Another great one gone

The New York Times has an article by Helen Verongos about one of Rico's favorite writers:

John Mortimer, barrister, author, playwright, and creator of Horace Rumpole, the cunning defender of the British criminal classes, has died, according to his editor at Viking, Tony Lacey. He was 85 years old. Mr. Mortimer is known best in the US for creating the Rumpole character, an endearing and enduring relic of the British legal system who became a television hero of the courtroom comedy. To read Rumpole, or watch the episodes, is to enter not only Rumpole’s stuffy flat or crowded legal chambers, but to feel the itch of his yellowing court wig and the flapping of his disheveled, cigar ash-dusted courtroom gown. Rumpole spends his days quoting Keats and his nights quaffing claret at Pommeroy’s wine bar, putting off the time that he must return to his wife, Hilda, more commonly known as She Who Must Be Obeyed.
Using his wit and low-comedy distractions, Rumpole sees that justice is done, more often than not by outsmarting the ‘’old sweethearts” and “old darlings” of the bench and revealing the inner good— or at least integrity and inconsistency— of the accused, including clans like the Timsons, whose crimes have kept generations of police officers busy.
Rumpole began as a BBC teleplay 1975. The television series was produced in Britain by ITV, beginning in 1978. Once you have seen Leo McKern in the role, it’s difficult to read the Rumpole stories without hearing his rich narration. It is true that there is a certain predictability to the Rumpole stories, but they are no less enjoyable for that, and there is a certain satisfaction that the neatly tied up yarns bring the reader. Rumpole has not “developed” in more than 30 years of stories, television scripts, and novels, Sir John told an interviewer for the Guardian in 2006. “What keeps him going is that he can comment on whatever’s going on at the time.”
Mr. Mortimer continued to churn out the Rumpole adventures for many years, coming up with titles including Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (2006), in which Rumpole undertakes to defend a suspect being held under Britain’s antiterrorism laws, and Mr. Mortimer undertakes to attack the broad-brush laws that he believes imperil human rights. Mr. Mortimer also adapted Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for television, years after he became enthralled with the book as a young man. Somehow, despite the demands of his chosen careers, a “schizoid business of being a writer who had barristering as a day job”, Mr. Mortimer also found time to pursue his lifelong interest in women, do some writing for newspapers, and keep up the garden nurtured by his father, whose outsized shadow remained with him all his life. Clifford Mortimer, a man who was known for being angry and verbally abusive, was a barrister, who specialized in divorce petitions and wills. He lost his sight when John Mortimer was a boy, but the blindness was never discussed or acknowledged, and the father carried on much as he had before. His wife would accompany him to court, reading his legal briefs aloud en route so he could keep up on his cases, often treating fellow commuters on the train to detailed accusations of intimate marital infractions.
Mr. Mortimer brought his father and their relationship to the stage in A Voyage Round My Father, which eventually was produced as a television movie in 1981, filmed at the family home, Turville Heath Cottage, near Henley on Thames, where Mr. Mortimer grew up. Laurence Olivier played Clifford Mortimer, re-enacting his death in the same bed where the father died.
Mr. Mortimer followed his father into the law, eventually taking over his law practice. After trying his hand at novels, writing in the morning before court, he turned to radio scripts and in 1957 had a first success, The Dock Brief. Years after its debut on BBC radio, it was produced on stage.
Mr. Mortimer took a turn down the path of criminal law, defending generations of criminals. He became a Queen’s Counsel, just in time to tackle some of the civil rights cases that arose in Britain the 1960’s, all the while writing fiction, non-fiction, drama and comedy.
His memoirs, including Clinging to the Wreckage (1982), Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life (1994), drop dozens names of the theater and movie people he spent time with. There are trays upon trays of cocktails in his stories, and interviews late in his life note the presence of what was described in one as a “comfortably large Guinness that he is drinking for his health even though it is still a long time until lunch".
John Clifford Mortimer was born in London or Hampstead in 1923— he has attested to both— to Clifford and Kathleen May Smith Mortimer. He attended Brasenose College, Oxford and in 1949 he married Penelope Fletcher, a writer, who came to the marriage with three children. They had two children, Sally and Jeremy, and divorced. Mr. Mortimer later married Penelope Gollop, or 'Penny the Second', as he has referred to her. Their children are Rosamond and Emily.
A heretofore-unknown son, Ross Bentley, born of a liaison with Wendy Craig, an actress, surfaced when Mr. Mortimer was in his 70s, and the author proclaimed himself delighted to have welcomed the son and new grandchildren to the family. The existence of Ross Bentley came out in The Devil’s Advocate, an unauthorized biography by Graham Lord which asserted that Sir John had known about the son all along. He denied this. An authorized biography, A Voyage Round John Mortimer by Valerie Grove, was published in 2007.
Mr. Mortimer came to be known in the 1960s as a defender of free speech and human rights for taking up cases that he said were “alleged to be testing the frontiers of tolerance.” He took part in the appeal by the publishers of the novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby Jr., a book deemed unacceptable under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and The Romans in Britain, a play. He also appeared on the behalf of the London edition of Oz magazine, which produced a “school kids” edition written and illustrated by student readers that included, among other items that offended the censors, the head of the children’s character Rupert Bear grafted atop a body drawn by Robert Crumb, depicting Rupert in a state of sexual excitement.
Among his cases were a successful defense of the Sex Pistols, whose album, Never Mind the Bollocks was held to have an obscene title. Mr. Mortimer wrote that he found a clergyman-lexicographer who said “the word bollocks might well have been used to describe the rigging of an 18th century man-of-war.” The magistrates agreed this was possible, he wrote, “and the record was then inflicted on the public".
“Doing these cases,” he wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.” In addition, Mr. Mortimer went to Nigeria to help in the defense of the playwright and poet Wole Soyinka on a criminal charge.
In Murderers and Other Friends, one of his memoirs, Mr. Mortimer recounts an interview for a radio program in which the interviewer handed him the script of his own obituary, suggesting it might be “great fun” if he read it aloud for listeners. He refused. But he devoted a great deal of thought to death and dying.
He wrote of— and frequently discussed— the indignities old age visits upon humans: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in places like airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user a child’s-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests. “Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls,” he wrote in The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully in 2000. “The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn’t ready to appear ridiculous.”
In an interview with The Express of London in 2006, Mr. Mortimer said he had no intention of giving up writing. “I shall continue writing until I drop,” he told the interviewer. And he did.

Rico says he has the same intention, and hopes to succeed as well as Mr. Mortimer did, both as a writer and in writing into old age...