Rumpole Rests His Case

All in all however an absolute treat .


Members of the Jury...   November 8, 2001
 24 out of 26 found this review helpful

The most recent entry in John Mortimer's long-running "Rumpole of the Bailey" series features seven short stories. There's a slightly elegiac tone this time around--especially in the title story, which begins with Rumpole suffering a heart attack in court and ends on a note of resigned uncertainty. Indeed, Mortimer uses the running conflicts between youth and age, past and present, as the unifying themes in this collection: older characters conspire against younger ones, long-lost figures from days of youth come back to visit, and buried crimes from decades past return to light. Most amusingly, Samuel "Soapy Sam" Ballard turns out to have had a most unexpected previous life; Rumpole's attempt to blackmail him with it actually winds up liberating him just a wee bit.

As always, the stories take on topical issues: asylum seekers, e-mail stalking, multiculturalism, the hang-'em high crowd, shooting in self-defense ("Rumpole Rests His Case" seems rather indebted to a controversial real-life case), and anti-smoking activists. And as always, Rumpole comes out firmly on the side of the underdog--and on the side of universal justice. ("Rumpole and the Asylum Seekers" takes a good thwack at cultural relativism.)

Mortimer has not varied his formula here. Each story has a criminal case and a "private life" parallel, and the solution to one generally dovetails with the solution to the other. Unfortunately, the collection gets off to a rather bad start with the weak "Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces," in which the parallels never come together adequately; as a result, the story reads like the equivalent of a run-on sentence. After that, however, things improve markedly, with some bona fide laugh-out-loud moments. This is not the best of the Rumpole collections, but reading it is certainly an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.