This impulse is as understandable financially as it is emotionally it's not just the Mortimer estate lawyers who'd like to see this Old Bailey duffer go on forever.Īs with Wodehouse, so too with Rumpole: the essence of the comedy comes from the comfortable confines of its created world. A "Christmas" volume was cobbled together and there have been, and will be, further dramatic interpretations, as heretical as they seem without McKern, who died in 2002.
After the author's death, sporadic attempts were made to sustain things. There were 11 collections of short stories, three omnibus editions, four collections and, at the time of Mortimer's death in 2009, four full-length novels - Rumpole and the Angel of Death, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, and The Anti-social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole. Not since the days of Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes had an actor so thoroughly inhabited such a role, and through that popularity the Rumpole enterprise flourished. Mortimer created Rumpole for a television play in 1975, reprised the character for a TV series in 1978 and the ensuing flow of stories starring Rumpole and his supporting cast won a comfortable popularity with murder-mystery fans - a popularity hugely abetted by veteran actor Leo McKern in the lead. Horace Rumpole, that is, the Old Bailey barrister: plump, perennially dishevelled Rumpole, mainstay of No 3 Equity Court, who subsists on "the rich pickings of legal aid", enjoys a glass of "Château Thames Embankment" at Pommeroy's bar after a hard day in court and who never pleads guilty. Although he enjoyed a certain notoriety as a barrister at London's Old Bailey, Mortimer achieved his measure of immortality outside its chambers - for it was Mortimer who gave us Rumpole. The beauty of the Wodehouse canon, as has been often remarked, is that no word of it ever feels like work, and that same balancing act was well known to his most obvious literary heir, the late John Mortimer.
PG Wodehouse once complained that comedy was bloody hard work, but he kept on churning out glittering, bubbly prose almost until the day he died.
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