Rumpole’s seasonal cheer

Music fans may groan at the glut of greatest hit collections clogging up shelves at this time of year. Bookshelves are usually immune from such compilations, though the odd one slips through. In this case, it’s a positive. Forever Rumpole: The Best of the Rumpole Stories brings together some of the most winsome of John Mortimer’s tales. With a healthy range, and stories breezy enough to tackle on a full stomach, it is a timely fireside companion.
 
The charm lies largely with Horace Rumpole, Mortimer’s caustic lawyer. With his waistcoat, cigars and fondness for a tipple or two, Rumpole takes his rightful place in the pop-fiction pantheon. The back jacket sees him compared with the usual list of suspects: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Jeeves and Wooster, and, perhaps slightly optimistic this one, Mr Pickwick.
 
Rumpole is far worldlier than Wooster, and arguably even Jeeves, though the stories are similarly humourless. Mortimer is master of the slyly comic turn. One character cracks ‘The Times crossword in the opening of an egg’, a judge ‘might have been carved out of yellowish marble’ while a colleague has a ‘laugh…like a bath running out’. Another party-piece, again lovingly borrowed from Wodehouse, is letting the high collide with the low, filleting cliché for comedy. A moustache is described as the sort ‘once worn by South American revolutionaries and now sported by those who travel the Home Counties trying to flog double-glazing to the natives’. The Angel of Death becomes ‘a dumpy, grey-haired, bespectacled lady who wore sensible shoes’. Or, my favourite, on the creative criminality of Rumpole’s clients, the Timsons: they ‘provide not only the bread and marge, the Vim and Brasso, but quite often the beef and butter of our life in Froxbury Mansions’.
 
Mortimer is similarly adept at skewering bunkum. Whether it is in ‘Rumpole à la Carte’, where Rumpole satires restaurant speak — ‘an octagonal plate on which a sliver of monkfish is arranged in a composition of pastel shades’ — or the modish marketing horrors of Vince Blewitt in ‘Rumpole and the Angel of Death’ or Luci Gribble in ‘Rumpole and the Primrose Path’, both of whom disrupt the etiquette of Chambers. Mortimer also manages to smuggle in a few political points: taking aim at the authoritarian reflexes of New Labour in ‘Rumpole Redeemed’. All threats to liberty and a fair trial are roundly birched, whether in the guise of politicos, ambitious career-lawyers or PR gurus.
 
The stories chosen work well together. The subject matter changes intriguingly as the decades pass, with side-glances at feminism or, as in the penultimate piece, the threat of terrorism. The plots tinkle tunefully, and the marital tension between Rumpole and his wife Hilda, or She Who Must Be Obeyed, is charming in its own way.
 
Raise a glass of Château Thames Embankment to an old friend, and then fill another.