Roger Mortimer writes again

After Dear Lupin and Dear Lumpy, here’s a slightly more prosaically titled collection of letters from Roger Mortimer, longtime racing correspondent of the Sunday Times and frequent purchaser of stamps. Who would have thought that one man could write so many letters that, 20 years after his death, so many people would still want to read?

But that’s the beauty of publishing: the oddest books can find a readership. And this encourages enterprising publishers to look out for even odder books, which benefits us all: writers, readers, even reviewers. So, well played to Constable, and to Mortimer’s three children (none of them children any longer, of course), for between them they have unearthed a distinctive and cherishable comic voice, who throughout his career saved his best material for his smallest, most select readership.

Mortimer was born in 1909, went from Eton to the Coldsteam Guards and spent most of the war as a PoW. It was while holed up in various prison camps that he developed his distinctive epistolatory style: dense, sharply funny, no paragraphs, no flab. He was 37 when he married, 39 when he became a father and well into his fifties before he started writing to his children, often ticking them off for something or other. He once wrote to Jane:

Dear Wafer Head,You left those nice buttons I gave you on the mantelpiece. I think your head is full of eggshells, old socks and a copy of the Woman’s Magazine for 20 October 1937.

That’s relatively mild. Photos show a man of high colour and a round head that you suspect might explode at any minute. Humour seems to have been his safety valve. It’s hard to imagine that he could have lived to 82 without it.