Remembering the exemplary life of British author and barrister Sir John Mortimer

The death at 85 of Sir John Mortimer, the barrister, author, playwright and quintessential Englishman, will sadden readers hoping for yet another comic novel about Horace Rumpole, the stubborn defence lawyer who prowls the Old Bailey inconveniencing everyone but his hapless clients.

But Mortimer wrote 20 Rumpole of the Bailey novels in total, a heartening number for any fan of the books and the classic TV series starring Leo McKern. He also wrote 12 other novels, two collections of eccentric newspaper journalism, three volumes of stylishly written autobiography and 44 plays.

Mortimer was nothing if not prolific, but kept his publishers happy by producing his books at a level of quality that few other writers could maintain.

Whether it was for his talent or his self-deprecation and gentle, funny manner, Mortimer was greatly loved by his countrymen, a sort of politicized Alan Bennett type, but with a fondness for women. It led to two lengthy marriages and many children — including a 42-year-old illegitimate son, previously unheard of, who introduced himself when Mortimer was an old man. Mortimer was unfazed.

Mortimer was born in 1923 and grew up in Turville Heath, the comfortable, beautifully gardened Oxfordshire home he lived in until his death. He was the son of barrister Clifford Mortimer and his long-suffering wife, Kathleen, and his love of the English language was born of reading Shakespeare to his father, who was blind. He was an only child who was comfortable with solitude — something, he says, that sustained him later as a writer.

As a boy, Mortimer was schooled at Harrow, which, as he wrote later, made little impression beyond that of a small, brutal classmate named Tainton, who was famed for his achievements at masturbation. He was discovered at this task by the school chaplain, who was deeply shocked.

"Really, my boy, you should save that up till you are married."

"Oh I'm doing that, sir," Tainton said enthusiastically. "I've already got several jam jars full."

As a teenager, Mortimer had dreams of writing for film, a notion quashed by his father, who told him that writers hang around the house all day annoying their wives, "brewing tea and stumped for words." He advised a legal career and Mortimer duly went to Oxford to learn the trade.

He was called to the bar in 1948 and married Penelope, a glamorous older woman with four children by various fathers. It was a parlous time. They were desperately short of money, and Mortimer hunted down poorly paying divorce cases and small-time criminal cases while attempting to write radio plays on the side.

He then became a playwright and a novelist, using his legal experience as a background for literature that approached its characters with compassion and an unflinching eye. Mortimer had a talent for anecdote — not the kind that goes on forever, but relies on dialogue, one line summing up a life.

He did much of his greatest work in later life, when most people would feel entitled to call themselves senior citizens and leave it at that.

He cheerfully attributed his long life to a glass of champagne every morning.

"When I mentioned that on a radio show once, I was asked if I had taken counselling for it," he told the Times of London.

He was said to be the epitome of a champagne socialist, but never apologized for being one and was a great enjoyer of life. "There is an assumption that only the poor should be allowed to complain on behalf of the poor. This is a convenient belief for those in power as it may silence eloquent voices of criticism."

Mortimer liked his food and grew fat on it, saying, "I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward."

Thanks to a sense-memory of the smell of boarding school locker-rooms, exercise appalled him and he never tested its merits. He defended fox hunting, although he would have shuddered at the idea of being found atop a horse (doubtless the horse would have complained, too), and he was bemused by animal rights activists who put envelopes of excrement through his front door mailbox to express their unhappiness with his only un-leftish cause.

But Mortimer spent his life defending what he called the golden thread that runs through British justice — the presumption of innocence — and to the end he deplored a so-called Labour government destroying the Magna Carta in an overreaction to terrorism. He opposed censorship, and his early-'70s courtroom work helped end the ancient practice of the Lord Chamberlain being allowed to ferret through scripts and remove offensive wording from stage plays. In 1968, he argued the appeal in the Last Exit to Brooklyn case, ending censorship of the written word on the grounds of obscenity.

"I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws," he said. "They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print."

It was that kind of remark that annoyed conservatives, another being his uncontradictable statement that criminals were the mainstay of the justice system. Without them, the whole thing would collapse; judges, prosecutors and police would do well to remember this, he said.

That said, Mortimer preferred to take his glasses off as he screened films with titles like Double Toilet Orgy, which, he claimed, reduced the evidence "to a comfortable and pinkish blur." It was this contrariness, this deliberate unworldliness, combined with a ferocious belief in "defending the indefensible," (as his legal colleague Geoffrey Robertson put it) that kept Mortimer in the public eye.

In the Thatcher years, he wrote the Rapstone novels, portraying the rabid, right-wing, "self-basting" prig Leslie Titmuss as a man who wrung the heart and the die-hard lefties in Opposition as sad prisoners of ideology. In real life, he abandoned the Labour Party as it abandoned him, and his last vote, in 2005, was for the Liberal Democrats, fated as always to lose.

When Mortimer edited The Oxford Book of Villains in 1992, I interviewed him over a lavish lunch in a Toronto restaurant. Despite the running gag of Rumpole drinking plonk called Chateau Thames Embankment, Mortimer's publisher encouraged him to order an expensive and hard-to-find Valpolicella.

"It's very strong," he warned me politely.

"Oh good," I said, and he noticeably warmed.

I asked Mortimer about a critic who accused him of being lightweight, of "covering pain with jokes." He was mystified, saying that covering pain with jokes was the only possible attitude to life. We had two bottles of wine, which had me staggering out of the restaurant, while the elderly Mortimer marched off intact to buy a leather Roots jacket for his latest child.

After Mortimer's first marriage ended in rancour (about which they both wrote novels — hers angry, his blithe), he married another Penelope, known affectionately as Penny II, mother of Rosie and Emily. The latter is an actress, best known for playing Alec Baldwin's ultra-thin girlfriend with "avian bone syndrome" in 30 Rock.

"Life seems to have been full of verdicts," Mortimer wrote in Clinging to the Wreckage, the first volume of his autobiography, not referring merely to his legal career. In his case, it was a verdict of close to a century of great happiness overall, with attendant jokes.

Heather Mallick is a columnist for CBCNews.ca and the author of the essay collection Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life. She lives in Toronto.