Telling people things they’d like to hear. Talking to juries and judges in court, I was always telling them things I thought they’d like to hear.” He says, “I count myself extremely lucky to have been called to the bar in my twenties,” and adds, “The art of listening is one that has to be learned by lawyers.” As a lawyer he was able “…to learn many secrets, to meet a huge variety of people, to bear their misfortunes with great heroism and to see the solutions to their problems quite clearly. We all draw on our own experiences in creating characters and stories, but Mortimer very much based Rumpole’s legal career on his own. Well yes, it is, and more so in Mortimer’s case than that of many authors. Mortimer points out how there’s the author, there’s the character, and there’s the actor who played the character-and admits it’s all very confusing. At a restaurant we go to near our home in England, the owner saw a newspaper headline, ‘Rumpole Dies’, and for days she spoke in hushed and, I’m relieved to say, regretful tones about my unfortunate death.” Mortimer writes, “He was an actor who magnificently portrayed a character I’d written, Rumpole, the claret-swigging, small-cigar-smoking, fearless upholder of our great legal principles, trial by your peers, the presumption of innocence and the rule that the police shouldn’t invent more of the evidence than is strictly necessary. So I was amused when I read in Mortimer’s part memoir, part collection of essays, Where There’s a Will, about an incident that occurred after the death of Leo McKern.

Sir John Mortimer wrote novels, plays, and several volumes of autobiography, but the Rumpole of the Bailey stories are my favorites.

Rumpole of the bailey author