Rumpole's still got it

Horace Rumpole ages well. That's true with the character in John Mortimer's stories about a London barrister and with the stories themselves. I just finished reading the three Mortimer story collections that make up The Second Rumpole Omnibus, published in 1987.

The stories in Rumpole for the Defence, Rumpole and the Golden Thread and Rumpole's Last Case do begin to seem a bit predictable when read one after the other, yet that hardly makes them less entertaining. Rumpole is just such an endearing character, sort of like Peter Falk's Columbo, that we don't really care if the stories all seem to follow a similar pattern.

Yet there are exceptions. In "Rumpole and the Winter Break," the briefest story in the book, the aging barrister must take Hilda, better known as She Who Must Be Obeyed, on a vacation that he promised her if he won his case defending a suspected wife murderer. Rumpole never expects to win that case and is greatly surprised when he does. And even bigger surprise happens on their vacation.

Sometimes, as in "Rumpole and the Golden Thread," he successfully defends a client, then discovers that client actually wanted to be found guilty.

In "Rumpole's Last Case," he gets racing tip that he is convinced will allow him to retire with enough money to allow him and Hilda to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Things don't quite work as he plans, which itself is predictable. What may come as a surprise is just how his "last case" becomes only the last case in the book.

No less interesting than Rumpole's courtroom successes are his life with Hilda and with his associates in his law firm. In most of these stories, his life outside the courtrooms in some way parallels his current case.

Leo McKern played Rumpole in the long-running BBC/PBS series based on Mortimer's stories, and it is impossible to read them without seeing McKern in one's mind. It was a character he was born to play. That's him on the book's cover.