Drama:
The Dock Brief, pr. 1957 (radio play and televised), pr. 1958 (staged; one act)
I Spy, pr. 1957 (radio play), pr. 1958 (televised), pr. 1959 (staged)
Call Me a Liar, pr. 1958 (radio play and televised), pr. 1968 (staged)
What Shall We Tell Caroline?, pr., pb. 1958 (one act)
Lunch Hour, pr., pb. 1960 (one act)
The Wrong Side of the Park, pr., pb. 1960
Lunch Hour, and Other Plays, pb. 1960 (includes Collect Your Hand Baggage, David and Broccoli, and Call Me a Liar)
Collect Your Hand Baggage, pb. 1960 (one act)
Two Stars for Comfort, pr., pb. 1962
A Voyage Round My Father, pr. 1963 (radio play), pr. 1970 (staged)
A Flea in Her Ear, pr. 1966 (adaptation of Georges Feydeau’s play)
The Judge, pr., pb. 1967
Cat Among the Pigeons, pr. 1969 (adaptation of Feydeau’s play)
Come as You Are: Four Short Plays, pr. 1970 (includes Mill Hill, Bermondsey, Gloucester Road, and Marble Arch)
Five Plays, pb. 1970 (includes The Dock Brief, What Shall We Tell Caroline?, I Spy, Lunch Hour, and Collect Your Hand Baggage)
The Captain of Köpenick, pr., pb. 1971 (adaptation of Carl Zuckmayer’s play)
I, Claudius, pr. 1972 (adaptation of Robert Graves’s novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God)
Collaborators, pr., pb. 1973
Heaven and Hell, pr. 1976 (2 one-act plays; The Fear of Heaven and The Prince of Darkness)
The Bells of Hell, pr. 1977 (revision of The Prince of Darkness)
The Lady from Maxim’s, pr., pb. 1977 (adaptation of Feydeau’s play)
John Mortimer’s Casebook, pr. 1982 (includes The Dock Brief, The Prince of Darkness, and Interlude)
Edwin, pr. 1982 (radio play), pr. 1984 (televised)
When That I Was, pr. 1982
Edwin, and Other Plays, pb. 1984
A Little Hotel on the Side, pr. 1984 (adaptation of Feydeau and Maurice Desvalliers’s play)
Three Boulevard Farces, pb. 1985
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, pr. 1994, pb. 1995 (adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel)
Naked Justice, pr., pb. 2001
Long Fiction:
Charade, 1947
Rumming Park, 1948
Answer Yes or No, 1950
Like Men Betrayed, 1953
The Narrowing Stream, 1954
Three Winters, 1956
Paradise Postponed, 1985
Summer’s Lease, 1988
Titmuss Regained, 1990
Dunster, 1992
Under the Hammer, 1994
Felix in the Underworld, 1997
The Sound of Trumpets, 1998
Short Fiction:
Rumpole of the Bailey, 1978
The Trials of Rumpole, 1979
Regina Rumpole, 1981
Rumpole’s Return, 1981
Rumpole and the Golden Thread, 1983
The First Rumpole Omnibus, 1983
The Second Rumpole Omnibus, 1987
Rumpole à la Carte, 1990
Rumpole on Trial, 1992
The Best of Rumpole, 1993
Murder Most Medical, 1995
Rumpole and the Angel of Death, 1995
The Third Rumpole Omnibus, 1997
Rumpole Rests His Case, 2001
Screenplays:
Ferry to Hong Kong, 1959 (with Lewis Gilbert and Vernon Harris)
The Innocents, 1961 (with Truman Capote and William Archibald)
Guns of Darkness, 1962
I Thank a Fool, 1962 (with others)
Lunch Hour, 1962 (adaptation of his play)
The Running Man, 1963
Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1964 (with Penelope Mortimer)
A Flea in Her Ear, 1967 (adaptation of his play)
John and Mary, 1969
Teleplays:
David and Broccoli, 1960
Desmond, 1968
Rumpole of the Bailey, 1975, 1978, 1979
Rumpole’s Return, 1980
Brideshead Revisited, 1981 (adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel)
A Voyage Round My Father, 1982
Paradise Postponed, 1986
Titmuss Regained, 1991
Nonfiction:
No Moaning at the Bar, 1957 (as Geoffrey Lincoln)
With Love and Lizards, 1957 (with Penelope Mortimer)
Clinging to the Wreckage: A Part of Life, 1982
In Character, 1983
Character Parts, 1986
Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life, 1994
The Summer of a Dormouse, 2000
John Clifford Mortimer first attracted attention on the English stage in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s as a writer of one-act and full-length comedies of manners and farces that traced what he called “the tottering course of British middle-class attitudes in decline.” He gained his widest audience, however, on television, notably with an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and with the teleplays he fashioned from his own Rumpole of the Bailey stories, his novels Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained, and his autobiographical play A Voyage Round My Father.
He was the only child of Clifford and Kathleen Mortimer. His father was a barrister who wrote a standard reference work on probate law and who continued to practice long after he went blind. In the play A Voyage Round My Father and in his autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage, Mortimer wrote of his relationship with his quick-tempered father. His experiences from 1937 to 1940 at Harrow School in Middlesex and from 1940 to 1942 at Brasenose College, Oxford, are reflected in the play as well and treated in detail in the autobiography. During this period, he developed his left-wing sympathies, his dislike for the English upper classes, and his generally anti-establishment views, all of which are central to Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained.
Because of his bad eyesight, Mortimer did no military service in World War II; instead he worked as an assistant director and scriptwriter with the Crown Film Units. In 1948 he was called to the bar; he became Queen’s Counsel in 1966 and Master of the Bench, Inner Temple, London, in 1975. Until 1983 he practiced law while writing novels, film scripts, plays, and journalistic pieces. Though much of his early legal work involved divorce litigation, he later became a leading figure in freedom of speech and press cases; partly through his efforts, for example, the Lord Chamberlain’s stage censorship powers were abolished in 1968, and in 1970 he successfully defended Oz magazine against charges of pornography. He married Penelope Fletcher (a novelist known first as Penelope Dimont and then as Penelope Mortimer) in 1949. After their divorce in 1972, he married Penelope Gollop.
Perhaps because of his early success with radio dramas, Mortimer’s first works for the theater were one-act plays, and he continued to write them into the 1980’s, demonstrating both their commercial and artistic viability. Though his short farces such as Mill Hill and Marble Arch are mere whimsies, The Dock Brief is a Chekhovian one-act play of enduring merit that he originally wrote for radio and then adapted for the stage in 1958. According to Mortimer, in The Dock Brief he “wanted to say something about the lawyer’s almost pathetic dependence on the criminal classes, without whom he would be unemployed.” The play also dramatizes his belief that comic drama should be “on the side of the lonely, the neglected, the unsuccessful” and “against established rules and . . . the imposing of an arbitrary code of behaviour upon individual and unpredictable human beings.” In a 1982 revival, The Dock Brief was part of a trilogy (with The Prince of Darkness and Interlude) that criticizes three social pillars: the church, medicine, and the law.
The law is also present in such later plays as Two Stars for Comfort and The Judge, and is represented as an oppressive force in both. It is important, too, in A Voyage Round My Father, Mortimer’s best and most popular work for the stage. In this autobiographical play, he fictionalizes the forces that shaped his life for more than twenty years: teachers, women, wartime experiences, friends, and–most important–his father.
Though active primarily as a dramatist for a quarter of a century, Mortimer began as a novelist, writing six novels between 1947 and 1956. The first of them is Charade, which was reissued in 1986. Set during World War II, the novel features a young man who is with a film unit that is making an army training documentary. The witty narrative develops into a mystery when a crew member dies in what may or may not be an accident. Mystery and detection motifs also are present in Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained, and Summer’s Lease, novels that are also social commentaries in the manner of Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Trollope, and Evelyn Waugh, all of whom Mortimer has acknowledged as influences. In Paradise Postponed, for example, Mortimer focuses upon one family during the four decades after World War II, developing through flashbacks and dramatic set pieces a satirical narrative in which wit tempers a sometimes poignant chronicle of malaise. Titmuss Regained, its sequel, continues the story of Leslie Titmuss, who epitomizes what Mortimer believed was wrong with Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: a lack of moral purpose and of compassion for the poor. In Summer’s Lease, whose style and form recall the early novels, an English family rents a villa and becomes involved in strange circumstances surrounding the absent owner. The novel Dunster also is basically a mystery, which concludes with its hero destroying evidence of someone’s war crime. Suppression of a guilty past and forgiveness of sinners (except for Leslie Titmuss) are recurring Mortimer themes.
In the 1980’s, Mortimer stopped writing original stage works, though he continued to do translations and adaptations, including A Little Hotel on the Side, a Feydeau farce; the opera Die Fledermaus; and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. He also published collections of his newspaper interviews with public figures–In Character and Character Parts–and two autobiographical volumes, Clinging to the Wreckage: A Part of Life and Murderers and Other Friends. From the mid-1970’s to the 1990’s, he wrote more than fifty witty detective stories, which he adapted for television, about barrister Horace Rumpole, an iconoclast and nonconformist who often struggles on behalf of kindred souls. Rumpole’s international popularity has come to rival that of Sherlock Holmes. Mortimer died at home in Oxfordshire, England on January 16, 2009. He was 85.
Mortimer, in almost all of his work, reflects a Dickensian humanism, the sense that one should feel sorry for the less fortunate. His strong social conscience and concern with the lack of communication among people link him to other English playwrights who emerged in the 1950’s; yet whereas their work deals with the rising working class, he focused upon the fading middle class, and unlike Harold Pinter and N. F. Simpson, Mortimer was a traditionalist in terms of form. Nevertheless, he produced at least one major achievement for the stage, A Voyage Round My Father, which has been compared to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944). He also brought English stage farce and television drama to new creative heights, and among his novels, Paradise Postponed is a memorable social chronicle in the manner of the grand nineteenth century novel. A painting in the National Portrait Gallery in London is official recognition of his achievements as an important twentieth century British literary and cultural figure.