Forgotten Book: RUMPOLE a La Carte, John Mortimer

For many of my contributions this year to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books  I am focussing on the books I read 20 years ago in 1992. By then my reading diet was almost exclusively crime fiction.

This week, 20 years ago, I completed reading RUMPOLE a La Carte by John Mortimer.

Synopsis
A collection of six tales all featuring Horace Rumpole. Characters such as She Who Must Be Obeyed, and the philandering Claude Erskine-Brown are back as Rumpole visits a snooty restaurant, where he enagages in a battle over mashed spuds and takes the unaccustomed role of prosecutor. 

I guess one of the things this choice shows is that I really liked short stories, but I loved the quirky humour of these tales..

Of course, for most of us, Leo McKern became Rumpole-in-the-flesh in the television series, which in its turn gave the Rumpole books a new lease of life. RUMPOLE A La Carte was published in 1990, and incorporated in a television series in 1993.

Coincidentally the embedded YouTube video snippet below comes from the episode in the TV series based on the a la carte story.