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. They want convictions and smugly expect them. They play to easy prejudices, and the judge has (or thinks he has) the best cards. It is his court and he sums up. So Rumpole and his clients start out as underdogs. However, in the criminal courts, game-point is for the jury, and Rumpole is a jury man.
We, the readers, observe this struggle as jurors would. The pleasure of seeing the cogency of a prosecution case implode under maverick questioning does not diminish in repetition; any more than do Jeeves’ and Holmes’ solutions to the superficially insoluble. Rumpole, however, must pay the maverick’s price. He gets due credit from the rogues he represents, but rarely from his colleagues. In one story, Rumpole mulls over past glories (and several bottles of Chateau Thames Embankment) — but with a hack crime reporter, not a lawyer.
Then there is Rumpole’s beguiling affection for times past. A member of my chambers voted years ago against the acquisition of a fax-machine, foreseeing day after day spent reading irrelevant papers copied by over-enthusiastic or over-charging solicitors. In one story Rumpole smells a similar rat in the internet. Fellow members of chambers pragmatically follow the zeitgeist. Rumpole fights, as ever, on his principles.
What of Rumpole’s life outside the law? There is little, but that rings true. Rumpole is as restless without a case as Sherlock Holmes is. Domestic comforts are few. His wife thinks him a failure (not even a QC — Queer Customer, in Rumpole-speak) and confuses partisan spirit with a lack of the social graces.
In our audio-visual age, few claim immortality from the page alone; and here Rumpole scores handsomely. Staring from the cover is not a cartoonist’s imagined Rumpole, but Leo McKern, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Holmes and Jeeves have fine interpreters, but McKern’s Rumpole is definitive. Mortimer, initially uncertain, came to think so too.
Those against might label Rumpole archaic in the second millennium (he first emerged from the robing room in a BBC Play for Today in 1975). Indeed most judges and prosecutors have moved on; but the worlds of Wooster and Baker Street are no less historical. These are fables, not documentaries.
All this said, John Mortimer would not have wanted his readers to think that these stories exemplify the best. They were written as seasonal Christmas fare for news- papers between 1997 and 2006 — so late in the canon. Most of the earlier short stories evolved from television scripts, and seem more finished. The seasonal theme brings some repetition, though I like She Who Must Be Obeyed ‘laying down’ Rumpole’s invariable present of Lavender Water, as she retaliates with an unwearable tie. Two stories involve rural hotel Christmas breaks (one in a health farm); two turn on old lags recognised. The sharp sense for social injustice, which pervades the best stories, has here more a tone of world- weariness. The twists are, for the main, gentle bends, signalled well in advance.
And yet, and yet . . . the whole is suffused with the Rumpole charm — light on the surface, firm in underlying values — a perfect soufflé. If your loved one’s stocking has a slim space for light fiction, you could hardly do better. In the year of his creator’s passing, who could not recommend an afternoon in McKern’s — sorry, Mortimer’s — sorry, Rumpole’s — immortal company?
Comments