A Poorer Place
Well, here’s how out of touch I’ve been: two of my favorite writers died — one in January of this year, one almost exactly a year to the day earlier — and I didn’t know it until last month.
This is telling commentary not just on my vigilance about current events, but also about the “normal” media outlets’ obsession with housewives, Lady Gaga, and like shallow bullshit — and the absolute disregard they have for literary contributions and those who make them. Realizing I missed these two losses has forced me to start checking the NYT obituary page every day. But that’s a rant for another time.
One of the writers is someone I’ve written about in this blog — Robert B. Parker. I think the respect and esteem I have for his writing is well documented in my post about him. The other “tell” that a writer has left his mark: when the writer dies, the reader feels the personal, emotional loss of the characters he or she created. I feel that loss. The world is a poorer place for Spenser being silenced, and for his walks in Boston all being lamentably now locked in the past.
The other was John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole. For the uninitiated, Rumpole is a rumpled (pun intended), cigar-ash-wearing, Chateau Thames Embankment-drinking, aging, and absolutely anachronistic barrister who ekes out a living on his overdraft and the meager earnings he gets from defending every imaginable English lowlife. His days are tormented by Sam Ballard QC, his head of chambers, and his nights by She Who Must Be Obeyed, his wife Hilda. He is erudite, yet possessed of great common sense. He resists all efforts on the part of She Who Must to instill ambition in him with a willful inertia that is awesome to behold. And in his own way, he solves his mystery, wins his case, and gets his way. If you haven’t met Rumpole, by all means seek him out — and if humanly possible, listen to Leo McKern’s reading of him in audio format. McKern played him in the BBC series based on the books, and reads him to perfection. On my long-ago trip to London, the tube station near my hotel obligingly let out within a block or two of the Gloucester Road, where Rumpole returned every night to She Who Must in their mansion flat. I walked the Gloucester Road, and there were indeed some buildings there that looked like what I imagine a “mansion flat” apartment building to look like. I hope when next I see them, I can still conjure Rumpole trudging up the stairs, latchkey in hand, singlehandedly bearing the crushing weight of his role as protector of the rights of the accused.
