before retirement, he asks to be judged rather than to judge. The play is an interesting (though not wholly successful) study of obsession and a disturbing look at the unpredictability of the legal system. Mortimer deals with similar characters and situations in the Rumpole tales, but more lightly, mixing satire and other humorous devices with his mysteries.

His major play is the full-length A Voyage Round My Father, an autobiographical drama that began as a radio play produced in 1963. Aside from its intrinsic merits, it is a landmark work because introspective memory plays are uncommon on the English stage. Having been regularly produced on West End stages, Mortimer was so familiar to English theatergoers that a critic said his “world is consistently and instantly knowable.” However, none of his previous plays had prepared audiences for A Voyage Round My Father, which was first presented at the Greenwich Theatre in 1970 and then, slightly revised, at London’s Haymarket Theatre on August 4, 1971.

When he resumed writing novels after a thirty-year hiatus, Mortimer also produced a family chronicle developed largely through flashbacks. Paradise Postponed and its sequels, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets, are social histories that combine the expansive form of the Victorian novel with the mordant satire of Evelyn Waugh. While they reveal their author’s liberal bias, both portray flawed people at all points of the political and social spectrums. Supported by their false myths, even the author’s favorites lie, embrace futile causes, and are self-serving, but Mortimer is a benevolent judge of his saints and sinners, except for Leslie Titmuss, whose deceit and unscrupulous ambition make tolerance and forgiveness impossible. Mortimer’s stance in this regard was consistent over the decades.

A Voyage Round My Father

First produced: 1963 (radio play), 1970 (stage play)

Type of work: Play

Through flashbacks focusing on his father, a son creates an affectionate, moving, and funny tribute.

A Voyage Round My Father is an autobiographical memory play comprised of chronological episodes spanning two decades. A reflective narrator links past and present and is a unifying force, participating in the action (as man and boy) and stepping out of it to address the audience. The narrator reveals a symbiotic yet strangely distant and unemotional relationship between the son and his father, a blind barrister. As the title suggests, the son never gets as close to his father as he desired, partly as a result of the blindness, but also because the older man regarded life as a game and built an impenetrable emotional barrier between himself and everyone else, even the wife upon whom he totally depended. Despite his father’s coldness and self-absorption, Mortimer intends A Voyage Round My Father as a loving tribute.

The play starts with the old man having his adult son describe the family garden. After the son as narrator gives the audience some background, the action reverts to the past, with youthful initiation episodes at home and school. When the son must decide upon a profession, the old barrister, who regards the law contemptuously, encourages his boy to choose it, primarily because it will give him spare time for writing. In the second act, the young man is working in a wartime propaganda film unit in lieu of military service; there he falls in love with a married woman. After her divorce, by which time he is a barrister, they marry, but since his income from divorce cases is inadequate, he works part-time for a legal aid society and starts writing plays.

Having been instructed by his father on the nuances of cross-examinations, the son finally wins a major domestic case, though the victor did not deserve to prevail. The son thinks he has become like his father, of whom he says: “He had no message. I think he had no belief. He was the advocate who can take the side that comes to him first and always discover words to anger his opponent.” In the last scene, the garden deteriorates as the father dies, and the play concludes with the narrator telling the audience: “I’d been told of all the things you’re meant to feel. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you’re in no one else’s shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.” In his 1982 memoir, Mortimer says that after he wrote the play, “a man who had filled so much of my life seemed to have left me and become someone for other people to read about and perform.”

Many American memory plays are products of their authors’ imaginations, with autobiographical elements presented in highly stylized ways, and Oedipal or other psychological concerns the thematic centerpieces. Mortimer’s play, in contrast, is largely reportorial, a kind of personal essay in dramatic form. Further, while he has altered some details, situations and events faithfully represent the past. An atypical work for him in subject matter, its form also departs from the traditional pattern of his other stage works. A Voyage Round My Father, which unequivocally demonstrates his mastery of the full-length serious play, was a critical success, had a 1971 London run of 501 performances, was adapted for television in 1982, and has been subsequently revived.

Paradise Postponed

First published: 1985

Type of work: Novel

The book is a family chronicle, set in post-World War II England, in which a rector disinherits his family and his sons try to learn why.

Paradise Postponed, which Mortimer wrote as a novel and television miniseries, is both a family chronicle and social commentary on England in the decades following World War II. Its conventional form (aside from flashbacks) and some of its plot (such as the prospect of lengthy litigation over a will) bring to mind novels by Dickens and Trollope. Like his nineteenth century predecessors, Mortimer tempers a sometimes poignant story of malaise with wit. Propelling the plot is a mystery that is not unraveled until the end, at which time the full significance of the title becomes clear. The earthly paradise that the main characters strive to achieve remains elusive, even to the one person who seemed to have it within grasp.

The main setting is a seemingly idyllic village, Rapstone Fanner. Rector Simeon Simcox, a socialist whose family owns the local brewery, devotes more time to ban-the-bomb marches and other political works than to his ecclesiastical duties. His wife is patient and indulgent. His older son is a novelist whose idealism Hollywood corrupts. His younger son is a self-effacing idealist, a country doctor who plays with a local jazz combo. The two brothers become involved with the same woman, who becomes pregnant by the younger, marries the older, eventually divorces him, and later rekindles the flame with the younger.

Intertwined with this Simcox saga is that of Leslie Titmuss, whose father is a brewery worker and whose mother was a maid at the local nobleman’s home. An amoral social climber, young Titmuss sets his sights on a seat in Parliament and proceeds with guile to attain his goal by surreptitiously engineering the defeat of the incumbent Conservative and setting the stage for his own candidacy in the next election, when he beats the Labourite. He abets his social and political rise by a loveless marriage to homely Charlotte, the nobleman’s daughter, which produces a son, Nicky. A few years later, Charlotte is accidentally killed by a police vehicle during a women’s demonstration against military weapons.

When the Reverend Simeon Simcox leaves his estate to Titmuss, his sons attempt to learn what motivated a socially conscious leftist to leave everything to a money-hungry Conservative. They believe their father had gone mad, until their mother reveals that Charlotte was Simeon’s illegitimate child, and by leaving his estate to Titmuss, grandson Nicky eventually would benefit. A final ironic shock is the revelation that the inherited brewery stock is worthless.

Titmuss, whose ambition leads him to renounce his working-class origins, epitomizes what Mortimer believed was wrong with the United Kingdom that Margaret Thatcher led into the 1980’s. The government and Titmuss lacked moral purpose and compassion for the country’s poor. Using his political base, Titmuss orchestrates business takeovers and land grabs that destroy others’ careers and fortunes, and though styling himself Conservative, his political and financial activities ignore traditional values. At novel’s end, he and his kind are in control. In the sequel Titmuss Regained, having moved higher in the government, Titmuss seems to get his comeuppance, but in a third novel in the chronicle, The Sound of Trumpets, he rises again.

Rumpole à la Carte

First published: 1990

Type of work: Short stories

London barrister Horace Rumpole demonstrates his deductive and legal talents in six comic detective tales, most of whose characters are present in other Rumpole stories.

Mortimer has written numerous comic detective tales featuring defense barrister Horace Rumpole; Rumpole à la Carte is one of the many collections of these stories. Although Rumpole has not become a Queen’s Counsel and handles mainly Old Bailey crime cases that his colleagues shun, he is satisfied with his lot, possibly because he almost always bests nominal superiors, including judges and the boorish head of his chambers.

The Rumpole stories, which Mortimer also adapted for television, have at least two complementary plots, courtroom and personal, the latter either a domestic crisis between Rumpole and his wife Hilda (“She Who Must Be Obeyed”) or a problem involving the courts or the aging barrister’s colleagues. These subplots not only entertain but also further characterize the unlikely hero, who sometimes selflessly rescues the reputations and careers of ambitious younger barristers, and whose insights and slyness enable him to shape people and situations to his own purposes.

In an early story, Rumpole confesses that although he only feels “truly alive and happy in Law Courts, [he has] a singular distaste for the law.” Indeed, his advocacy on behalf of mainly worthless clients does not rely as much upon his knowledge of the law as upon his detective skills and ability to judge character, talents that link him to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, from whom Rumpole often quotes. Many of the stories, in fact, follow the Sherlockian pattern, which is no surprise, since Mortimer as a child listened to his father recite Holmes’s adventures from memory.

The stories in this collection include familiar details from other adventures, such as Rumpole’s rejuvenating visits to Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, his love for steak and kidney pudding, and his speechifying on behalf of an accused. Several of the tales, though, place the crusty hero in unfamiliar milieus. In the title story, for instance, he confronts “the terrible curse of nouvelle cuisine” in a three-star restaurant to which Hilda’s expatriate cousin takes them. Later, the owner-chef, whose food and establishment Rumpole had roundly insulted, hires the barrister to defend him. In “Rumpole at Sea,” Hilda books the couple on a two-week cruise over her husband’s objections, and among the passengers is one of Rumpole’s high court nemeses, Mr. “Miscarriage of Justice” Graves. The adversaries become involved in a shipboard mystery that Graves bungles but Rumpole solves. In “Rumpole for the Prosecution,” as the title reveals, he becomes, for the first time in his career, a prosecuting attorney, but even in this murder case his shrewd instincts prevail, and he ends up securing an acquittal for the accused.

Within a format of mystery mixed with humor, Mortimer also presents his insider’s view of England’s legal system, with its hypocritical barristers and biased, even ignorant, judges. Rumpole, an iconoclast fighting the establishment, sometimes is a nonconformist who upholds his own interests, but more often he struggles on behalf of a kindred soul, also an outsider of some sort.

Rumpole and the Reign of Terror

First published: 2006

Type of work: Novel

To defend a Pakistani doctor detained as an Al Qaeda operative, Rumpole must overcome new antiterrorism laws, as well as his usual judicial adversaries.

Having written dozens of Rumpole stories, Mortimer in 2004 published his first novel featuring the Old Bailey advocate, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, which recalls the early case that made his reputation and incidentally led to marriage with Hilda. Rumpole and the Reign of Terror also is a novel, with Hilda as conarrator and aspiring memoirist. Notwithstanding this new narrative approach, there is much that is familiar from earlier entries in the Rumpole saga: his antiestablishment attitude, especially toward the judiciary; his sympathy for society’s outsiders; his almost paternalistic attitude toward the Timsons, the clan of petty thieves who are his frequent clients; and multiple story lines. In addition, recurring characters make cameo appearances: “Soapy Sam” Ballard, Q. C., hapless head of chambers and Rumpole’s nominal superior; Claude Erskine-Brown, an ineffectual colleague whose wife’s legal career puts his to shame; Ferdinand Ian Gilmour Newton, also known as Fig Newton, Rumpole’s private investigator, who always has a cold; and Dodo Mackintosh, Hilda’s old school friend and occasional guest, whose dislike of Rumpole is matched by his antipathy toward her.

While defending a Timson client, Rumpole is engaged by another family member, Tiffany Timson Khan, but not to finesse a burglary charge. Rather, her husband, a London physician whose family had emigrated from Pakistan in the 1970’s, was arrested as a terrorist and faces indefinite imprisonment. Because of new antiterrorism statutes, the government can withhold information about the case, even potentially exculpatory evidence; thus stymied, Rumpole resorts to unconventional means to develop his defense. Thanks to a fortuitous coincidence, the Old Bailey hack learns potentially embarrassing information about the home secretary, whom he pressures (indeed, blackmails) to remove some of the new legal obstacles in this instance. Thus unfettered, Rumpole embarks upon a vintage courtroom performance and exonerates his wrongly accused client.

Meanwhile, the presiding judge, an erstwhile Rumpole rival, Leonard Bullingham (dubbed “The Mad Bull” by court denizens), who has become Hilda’s afternoon bridge partner, starts to woo her and suggests marriage. Domestic subplots, standard in the Rumpole canon, are more than gratuitous diversions. Here, Mortimer reduces a high court judge, Rumpole’s present courtroom nemesis, to a would-be seducer of a married woman. Flattered though she is by Bullingham’s attention, Hilda’s commitment to Rumpole is unwavering; she is as loyal and selfless a spouse as Tiffany and quite the opposite of manipulative and ambitious Benazir Whiteside.

The Hilda narrative also provides a contrasting view of the government’s tampering with legal traditions, for Hilda supports actions against the United Kingdom’s immigrant population, whom she distrusts. Dr. Khan is a “ghastly terrorist,” properly imprisoned, she says, and believes that “most sensible people” agree with her. When Rumpole confronts her with allusions to the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, she responds that “there were no suicide bombers and no Al Qaeda when King John signed up to the charter on the island of Runnymede.” This contrast between the Rumpoles focuses reader attention upon Mortimer’s deeply held belief in liberty and freedom of speech for all.

Having prevailed once again for his clients over hypocrisy and the more powerful, and in this instance over questionable laws, Rumpole the liberal iconoclast looks ahead to more closing speeches and cross-examinations, troubled only by the prospect of Hilda publishing her memoirs.