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  • Published: 28 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141964973
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

Forever Rumpole

The Best of the Rumpole Stories





A new selection of fourteen of the best Rumpole stories spanning thirty years in the life of one of our greatest comic creations

Horace Rumpole lives alongside Sherlock Holmes, Pickwick and Jeeves as one of the immortal characters of English fiction. With his curmudgeonly wit, his literary allusions, his disdain for personal ambition and his lack of pomposity, he has, according to the Daily Telegraph, 'ascended to the pantheon of literary immortals'.
Over a period of thirty years, John Mortimer wrote almost eighty Rumpole stories. The world changed gradually and Rumpole found himself defending hunt-saboteurs and alleged Islamic terrorists, but the old boy himself remained the same: committed to defending the apparently indefensible, trusting of the good sense of a jury, scornful of the law's pomposities - values he carried with him wherever he practised, whether a murder at the Bailey or a bit of assault at the Uxbridge Magistrates Court. And when the day was over, it was a quick nip into Pommeroy's for a glass or two of Chateau Thames Embankment before the tube home to She Who Must Be Obeyed in Foxbury Mansions.
The best of Rumpole is represented in this new selection of fourteen stories, the first published in 1978, the last in 2004. And as an added bonus, the book ends with the fragment of a new Rumpole novel Sir John was working on when he died in January 2009.

  • Published: 28 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141964973
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

About the author

John Mortimer

John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising barrister. During the war he worked with the Crown Film Unit and published a number of novels, before turning to theatre. He has written many film scripts, and plays both for radio and television, including A Voyage Round My Father, the Rumpole plays, which won him the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.He has written four volumes of autobiography, including Clinging to the Wreckage and Where There's a Will (2003). His novels include the Leslie Titmuss trilogy, about the rise of an ambitious Tory MP: Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets, and the acclaimed comic novel, Quite Honestly (2005). He has also published numerous books featuring his best-loved creation Horace Rumpole, including Rumpole and the Primrose Path (2002) and Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (2004). All these books are available in Penguin.He lives in what was once his father's house in the Chilterns. He has received a knighthood for his services to the arts. His authorized biography, written by Valerie Grove, will be published by Viking in Spring 2007.

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