John Mortimer. Rumpole and the Angel of Death (1995) Rumpole delights no matter how many times one has read or seen him. Leo McKern defined the character for us in the TV series so well we can’t imagine him any other way; the cover painting of this book displays McKern as Rumpole. This collection ends on a dark and terrifying note, with Rumpole used by some terrorist types to get one of their own set free on a human rights argument. Rumpole finds out too late how he (and his Head of Chambers, Sam Ballard) have been manipulated. But most of the stories show Mortimer’s indulgent view of human weakness and his satirist’s eye for the hypocrisy of the respectable classes. *** (2005)
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