On View : Rumpole’s Last Hurrah

Look your last on “Rumpole of the Bailey,” O woe, alas!

England’s greatest second-rate barrister, Horace Rumpole (consummately played by Leo McKern), a stalwart of PBS’ “Mystery” since 1981, appears in his last original one-hour courtroom mystery on Thursday.

Why? Why must it end? Such were the bootless cries in the midtown Manhattan hotel suite of former barrister John Mortimer, author and screenwriter of the Rumpole mysteries. Was it ... something we said? Had McKern tired of his character?

“I don’t think it’s anything to do with McKern,” says Mortimer, who was in New York recently to promote “Murderers and Other Friends,” the second volume of his memoirs. “I don’t know whether he would like to do some more or not.

“It’s partially the reorganization of British television, and it’s partly that I just haven’t written another television series,” he says.. “I don’t know that I never will.”

It is Rumpole who contends not merely with the travails of criminal law, officious colleagues and bullying judges, but with the terrible will of his indomitable wife, Hilda--”She Who Must Be Obeyed.”

Rumpole’s passion for truth, justice, evidence and certain bloodstains has let him triumph, if only briefly, against all odds, while brushing the ashes of vile little cigars from his waistcoat and slurping inexpensive burgundy (“Chateau Thames Embankment”) in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar.

Mortimer, as if to appease the pain, says he is at work on yet another book of Rumpole stories.

“I’ve actually written a story which is told by Hilda, because I discovered there’s a Jeeves story which is actually told by Jeeves--not a good one, but at least it’s peculiar,” Mortimer says.

They join the nine Rumpole volumes in the Mortimer oeuvre, alongside many plays, novels and classic screenplays--”Brideshead Revisited,” “A Voyage Round My Father,” “Paradise Postponed” and “Titmuss Regained,” among them.

Mortimer said he is hanging up “Rumpole” because the private companies controlling Britain’s commercial TV have become ratings-driven, “very much more like American television, which is sad.

“For some dotty reason, the whole of the commercial output is controlled by one man, a scheduler, who is appointed by all the companies. And he it is who tells them what will go in the schedule and therefore what they can make.

“I don’t really wish to write 11 Rumpole scripts and have them put up to this ‘professional’ who’ll say, ‘No, I don’t think I want that at all. We’ll have it in 10 years’ time,’ ” Mortimer says.

“What they really want is something that’s going to last for years and years--product--which Rumpole isn’t, because Rumpole is only six episodes and they all have to be written by me,” he says.

Mortimer, an accomplished barrister who “took silk” and became a Queen’s Counsel at the top tier of British trial lawyers, retired from practice in 1984. And yet he is not a lawyer who took up writing.

“I was a writer. That was what I have been and always will be,” he says. “My whole life has been down to writing, but to pay the rent I did law.”

“As an advocate, I never knew very much law, and I always found that any knowledge of the law is a severe disadvantage,” Mortimer says. “The last thing the jury want to hear is about the law.

“I was very privileged to meet people who had done murders, or strange judges, or, when I was very young, women in divorce cases who would pour out all their secrets in my ear. So I learned a lot about humans. A lot.”

That helped create a character worthy of rubbing elbows with Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes on “Mystery.” Yet it fails to explain why people who love Rumpole are so ... dotty about him.

Take the world’s largest Rumpole fan club, which is in San Francisco.

“They have huge meetings. People come there from Israel, Alaska, all over,” he says. “There’s a minor character, Dodo Mackintosh, who makes ‘cheesy bits’ for the Rumpole chambers parties. Well, their last meeting started with a blind tasting of cheesy bits.

“And they have Hilda Rumpole lookalike contests.”

If this is to be the final Rumpole series, then we may never know the exact details of Rumpole’s greatest case: His successful defense, unassisted, of the infamous Penge Bungalow Murders.

Mortimer, pressed for the truth, had none. He hasn’t written the tale, or even thought much about it.

“I have to find out what happened,” he says apologetically. “There was a lot of blood. And probably more dead bodies than one. ... Probably one was in a trunk.

“Unfortunately, I was always under the impression that Penge was by the seaside,” he says. “Now I discover that Penge is in the middle of London.”

“Rumpole of the Bailey: Rumpole on Trial” airs Thursday at 9 p.m. on KCET.