Culture

In memoriam, John Mortimer

January 19, 2009
article header image

In a web-exclusive article for Prospect this week, journalist Colin Murphy looks back on a meeting in 2005 with John Mortimer, who died at the age of 85 last Friday. Mortimer—who for many years combined his literary career (most famously as the creator of fiction's most renowned and redoubtable barrister, Rumpole of the Bailey) with an equally dazzling professional and social life—was one of those great Englishmen who lived long enough to become their own monument. Despite his status as a living classic, however, he never ossified or stopped working: his final novels only appeared in 2006 and 2007 and dealt, respectively, with the war on terror and that great New Labour innovation, the Asbo. As Murphy notes, until the end his creed was the one so ably expressed by Noel Coward: "I believe in life before death." And if this entailed living hard, fast and as well as possible—by the standards of an English gentlemen—so much the better.