jury, that the sole purpose of the criminal law in England is not to entertain Mr. Mortimer."
In fact, Mortimer had from his undergraduate days at Oxford hoped to make his way as a writer. His father, however -- one of his generation's most celebrated probate and divorce lawyers -- urged his son to follow in his footsteps.
"My dear boy, have some consideration for your unfortunate wife," he told his son. "You'll be sitting around the house all day wearing a dressing-gown, brewing tea and stumped for words. You'll be far better off in the law. That's the great thing about the law, it gets you out of the house."
