An extremely prolific and versatile writer--accomplished playwright, scriptwriter, and memoirist as well as fiction writer--John Mortimer is also well known as a barrister. Combining his interests in writing and the law, he created the character Rumpole of the Bailey--featured initially in a television series, then in a series of books--for whom he is likely to be best remembered. But he is also the author of several novels that are not about Rumpole.

John Clifford Mortimer was born on 21 April 1923, the only child of a former art teacher, Kathleen May Smith Mortimer, and a successful divorce lawyer, Clifford Mortimer. His father, who went blind when John Mortimer was a boy but continued to practice law, was the chief inspiration for his son--both in Mortimer's life, as he went into his father's profession, and in Mortimer's imagination, as he used his father as the model for his best-known fictional character...