Creator of the mysteries starring the beloved English barrister, Horace Rumpole, John Mortimer paints a spirited portrait of his own colorful life in his quirky autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage. With wit and style, he takes you from his austere childhood in a 1930s British boarding school to his successful dual career in law and writing during the 1980s. Raised on his barrister father's sordid tales of divorce cases, young John Mortimer grew up to view the world with an acute sense for the absurd. As an adult, he has maintained his huge appetite for laughter and life despite his daily legal work defending violent criminals and handling shipwrecked marriages. Novelist, playwright, and esteemed former barrister, John Mortimer draws on his many talents to create his wry, urbane memoirs. Patrick Tull's splendid narration of this sophisticated book will have you laughing out loud and asking for more.
A story about lifelong friends and adversaries.John Mortimer - author of Rumpole of the Bailey - explores the complexities of love, honour and betrayal.
When Lewis Luby (Jeremy Irons) comes to, late at night in an Italian hospital, he finds himself lying under the monstrous big toe of God. Surely there has been some mistake: Luby, who has never for one moment believed in the immortality of the soul, cannot possibly be in heaven! John Mortimer had the idea for 'Mr Luby's Fear of Heaven' when he first visited the Santa Maria della Scala hospital in Siena and saw patients lying in beds under ceilings decorated with 15th-Century frescoes depicting Heaven and Hell. The play was first produced for BBC Radio 3 in 1976, with John Gielgud in the title role. Later that year it was presented on stage as part of a double bill 'Heaven and Hell', with Denholm Elliot as Luby. This BBC Radio 4 'Afternoon Play' production, starring Jeremy Irons as the protagonist, was first broadcast 31 December 2008 and repeated 15 February 2011. Stephen Critchlow, Marsha Fitzalan, Chris Pavlo, Donnla Hughes, Dan Starkey and Flaminia Cinque also feature amongst the cast.
The abridged, downloadable audiobook edition of John Mortimer's brilliantly funny Quite Honestly, read by Marc Warren and Beth Goddard.
Life couldn't be better for Lucinda Purefoy. Granted it's a little embarrassing, her father being the Bishop of Aldershot, but she's got a steady boyfriend, a degree in social sciences from Manchester University and the offer of a job in advertising. With all that, she felt she should 'pay back her debt to society' and 'do a little good in the world'. That's why she joined SCRAP (short for 'Social Carers, Reformers and Praeceptors'), an organization which trains girls like Lucy to become the 'guide, philosopher and friend' to ex-convicts coming out of prison, to find them a job, a home and to encourage them to kick the habit of stealing things. And so Lucy finds herself standing outside the gates of Wormwood Scrubs, on a windy March morning, waiting to greet her first SCRAP 'client', a career-burglar called Terry Keegan. What happens next confounds expectations and produces a story full of surprises. With a cast of characters that rivals anything in his famous Rumpole stories and a compulsive plot, Quite Honestly is a wonderfully comic novel, packed with John Mortimer's entertaining reflections on crime.
Here are six delightful tales featuring everyone’s favorite barrister for the defense, Horace Rumpole. Eccentric characters such as his wife, Hilda, otherwise known as “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” and his philandering colleague Claude Erskine-Brown are back as Rumpole visits a snooty restaurant where he engages in a battle of wills over his adored mashed spuds, takes the unaccustomed role of prosecutor, and ventures—unwillingly—onto a ship, where he confronts, of all things, a detective novelist. Included are “Rumpole à la Carte,” “Rumpole and the Summer of Discontent,” “Rumpole and the Right to Silence,” “Rumpole at Sea,” “Rumpole and the Quacks,” and “Rumpole for the Prosecution.” This masterly blend of humor and mystery makes for irresistible listening.
“The eighth collection of stories about the barrister; that they continue to be so enjoyable is a mark of both the author's craftsmanship and his natural talent.”—New York Times Book Review
Rumpole unenthusiastically accompanies Hilda and her cousin to a very fashionable restaurant. Rumpole hates the ostentatious ambiance, pretentious food with its scant portions. He requests steak and kidney pudding. Jean Pierre O'Higgins, the owner, is insulted that Rumpole would expect him to prepare such low-class dishes. Suddenly, pandemonium strikes when a live mouse jumps out from the serving dish at another table. Unfortunately, the diners are Erskine-Brown with an attractive colleague that he's romancing. When an obstinate O'Higgins comes to Rumpole to plead his help in saving his license and reputation, Rumpole agrees to defend him but he must also somehow do this without embarrassing Erskine-Brown.
Leo McKern is Horace Rumpole! Here he reads about the life and trials of the eccentric barrister, famous for his inestimable knowledge of blood stains, blood groups and forgery by typewriter. Witty and cynical as ever, Horace Rumpole will once again delight listeners with his irreverent behavior and legal triumphs. Will he and his long time client Percy Timson both be forced to retire, one to sunny climes, the other to jail?
Our Horace Rumpole, the most traditional of traditionalists, defends a hippie-like school teacher on a drugs charge. Quite unexpectedly, he finds himself attracted to her and to her unusual lifestyle.
Horace Rumpole, the comic, courageous, and corpulent “great defender of muddled and sinful humanity,” is joined by a winning cast of villains and victims in this collection of six tales in which wry humor and sparkling wit deftly send up the British legal system.
In Rumpole and the Angel of Death, our hero achieves new, resounding triumphs over the forces of prejudice and mean-mindedness. One adventure involves Rumpole in the world of hunters and the hunted, animal rights and human wrongs, while in another he finds that international justice is as fallible as the domestic variety. And for the first time, Hilda, “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” tells a story all her own.
“As always, Mortimer writes with a Wodehousian élan but, unlike Wodehouse, he incorporates a spirited if indirect wrestling with the social and political issues of the day…Rumpole is by turns acutely sensitive and brazenly bullheaded, as Mortimer dances nimbly around thorny subjects with his trademark ease, applying all-knowing wit and painstaking characterization.”—Publishers Weekly
In this collection of six witty short stories, the courageous and corpulent barrister, Horace Rumpole takes on both animal and human rights. And for the first time, Rumpole's formidable wife, Hilda-better known as She Who Must Be Obeyed-tells a story of her own.
Rumpole again defends a member of the Timson clan on a charge of possession of stolen goods, namely, he is caught with a garage full of expensive wine. Rumpole is concerned that Timson's explanation that he purchased the wine from some unknown individual he met in a pub, will not go down well with Mr. Justice Graves, who has heard these stories many times before.
In this engaging collection of stories, Rumpole continues to deftly juggle the vagaries of law, the ambiguities of crime, and the contradictions of the human heart in his death-defying performances on behalf of justice. The irreverent, claret-swilling, poetry-spouting barrister takes on suspect connoisseurs in the art world, journeys deep into the throbbing heart of Africa, dabbles in some feminist politics, decides the countryside is a very dangerous place, and incurs the wrath of his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed.
“Once detective-fiction heroes enter your mental landscape, they can seem as real as your own friends and family. For a lot of people, Horace Rumpole is just such a vivid and familiar figure.”—Wall Street Journal
