Rumpole: The Primrose Path & other stories

John Mortimer was born on 21 April 1923. His father was a successful divorce lawyer and a considerable influence on his son’s life. Schooled at Harrow, Mortimer studied law at Brasenose College, Oxford. After finishing his degree, he was called to the Bar in 1948 and entered his father’s chambers. Initially, he specialized in divorce cases, but soon switched to criminal law, finding murderers and the like easier to work with than divorcing spouses. In 1966, he became a Queen’s Counsel and continued working as a barrister until 1979. A lifelong champion of free speech, he argued for the defence in some of Britain’s most famous obscenity trials, including the one against the underground magazine Oz.

Mortimer began writing before becoming a barrister. His legal career inspired his fiction, and his first radio play, The Dock Brief (1957), focused on an aging barrister defending a man accused of murdering his wife. It won the Italia Prize and was adapted for stage, television, and film starring Peter Sellers and Richard Attenborough. He also had success with his autobiographical play, A Voyage Round My Father, which ran in the West End starring Jeremy Brett and Alec Guinness and was later adapted for TV starring Sir Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates.

He first wrote about Rumpole in a BBC TV Play for Today called Rumpole of the Bailey. Centering on a lovable Old Bailey hack with a penchant for cigars and claret and a domineering wife, “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” the play was an instant hit, and in 1978 the first Thames Television series aired under the same name, starring Leo McKern as Rumpole. It became hugely popular, and five more series followed. The first collection of Rumpole stories was published in 1978, followed by twelve more volumes.

His other novels include the trilogy of Titmuss novels, Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained, and The Sound of Trumpets. He also wrote three volumes of autobiography (Clinging to the Wreckage, Murderers and Other Friends, and Summer of a Dormouse) and numerous TV and film adaptations, including Brideshead Revisited, Cider with Rosie, and Tea with Mussolini.

John Mortimer received a knighthood for his services to the arts in 1998. He died in 2009.

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