Rumpole of the Bailey

A Chronological List of the Stories

The Penge Bungalow Murders.

In addition to the absent stories, earlier mentions of The Penge Bungalow Murders provide some background and detail about the case. There are, however, differences between these mentions and what finally appears in the novel of the case. The scraps of clues dropped throughout the run of stories since the first book in 1978 raised expectations that this was a very complicated case for which Rumpole had to draw on his many skills to understand, analyse and deconstruct in order to find the solution and successfully represent his client. The novel is a rather different beast and presents a much simpler tale, more in tune with the average Rumpole story. Indeed, the focus in the novel, as with all the stories, isn't really the crime as such but the various characters, chief of which was Rumpole himself.

In Rumpole and the Way Through the Woods we discover that the junior prosecution barrister was Rollo Eyles. It was Eyles' wife who was killed in this story and this brings Rumpole into the case. In the same story Rumpole describes Penge as "...arguably the classic murder of our time and undoubtedly the greatest moment of triumph in the Rumpole career" in which the court heard "...my first devastating cross-examination of the police surgeon". The police surgeon does not appear in the novel. Rumple notes that Rollo Eyles stood out from the legal hacks because all the other legal council regarded Rumpole as "...an inexperienced white wig who shouldn't be allowed out on a careless driving [charge]". By the time Mortimer gets to Rumpole and the Primrose Path in 2002 this is all forgotten; another name pops up as one of the junior prosecution barristers. Mr. Justice Sloper is remembered in Rumpole and the Vanishing Juror in this book, which is interesting because only two years later Mortimer was to write the Penge Bungalow Murders novel. It was, in fact, his next project after Rumpole and the Primrose Path. In the novel, however, neither Rollo Eyles nor the future Justice Sloper are mentioned, although Reggie Proudfoot was named as "one" of the prosecution juniors, while Thomas Winterbourne is named as the leader of the prosecution team.

The importance of Rumpole's examinatinon of blood stain evidence is often stated. In Rumpole and the Boy he says of the case, "I won it because of my extensive knowledge of blood stains". In the story Rumpole and the Expert Witness, Rumpole is reunited with Dr. Harry Dacre, an expert on the matter of blood, who it is stated gave evidence in the Penge trial. Dr. Dacre is not in the Penge novel. The bloodstain evidence given in trial in the novel is from the expert witness Dr. Percival Philimore and is used to support Rumpole's case that the murder victim was shot by a pistol at a certain angle in a hallway and staggered from that point to an armchair in an adjacent room (in chapter 13).

Rumpole also states in the novel that Dr. Philimore is of a generation of blood experts predating Dr. Ackerman who is often mentioned in the books and indeed appears in some of Rumpole's early written cases.

In the narrative sense these differences can be explained away as being a product of Rumpole's fallible memory leading to errors in the two accounts of the case - those scattered throughout the short stories and that of the novel; the case was long ago and one of many in a long career. Either Dr. Dacre was the trial's expert witness on blood or it was Dr. Philimore. Rumpole is pleased to see Dr. Dacre again in Rumpole and the Expert Witness so he obviously has a fond memory of this earlier appearance as a witness, one unlikely to be mistaken for anything other than the Penge Bungalow Murders suggesting therefore that the naming Dr. Philimore in the novel is a false remembrance of the trial.

The capacity of these two doctors as a pathologist, as mentioned in Rumpole and The Old, Old Story, while suggesting a biological nature to the evidence is a label which is assumed by their status as a physician and does not necessarily imply that this evidence was to identify an individual in the case. In the novel Rumpole's analysis of the pattern of blood spattering determines the order of events in the murder.

This is contradicted in Rumpole and the Family Pride in which bruising was a key element in the pathological evidence and not blood stains. Rumpole states that the case "...raised some interesting questions about bruising and the time of death. I mean, it should be relatively simple do discover if a bruise was pre- or post-mortem, of course. A careless pathologist could cause bruising...That's what happened in the Penge Bungalow Murders." In other words, the post-mortem examination returned results which were compromised by a sloppy pathologist leading to faulty evidence which Rumpole was able to identify.

A further mention of the bloodstain evidence is made in Rumpole and The Old, Old Story in which Rumpole recounts his cross examination of the pathologist in the trial (ie. Dr. Dacre) to the Erskine-Browns.

In Rumpole and the the Expert Witness short story the case is called R. v Samuel Poulteny but it is called R. v Simon Jerold in the Penge Bungalow Murders novel. A late and peeplexing addition to the Penge case was from the short story Rumpole and the Wedding Guest in which Harry Greenway was named as the accused. This name is perplexing because the story was published two years after the Penge novel and is the only example of details being changed after the Penge novel was published.

Another variance in Rumpole and the Wedding Guest is Rumpole's mention that the Flood Street Stabbing case, central to the story, took place not long after the Penge trial when he "had just sprung to fame", yet the ancient stabbing case mentioned in Rumpole and the Wedding Guest takes place in the middle 1960s. This is years after Penge is established in Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade as being 1939 at the dawn of the Rumpole career. In the Penge novel Rumpole states that the case took place in the early 1950s. Three different dates are given in three separate stories.

In Rumpole and the Primrose Path Rumpole states that he kept "the bullet found embedded in the radiogram", of which there is no mention in the novel.

In Rumpole and the Official Secrets Peter Royce-Williams, a witness in the case, is named as an expert on typewriters, "unrivalled in his field" who gave expert evidence about the "questioned suicide note" in the Penge trial. He is absent in the novel, as is the note - and indeed a suicide. The absence of Peter Royce-Williams in the Penge novel suggests this is Rumpole's memory from a different case of murder disguised as suicide and not the Penge murders.

Two further pieces of detail not included in the novel are Rumpole's brief mention in Rumpole and the Bright Seraphim of rigor mortis as a factor leading to his winning the court case, and in Rumpole a la Carte where Rumpole says he is given a clue to the case by "somebody else’s mackintosh" being taken from an office peg. He does not elaborate on this and mentions it only in passing. Neither of these are in the novel.

Rumpole claims modestly in Rumpole and the Reform of Joby Jonson that "I won the Penge Bungalow Murders by my two hours of brilliant deduction and emotional appeal". Of his deft handling of the evidence we can have no doubt. What is uncertain is which accounts we are to believe. For the attentive reader these contradictions are an irritant and a reminder that for the creator of a body of work the importance lies in the task at hand rather than gathering up all the scraps of continuity in the interests of consistency. To this Rumpole himself would add from his storehouse of quotes: "O, that way madness lies; let me shun that."