Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life - Softcover

Mortimer, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140248005 ISBN 13: 9780140248005

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1996

Synopsis

In this hilarious and touching autobiography, the bestselling author of Paradise Postponed and the Rumpole series continues the story he began in the popular Clinging to the Wreckage. Former barrister, screen writer, and novelist John Mortimer tells the story of the second half of his life and of the strangely assorted characters who enriched it. "A brilliant summing up."--Boston Sunday Globe.

About this title

About the Author

John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist, and former practicing barrister who has written many film scripts as well as stage, radio, and television plays, the Rumpole plays, for which he received the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He is the author of twelve collections of Rumpole stories and three acclaimed volumes of autobiography.

From Booklist

The author of the popular Rumpole stories as well as the lacerating political novel Paradise Postponed (1986) opens this tenderhearted sequel to his first autobiography (Clinging to the Wreckage [1987]) with anecdotes from his career as a queen's counsel, when he found himself establishing short-term but intense friendships with hard-core criminals during the course of their trials. His schizoid existence as a writer with a day job as a lawyer leads to a delightful juxtaposition of people and events, so that a description of a sordid murder trial is followed by a story about a raucous party thrown by director Tony Richardson. Pressured to practice law by his father--an avid gardener whose "ghost . . . is a hard one to banish, I still see him feeling for the flowers in his blindness . . . dressed in an ancient tweed suit"--Mortimer eventually quit the law to devote himself to writing. He talks of visiting Moscow with the Royal Shakespeare Company and swapping oft-heard jokes with a dying David Niven. In a self-deprecating, dryly amusing, unforgettable voice, Mortimer offers up the second part of his life story in a style so fluid, it seems effortless. Joanne Wilkinson

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140248005
• ISBN 13: 9780140248005
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272