Rumpole Rests His Case
How much longer will readers be treated to new stories featuring  irreverent and irascible London barrister Horace Rumpole? The character was  created for British television in the 1970s by John Mortimer, who once said that  he'd continue writing Rumpole tales only so long as actor Leo Kern could portray  him on the tube. If Kern's death in July 2002 means thatRumpole Rests His  Caseis the beginning of the end, then at least this series concludes on a  high and humorous note.The seven yarns collected here find the rumpled Rumpole defending his usual  assortment of eccentric clients, while also fending off antismoking zealots,  interior designers with a taste for lava lamps, and his domineering wife, Hilda  ("known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed"). One story teams the elderly  advocate with an elusive Afghan doctor who was smuggled into the U.K. in a crate  of mango chutney, and now seeks to become a legal resident. In another, Rumpole  investigates an assault, apparently committed by an unmanageable teenager with a  poetic streak, while a third case has the barrister working for a hypocritical  right-wing politician who, after first seducing away the wife of one of  Rumpole's colleagues, is accused of a drug offense. Cleverest of all, though, is  the title tale, in which a hospital-confined Rumpole builds the defense for one  of his roommates, a "reformed" thief with an unlikely connection to the aged  major who shot him during a residential break-in. With his own unreformed taste  for claret and cheroots, Rumpole persists in being an entertaining,  old-fashioned thorn in the silk-covered side of Britain's judicial system. Could  somebody please tell Mortimer that it's too soon for this character to hang up  his wig?--J. Kingston Pierce