Forever Rumpole: The Best of the Rumpole Stories - Hardcover

Forever Rumpole - a hilarious new selection of the very best Rumpole stories by John Mortimer

Horace Rumpole lives alongside Mr Pickwick and Bertie Wooster as one of the immortal comic characters in English fiction. With his curmudgeonly wit, his literary allusions, his disdain for personal ambition and his lack of pomposity, he has, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, 'ascended to the pantheon of literary immortals'.

Forever Rumpole contains seven stories originally chosen by the author himself as his favourites, together with a further seven from the later period and the opening chapters of a Rumpole novel that Sir John was working on when he died in 2009. The book also includes a fascinating introduction by Ann Mallalieu, fellow lawyer and for many years Sir John's colleague in practice.

'Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal' P. D James, Mail on Sunday

'I thank heaven for small mercies. The first of these is Rumpole' Clive James, Observer
Sir John Mortimer was a barrister, playwright and novelist. His fictional trilogy about the inexorable rise of an ambitious Tory MP in the Thatcher years (Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets) has recently been republished in Penguin Classics, together with Clinging to the Wreckage and his play A Voyage round My Father. His most famous creation was the barrister Horace Rumpole, who featured in four novels and around eighty short stories. His books in Penguin include: The Anti-social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole; The Collected Stories of Rumpole; The First Rumpole Omnibus; Rumpole and the Angel of Death; Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders; Rumpole and the Primrose Path; Rumpole and the Reign of Terror; Rumpole and the Younger Generation; Rumpole at Christmas; Rumpole Rests His Case; The Second Rumpole Omnibus; Forever Rumpole; In Other Words; Quite Honestly and Summer's Lease.

'I thank heaven for small mercies. The first of these is Rumpole' Clive James, Observer

'Rumpole is worthy to join the great gallery of English oddballs ranging from Pickwick to Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves and Bertie Wooster' Sunday Times

'Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal' P. D James, Mail on Sunday

'Mortimer has created one of the legendary fictional detectives ... a barrister [who's] as much a detective as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot' Boston Globe

'Mortimer's divine hero is one of the few fictional immortals of our time' The Times

'In the fluidy and panache of his prose, his combination of high intelligence and low foolery, John Mortimer is worthy of comparison to P. G. Wodehouse' New York Times Book Review

'A fine comic creation. A figure who represents something important: the defence of liberty against the arrogance of power' Scotsman