All the trimmings

The cover of this collection boasts a striking claim by P. D. James: ‘Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal.’ But will Rumpole’s world endure with Baker Street and Totleigh Towers?

The cover of this collection boasts a striking claim by P. D. James: ‘Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal.’ But will Rumpole’s world endure with Baker Street and Totleigh Towers?

The case in favour rests partly on the similarities. All three are first-person, multi-story narratives. In each, the forces of darkness are painted with gothic panache — Moriarty, Sir Watkyn Bassett and, in Rumpole’s case, most of Her Majesty’s judiciary, including, in the two best stories in this volume, Mr Justice Graves (or, as Rumpole would have him, Mr Injustice Gravestone). In each the hero finds solace in ritual comforts — for cocaine and violin, and Jeeves’ patent pick-me-up, read Pommeroy’s plonk and the works of Wordsworth. Rumpole is married to a harpy; the other two avoid intimacy with women like the plague. These heroes are loners; odd men out with whom we can nonetheless identify.

However, the differences are telling too. While Holmes has Watson, and Jeeves has Wooster, Rumpole stands alone. He is too close to his creator to need, or bear, a co-star. Mortimer the barrister, like Rumpole, was fearless, anti-authoritarian and witty; and no slave to the view that judges are there to be courted. Rumpole’s guiding principle — his ‘golden thread’ — is that all are innocent until found guilty by 12 good men and true at the end of the trial and not by the likes of Mr Justice Graves half way through.

Here lies the core of the drama. In Rum- pole’s universe, judge and prosecution are over-cosy allies.