John Mortimer
Rumpole and the Angel of Death
Viking (0 670 86451 x) £15.00
This is the tenth Rumpole book. One
was a full length novel, the others each contain six short stories. All the stories have
been made into hour - long features on ITV. The BBC turned down the original offer of the
series and have probably regretted it ever since . And Leo McKern has become everybody's
Rumpole and is featured again on the wrapper of this latest offering from John Mortimer. The list of John Mortimer's books is long: forty-one titles of novels, Rumpole books, plays, essays autobiographies and translations. The Rumpole books account for nearly a third of the whole and are probably John Mortimer's main claim to lierary fame, though whther he saw them as such when he began writing them is another matter. It is likely that they were first regarded as no more than television material and as such lesser than the novels and plays; but, as in the case of Richmal Crompton's William books, the lesser has taken precedence over the other apparently more serious work.
This latest Rumpole offering follows a familiar pattern. In each of the stories Rumpole is called on to defend some underdog: the Model Prisoner, Matthew Gribble, accused of a wanton attack on a guard; the animal rights activist, Dennis Pearson, who wants to be a martyr for the cause; the poor little rich boy, Micheal Skelton, accused of murder; the neighbour, Thelma Ropner, accused of child abduction; the young Asian, Amin Hashimi accused of murder; and the nurse, Betty Ireton, who believed in euthanasia and is accused of murdering her patient. Rumpole wins some and losses some, but the outcome of each story is invariably satisfactory to Rumpole and to us as readers.
Another feature of the Rumpole stories worthy of note is the use of a sub-plot which often reflects the main plot. A nice example is the case of the Model Prisoner. In the main plot Matthew Gribble's protoge is a damaging witness against his mentor, while in the sub-plot the master-pupil relationship of Claude Erskine-Brown and Wendy Crump finds Claude apparently guilty of a serious piece of professional misconduct. Both strands are cleverly dove-tailed, here as in other stories in the book. Indeed the discomfiture of Soapy Sam Ballard in the sub-plot of Rumpole and the Angel of Death is Rumpole's doing and very amusing .
This latest volume of the Rumpole canon is, like all the others, highly recommended.
(John Boyles)
