No crime in a bit of laughter

BY JOHN MORTIMER

Viking, 207pp, 17.99

SIR JOHN MORTIMER IS a British institution. Well, an English one anyway, much as Alexander McCall Smith has become a Scottish one.

Actually, they have a good deal in common. Both write engagingly, with an enviable ease of a manner. Both deal in that indefinable but immediately recognisable quality, charm. Each is in his way a moralist, a liberal moralist, though McCall Smith, being a Scot, is a rather more rigorous moralist than Mortimer. Both are deservedly popular, and it is indeed a measure of Mortimer's popularity that his publishers feel able to price this light novel, which can be comfortably read in an afternoon, at 17.99.

The central idea is simple and not original. Lucy Purefoy, daughter of the progressive Bishop of Aldershot, is a young woman eager to do good in the world. So she joins an organisation called SCRAP (Social Carers, Reformers and Preceptors), set up to help released prisoners go straight. She is assigned to care for a young man called Terry when he comes out of Wormwood Scrubs after a four-year sentence for breaking and entering.

Terry, quite a bright young man, doesn't feel in need of Lucy's help or that of any other do-gooder, on the quite reasonable grounds that "being out of prison means you're free, doesn't it?" Nevertheless, after an initial period of uncertainty, he rather takes to Lucy and she to him. First attempts at rehabilitation are not a success. Terry is sent to lodge with the Bishop's chaplain, a muscular Christian of - surely? - old-fashioned stamp. Terry dots him one, absconds with a silver cup and returns to his old milieu.

But Lucy won't give up. Now truly in love, she decides that if Terry won't enter her world, she must get into his, and practices a spot of thieving to get close to the boy. Terry, however, is predictably shocked by this role reversal. Well, you can guess what happens. She gets deeper into trouble, especially when a rap artist, Ishmael MacDonald, turns out to be a Scotland Yard man. Meanwhile, Terry decides to go straight. Will true love overcome these obstacles? Can it? Of course it can. Mortimer's world is as sunny as Wodehouse's. It is one where all crime is more jesting.

Told in alternate chapters by Lucy and Terry, the story gallops along with some good comic scenes. The best, perhaps, is the magistrates' court in which Lucy's application for bail is being heard, and her father, the trendy bishop, speaks up disastrously on her behalf. Asked by the prosecuting barrister whether he approves of gay marriages, he replied with a question of his own: "Do you enjoy prawn cocktail, Mr Hastie?" Those well-versed in the Book of Leviticus will appreciate the point he is making, one that Rumpole himself might have been proud of. The court thinks differently.

Mortimer has written substantial novels - Summer's Lease and the Titmuss trilogy, for instance, which deal with the real world and are sharpened by satire. There is none of that here. Quite Honestly is purely comic. The reversals of roles and fortune are here for our amusement only. It is a sort of fairy tale. It would have made a nice Ealing comedy in the days when they made Ealing comedies. It invites the willing suspension of any disbelief, and the result is charming, a light-hearted love-story which offers the old entertainer the opportunity to go through his well-practised, familiar and agreeable routines.

Only Rumpole is lacking, but then, he doubtless would have defended Lucy more effectively, which would have spoilt the story.