Own Legal Career Imbued Author's 'Rumpole' Series

John Mortimer, a British lawyer and writer who created the character Horace Rumpole, a disheveled barrister memorably featured in the popular television series "Rumpole of the Bailey," died Jan. 16 at his home in Oxfordshire, England, at age 85. The cause of death was not reported.

Mr. Mortimer, the author of more than 30 works of fiction and dozens of plays, was best known in the United States for the "Rumpole" series, which starred Leo McKern as the unkempt defense attorney who had a cast of louts as clients.

The comic series was based largely on Mr. Mortimer's experiences as one of Britain's leading courtroom advocates and defenders of civil rights and free speech. Rumpole's motto of "Never plead guilty!" was, in fact, Mr. Mortimer's own.

Referring to his dual career in his 1982 autobiography, "Clinging to the Wreckage," Mr. Mortimer claimed "with no particular vanity" to be "the best playwright ever to have defended a murderer at the Central Criminal Court."

He published his first novel in 1947, a year before he joined the British bar, and was armed with a ready wit, whether in the courtroom or at the typewriter.

Describing his place in literature to the New York Times in 1995, he said, "I straddle the chasm between [thriller writer] Jeffrey Archer and Salman Rushdie."

Beginning in the 1950s, Mr. Mortimer wrote dozens of plays and TV scripts. He was credited with writing the screenplay for the acclaimed 1981 British TV miniseries of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited." He also adapted several Graham Greene stories for British television and wrote a screenplay based on John Fowles's novel "The Ebony Tower" for a 1984 TV film starring Laurence Olivier.

Mr. Mortimer's autobiographical play, "A Voyage Round My Father," starring Alec Guinness, was a theatrical hit in London in the early 1970s and was made into a 1982 film with Olivier playing Mr. Mortimer's father, an imposingly gruff lawyer.

Nonetheless, Mr. Mortimer's greatest creation was the grizzled and bemused Rumpole, who first appeared in a 1975 television play. He wore an ill-fitting barrister's wig, trailed cigar smoke and ashes, and could always be found tippling cheap claret in Pommeroy's Wine Bar. With accused killers, burglars, prostitutes, pornographers and schemers of every stripe as his clients, Rumpole triumphed in the most hopeless legal cases.

He outfoxed his opponents in the courtroom, but at home he was constantly browbeaten by his formidable wife, Hilda, better known as "She Who Must Be Obeyed."

"Rumpole has customarily been described as a great comic creation," lawyer and critic Marcel Berlins wrote in London's Sunday Times. "He deserves to lose the limiting adjective, comic. He is simply one of the great fictional characters of modern English literature."

John Clifford Mortimer was born April 21, 1923, in London and was educated at the exclusive British prep school Harrow. He interrupted his studies at Oxford University during World War II to write propaganda scripts for the British government.

As a boy, Mr. Mortimer read legal briefs and poetry to his father, a divorce lawyer who lost his sight when his son was 13 but whose blindness was never mentioned by the family.

Mr. Mortimer graduated from Oxford in 1947, joined the British bar a year later and handled all kinds of cases. Over time, he became an expert in free-speech issues, successfully defending the British publishers of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit to Brooklyn" in landmark obscenity cases.

He was sent to Nigeria by Amnesty International to represent Wole Soyinka, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature, and helped win his acquittal in a free-speech case. In 1977, Mr. Mortimer successfully defended the Sex Pistols, the punk rock group whose first album's title, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols," was deemed obscene by British authorities.

Like Rumpole, who offered toasts to the malefactors who kept him in business, Mr. Mortimer was unapologetic about his varied and sometimes shady clientele. "My whole life has been spent helping people to avoid their just fate," he said.

He retired from the law in 1986 to devote himself to writing. He rose before 6 a.m., fortified himself with a glass of champagne and produced 1,000 polished words each day. In addition to his Rumpole novels and stories, he published three volumes of memoirs; two collections of interviews with celebrities; and the "Titmuss" trilogy, which was about politics and power in Margaret Thatcher's England and became a popular TV serial in Britain.

Mr. Mortimer was politically liberal but had a socially conservative bent. He supported the monarchy and fox hunting but was skeptical of feminists. He said he believed in everything about religion except God.

His first marriage, to writer Penelope Fletcher Mortimer, ended in divorce. Her 1962 novel, "The Pumpkin Eater," made into a film starring Anne Bancroft, was an acid-tipped view of their marriage.

In 2004, Mr. Mortimer disclosed that he had a son from an affair in the 1960s with actress Wendy Craig. The son did not learn of his true parentage for more than 40 years, but he and Mr. Mortimer had become close in recent years.

Other survivors include Mr. Mortimer's second wife, Penelope Gollop, whom he married in 1972 and called "Penny the Second"; two children from his first marriage; and two daughters from his second marriage, including actress Emily Mortimer.

Despite failing eyesight and ill health, Mr. Mortimer never tired of Rumpole and completed two final novels about his greatest fictional creation in the past two years.

"Passers-by have taken to waving and calling out: 'Morning, Rumpole!' " Mr. Mortimer wrote in London's Daily Express in 1994. "I have to protest that I am not he; I lack his courage, his stoicism and the essential nobility of his character."