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  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670919376
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $48.00

Forever Rumpole

The Best of the Rumpole Stories





The best of the Rumpole stories, in one bumper volume

Over a period of thirty years, beginning in the late 1970s, John Mortimer wrote around eighty Rumpole stories (as well as four Rumpole novels). During that period, the world changed dramatically but the old boy remained the same throughout: committed to defending the apparently indefensible, trusting of a jury, scornful of the law's pomposities. He is truly one of the immortal comic characters in English fiction, alongside Mr Pickwick and Bertie Wooster.

Forever Rumpole offers the perfect introduction for anyone lucky enough to be coming to Rumpole for the first time. It contains seven stories chosen by the author himself in 1993 as his favourites to that point, together with a further seven from the later period. It also contains a fragment of a Rumpole novel the author had just started when he died. With an introduction by fellow-lawyer Ann Mallalieu, a close friend of Sir John, Forever Rumpole offers the very best of Horace Rumpole.

  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670919376
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $48.00

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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