Marcus Berkmann

Roger Mortimer writes again

Dearest Jane..., by Jane Torday and Roger Mortimer, shows that there's still life in one of publishing's least expected success stories

[Getty Images/iStockphoto] 
issue 19 April 2014

After Dear Lupin and Dear Lumpy, here’s a slightly more prosaically titled collection of letters from Roger Mortimer, longtime racing correspondent of the Sunday Times and frequent purchaser of stamps. Who would have thought that one man could write so many letters that, 20 years after his death, so many people would still want to read?

But that’s the beauty of publishing: the oddest books can find a readership. And this encourages enterprising publishers to look out for even odder books, which benefits us all: writers, readers, even reviewers. So, well played to Constable, and to Mortimer’s three children (none of them children any longer, of course), for between them they have unearthed a distinctive and cherishable comic voice, who throughout his career saved his best material for his smallest, most select readership.

Mortimer was born in 1909, went from Eton to the Coldsteam Guards and spent most of the war as a PoW.

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