Rumpole of the Bailey, one of the best known and loved lawyers of British history does it again with this funny tale of daily life. Being forced into Retirement without knowing it, by his wife "She who must be obeyed" Hilda, and his son. It seems that everybody knows it but him!

Another enjoyable installment in this series. This one has the added feature of a story from "She Who Must Be Obeyed"'s perspective, aptly titled "Hilda's Story" and relating a case where Hilda susses out the solution even before Rumpole. Other installments include "Little Boy Lost," about an alleged kidnapping with a remarkably unsympathetic defendant and "Rumpole and the Angel of Death," where Rumpole has to defend a doctor accused of committing murder in the guise of euthanasia. Ever entertaining, with marvelous turns of phrase, and splendidly read by Patrick Tull and (with the one story) Susan Tanner.

Guthrie Featherstone, a red judge and former member of Rumpole's chambers, acquires a case of tennis elbow and visits a massage parlor for some deep rubbing therapy. Massages aren't the only thing sold at the parlor, but Featherstone is oblivious to the other goings on. He gets only a massage and then pays with a credit card.

When Rumpole undertakes to defend the owner of a chain of massage parlors/bawdy houses, he learns of Featherstone's visit. Featherstone learns the true nature of the place he visited, and Rumpole contrives to get Featherstone selected as the judge to hear the bawdy house case. Featherstone has visions of disgrace and divorce dancing in his head, and Rumpole does nothing to allay his fears. The denouement is quite entertaining.

Leo McKern does a rousing good job of reading the text of the short story.

John Mortimer wrote the Rumpole screenplays for Leo McKern, who portrays the portly barrister on the BBC TV series. On this audiotape, McKern reads two short stories from "Rumpole's Last Case." The chosen stories are "Rumpole and the Blind Tasting" and "Rumpole and the Old, Old Story."

In "Blind Tasting" Rumpole gets invited to an elegant blind tasting. As I understand it from the story, a blind tasting is a gathering at which a bunch of egotists gather to taste wine, guess what type the wine is, and otherwise attempt to impress each other with their erudition and sophistication. Being used to nothing better that Chateau Thames Embankment, Rumpole becomes an enthusiastic but unorthodox participant in the tasting. The tasting leads to a case, and the case leads Rumpole to uncover some lowbrow goings-on in the highbrow world of fine wines.

In "The Old, Old Story," Rumpole embarrasses She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. She harasses Rumpole, and Rumpole leaves home. While the course of love runs not so true at Casa Rumpole, Horace gets an out-of-town case defending the odd man out in a lover's triangle. Things are looking rather bleak for the client, and Rumpole is not encouraged when he enters court for the first day of the trial and finds She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed sitting on the bench as a guest of the presiding judge. With his wife's help, Rumpole finds his way through to a fabulous victory, and nobody lives happily ever after.

Leo McKern was born to play Rumpole on the stage, and he gives it his all as he reads the stories, but an audiotaped reading is not the best way to enjoy any form of literature. If it is impossible to read the stories or watch McKern on video, this tape will slake your thirst for Rumpole.

Once I tuned into the voice and adjusted the knobs on the tape player, this proved to be an excellent choice for in-the-car reading. The stories are reasonably short (one cassette each, as a rule) and quite entertaining. There's not much of the left-wing propaganda that comes out in the television series. This is just Rumpole using his ingenuity and accumulated experience to deal with an assortment of cases, from the woman accused of pushing her husband off their yacht to the policeman accused of taking bribes. There's even a case that Rumpole regrets winning when he realizes his client is guilty after all!

Good stuff, and I hope to listen to numerous additional tapes like this one.

The Amazon.com synopsis does not do justice to this book by wonderful writer John Mortimer. If you have been to Tuscany, or merely wish you had, the details of the Tuscan landscape and the villa La Felicita make you drool with envy. The family members are all vividly characterized - you can only wonder how the grandfather has avoided being the victim of a homicide during his 77 years, You are halfway through the novel before you realize that although you sympathize with Molly, the heroine, you don't particularily like her - and why is that, I wonder? Sorry to have finished the book- it will be difficult to find another novel which so neatly captures the Ex-Patriate British scene in Italy - and a mystery to boot!

Despite the fact that I generally enjoy comic British writing, and have on occasion watched the TV version of Rumpole with amusement, I found this collection of short Rumpole stories rather tedious. Having never read any of the extensive Rumpole series, I figured this collection of six stories would be a good place to test the waters. What I found was a series of predictable tales, populated by thin characters that offer little variety in their foibles from story to story. And while you could make the same case for P.G. Wodehouse's creations, the difference is that he had the Midas touch when it came to language and wit, whereas Mortimer's prose is generally uninspired. After a while, the curmudgeonly grumblings of Rumpole get rather old, as does the sharp tongue of his wife (She Who Must Be Obeyed), the pathetic philandering Erskine Brown, and the doddering foolishness of Uncle Tom. While the cut and thrust of the courtroom scenes do impart a sense of vigor and wit to the proceedings, they are the only bright lights in what are otherwise remarkably dull and predictable stories. Perhaps lawyers find Mortimer's prose remarkable, I, on the other hand, do not.

This is a really funny story, well told by Leo McKern, who IS Rumpole. (There are other Rumpole readers, but his is the best, even if you never saw his tv version) For Rumpole of the Bailey fans, you have all the usual cast, She Who Must Be Obeyed, Erskine Brown cheating on Portia, Uncle Tom, and Soapy Sam Ballard, head of Chambers. Lots of fun and really a pleasure to listen to. Couldn't even tell it was abridged. I'm a lawyer and I listen to mine evey fun months to get recharged

I cannot give a review of the entire book, as I have only read one of the short stories contained in it. I read the one entitled, "Rumpole of the Younger Generation." I felt like I was wasting my time, because all I was reading was a synopsis of a former triumph of this man. The case might have been exciting, but the author did not play fair, and the guilty party was obvious. I did not like this story very much, and can only hope that the rest of them are better than this one was.

The inaugural book in the Rumpole saga presents one of the great characters of British crime fiction. It's Holmes with humor (excuse me; humour), Bertie Wooster with brains. A collection of short stories, all revolve around Horace Rumpole, a self-described "Old Bailey hack". He practices (almost) exclusively as a defense barrister, specializing in hopeless causes, spouting poetry and cigar ash with equal gusto. The book provides the background for the accompanying series on "PBS", and it is at least as much a credit to Leo McKern's portrayal of Horace Rumpole as it is to author John Mortimer's skill that the stories--now contained in three massive omnibuses--have such deep appeal.

I read a little of this book and then found that I just didn't want to waste my time reading any more. And it sounded so interesting in the NYTimes review! I feel this book is pure garbage. He seems to be under the impression that every thought and memory which flits through his head is of great value. Just as power corrupts, fame insufflates the ego - unless you have the supreme wisdom to resist it. I read halfway thru another book called something like 'the delights of aging'. It was just as disappointing. And I'm aging. Are there any books which genuinely make you believe aging isn't as bad as it feels? Like that music isn't as bad as it sounds? Maybe self-delusion is the only way to joyfully tolerate the whips and scorns. Maybe that's Mortimer's real message here - message by example.

John Mortimer is a wonderful English author. My husband is a great fan of his work. I read of this book this summer in England and when I returned home I rushed to buy it.
My husband hated it! He said he had already read most of the stories in other works. The author also gives his opinion on the wonderful Labor Party in England. His mother should have taught him not to discuss politics in polite society.
It is really a dreadful book. Only useful as a door stop on a windy day.

Everybody and their brother and sister, which includes Gertrude Stein, of course, seems to be penning memoirs. A caveat to the form practiced at its best: The memoir of a man nearly eighty should be read quickly. In part to raise demand - if the recounting is revisited in prose artfully and summons forth a brilliant life - for a return engagement of cottage industriousness from the un-retiring pensioner, and chiefly because the best memoirs offer frothy recollections and musings which naturally propel alacrity.

In the case of "The Summer of a Dormouse" by John Mortimer, the episodic visits taken around the world and within the circle of the celebrated novelist, Queen's Counsel, playwright, knight (bearing a unique coat of arms), and "champagne socialist" end all too soon. We need some levity to dispel the infirmities of old age, septuagenarian John Mortimer advises.

The adapter of "Brideshead Revisited," Mortimer compares his life to scriptwriting's pace, "scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end." And sped-up indeed it is for Mortimer. He plays the strolling scribe and player, from the "Chiantishire" to San Francisco and Watford to Antibes, respectively. He loosely adapts Franco Zeffirelli's life in "Tea with Mussolini" and Laurie Lee's (with whom he worked in government films during WWII) "Cider with Rosie"; for the former he is whisked off to Cinecitta - enclave of la dolce vita for the film industry set.

Back in London, Sir John chairs the Royal Court Theatre's - presenter of George Bernard Shaw and John Osborne - rebuilding. Despite stupefying behind the scrim skirmishes, he soldiers on through meetings with overly sensitive playwrights of the cut-off-your-nose-in-spite-your-face variety. Finally, Mortimer's common sense prevails and the theatre gets built. The redoubtable David Hare, none the worse for bygone artistic differences, writes a play for the new stage.

Goaded by a politico hostess to "have a go" at [then] Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, this former barrister uses a lunch encounter to argue the defense of civil liberties and Magna Carta, and he hosts another lunch, a fundraiser on behalf of prison reformation, where a CEO is drilled over the company's annual report by a major stockholder--a convict--at the prison's groaning board. He also dispatches his opinion to the newspaper on the crisis in farming, easily deducible from the vantage point of his countryside home that is roundly ignored by Tony Blair's New Labour government. In fact, Mortimer questions whether "the promised land of a Labour Britain" looks or acts any different from its Conservative Party predecessor.

Mortimer recalls, from his youth, the Shakespearean passages his father quoted and conjures the blinded in middle age, intrepid, yet reliant for personal matters such as daily dressing on his wife (Mortimer's own Shavian, strong-willed mother), barrister that mirrors Mortimer's own age-related frailties - from use of a wheelchair to not being able to put on socks anymore - to wistful effect. A tinge is likewise evoked during a visit to an old artist friend with late-stage Alzheimer's who has, nevertheless, recapitulated a radiant painting he had done twenty years earlier, "this was only an echo, something left stranded on the beach after the sea had retreated."

Famed as Mortimer is for his Rumpole of the Bailey series, he acknowledges that when filling up his writing pads he draws more interest from failure than success. Coincidence, perhaps fate, abounds in his lifetime, and he attends the funeral of his first wife, Penelope, with his wife, Penny (for Penelope), surrounded by children of the first marriage and his teenaged daughter from the later union. The couple of years chronicled in this memoir include an eclectic cast of friends and colleagues: Muriel Spark, Neil Kinnock, Stephen Daldry, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness, Lord Richard Attenborough, Joss Ackland, and twins, Vicky and Jackie, who married Deep Purple band members. When an elegiac tone sets in, as birthdays come and friends die, Mortimer says the "cure is to be found among the living..." And so it is.

In the interim between another trip down memory's lane, once past the surfeit of this writer's well-lived life is consumed, the reader can go back to John Mortimer's catalogue of autobiography (now in three published books), novels, and plays. Then, with delight still at the fingertips, perhaps the champagne-tippling dormouse will serve up yet another rich and textured morsel from a gracious and blessedly prolonged summer for Sir John Mortimer, Esquire.

I loved Paradise Postponed. Even the name Leslie Titmuss makes me smile. Leslie reappears here, but the attention focuses on a wimpy candidate whom it's hard to root for. All seemed a bit tired, even the humor.