Brilliant? Guilty as charged

Sir John Mortimer, the preternaturally prolific English author who died Friday at 85, created two unforgettable characters: One was the irascible barrister Horace Rumpole; the other was himself.

Rumpole, the craftily disheveled Old Bailey “hack,” is probably best known through Leo McKern’s portrayals on television. As a barrister, he is distinguished by his reverence for the common law, his contempt for judges and his refusal ever to prosecute or to enter a guilty plea.

Mortimer was one of his country’s best-known literary celebrities, first as a highly successful playwright -- part of the so-called new wave with his friends John Osborne and Harold Pinter -- then as writer of radio dramas, screenplays, novels, short stories and surprisingly first-rate journalism.

For most of his career, he also was a practicing barrister and Queen’s Counsel, the foremost free-speech advocate of his generation at the English bar, a notable divorce lawyer and a formidable criminal attorney, who -- like Rumpole -- accepted only defense briefs.

Mortimer plucked Rumpole from his own experience. Not long after branching into criminal trials in the early 1970s, he was defending one of a group of soccer hooligans. Another defense lawyer remarked, “I’m really an anarchist at heart, but I don’t think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot.”

“And there,” Mortimer subsequently said, “I had Rumpole.”

In court, Mortimer was -- like Rumpole -- an inveterate needler of judges; they often responded in kind. During one closing argument, Mortimer apologized to the jury because they’d had to sit “through the most boring trial ever to have been held in the criminal court.”

The judge began his own summation by noting, “It may surprise you to know, members of the jury, that the sole purpose of the criminal law in England is not to entertain Mr. Mortimer.”

In fact, Mortimer had from his undergraduate days at Oxford hoped to make his way as a writer. His father, however -- one of his generation’s most celebrated probate and divorce lawyers -- urged his son to follow in his footsteps.

“My dear boy, have some consideration for your unfortunate wife,” he told his son. “You’ll be sitting around the house all day wearing a dressing-gown, brewing tea and stumped for words. You’ll be far better off in the law. That’s the great thing about the law, it gets you out of the house.”

The elder Mortimer was a remarkable character, and Rumpole’s fondness for quoting Wordsworth is a gloss on the father’s habit of responding to every difficult situation with a quote from Shakespeare. His son would have one of his greatest successes with a memoir of his relationship with the elder man, “Voyage Around My Father,” later adapted for both stage and television.

Still, as an advocate, Mortimer much preferred murder to divorce. “Matrimonial clients,” he said, “hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they’re usually quite peaceful and agreeable.”

In later years, Mortimer would produce a trilogy of blackly comedic political novels, the Rapstone Chronicles, that are the finest fictional account of Thatcher-Reagan-style conservatism ever written on either side of the Atlantic. While the books chart the rise of an abominable Thatcherite politician, Leslie Titmuss, the final volume introduces a Tony Blair-like New Labour pol named Terry Flitton, who’s as creepy as anybody who ever asked for your vote.

As Rumpole -- whatever his anti-authority impulses -- was a fervent believer in English jurisprudence, so Mortimer was an unselfconscious patriot.

“We live in the most beautiful, most tolerant and most politically mature country in the world,” he said, explaining why he came to write the Rapstone books as a protest against the Thatcher years’ moral and social degradation. “Comedy is the only thing worth writing in this despairing age.”

In the end, Mortimer was -- like Rumpole -- constant but unafraid of contradiction. He was a lifelong socialist who drank Champagne before breakfast, was “all for” homosexuality and disdained feminism. He defended free speech and loathed political correctness. He held conservative politicians in contempt but supported the monarchy and fox hunting.

He was an atheist who supported the established church because he “approved everything about it, but God.”

In a celebrated public exchange, Basil Hume, the former Benedictine abbot who was then cardinal of Westminster, said to Mortimer that, if there were no God, “life would be absurd.”

“Well, exactly,” Mortimer replied.

--

timothy.rutten@latimes.com