Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

The Rumpole renaissance continues to build, and now the beloved barrister’s many followers have a special reason to rejoice: a sensational full-length Rumpole novel that at last relates the oft-mentioned but never revealed story of Rumpole’s first case, the Penge Bungalow affair. Looking back half a century into a very different world, Rumpole recalls a man accused of murdering his father and his father’s friend with a pistol taken from a dead German pilot. It was this trial and its outcome that put Rumpole on the map and shaped him into the cantankerous defender of justice that readers know and love. This is a must-read for every Rumpole fan and a compelling invitation to new readers.

"Often mentioned but never before revealed, it's high time Rumpole committed to paper his memories of the Penge Bungalow affair. It would be an affront to history if the details of such a famous case were lost in the mists of time." "Horace Rumpole was a novice at the Old Bailey when the murders at Penge Bungalow first hit the headlines: two war heroes who'd flown numerous sorties together over Europe, apparently shot dead after a reunion dinner by the son of one of them, young Simon Jerrold." Young he might have been, but in those dark postwar days, Simon Jerrold was facing the ultimate punishment. There seemed little he could hope for since the evidence was so incriminating. Even old Wystan - head of Chambers, father of Hilda and conducting Jerrold's defense - seemed to have given up the game. But not Rumpole. There was something about the evidence that bothered him and, though he was only Wystan's junior in the case, when the time came for him to seize the initiative, he did it triumphantly.

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

To read Horace Rumpole's account of his first court case, in John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, is to know how archaeologists felt when they clapped their eyes on the Rosetta Stone. All those tantalizing mysteries about how the grumpy sage of the Old Bailey got his start as a young barrister are revealed here, along with answers to questions we never thought to ask … For anyone unfamiliar with this series, here's a charming way to begin.

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.