Dear Lupin...

July 1, 2013
From 1967 to 1991, Charles Mortimer saved all of the letters written to him by his father, Roger, racing correspondent for the Sunday Times who wrote a classic book on horse racing, The History of the Derby. Collected here (in what was a bestseller in England) the letters successfully present what Charles calls “a humorous insight into the life of a mildly dysfunctional English middle-class family in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.” With his father living in the English countryside, and Charles bouncing from career to career after a failed stint at Eton College, the letters also chart a relationship between father and son that perseveres through thick and thin, including Charles’s drug problems. (His father affectionately nicknames him Lupin after the disreputable son in the 19th-century British comic novel The Diary of a Nobody.) None of Charles’s responses exist, but he provides short comments after almost every letter, which actually makes the book more compulsively readable, since it allows readers to more fully enjoy Roger’s articulate, eccentric, and always deeply British sense of humor. In 1974, advising Charles on job possibilities, he writes, “Have you considered the Church? There is much to be said for the quiet life of a country curate. Fortunately in the Church of England an ordained priest is not committed to any but the vaguest beliefs.”