Sir John Mortimer

The elder Mortimer was a remarkable character, and Rumpole's fondness for quoting Wordsworth is a gloss on the father's habit of responding to every difficult situation with a quote from Shakespeare. His son would have one of his greatest successes with a memoir of his relationship with the elder man, "Voyage Around My Father," later adapted for both stage and television.

Still, as an advocate, Mortimer much preferred murder to divorce. "Matrimonial clients," he said, "hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable."

In later years, Mortimer would produce a trilogy of blackly comedic political novels, the Rapstone Chronicles, that are the finest fictional account of Thatcher-Reagan-style conservatism ever written on either side of the Atlantic. While the books chart the rise of an abominable Thatcherite politician, Leslie Titmuss, the final volume introduces a Tony Blair-like New Labour pol named Terry Flitton, who's as creepy as anybody who ever asked for your vote.

As Rumpole -- whatever his anti-authority impulses -- was a fervent believer in English jurisprudence, so Mortimer was an unselfconscious patriot.

"We live in the most beautiful, most tolerant and most politically mature country in the world," he said, explaining why he came to write the Rapstone books as a protest against the Thatcher years' moral and social degradation. "Comedy is the only thing worth writing in this despairing age."

In the end, Mortimer was -- like Rumpole -- constant but unafraid of contradiction. He was a lifelong socialist who drank Champagne before breakfast, was "all for" homosexuality and disdained feminism. He defended free speech and loathed political correctness. He held conservative politicians in contempt but supported the monarchy and fox hunting.

He was an atheist who supported the established church because he "approved everything about it, but God."

In a celebrated public exchange, Basil Hume, the former Benedictine abbot who was then cardinal of Westminster, said to Mortimer that, if there were no God, "life would be absurd."

"Well, exactly," Mortimer replied.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com