James Morton delves into the books of Robert Smith Surtees and is fascinated by a man who created scathing portraits of the legal profession

The law may not have produced quite so many authors as has medicine - disregarding the crop who are currently producing detective novels and thrillers.

Dickens, of course, Sir Walter Scott and Thackeray all dabbled in the law, as did lesser lights such as Harrison Ainsworth who in Rookwood single-handedly created the myth of Dick Turpin.

But who reads him now? Or Charles Reade for that matter? So this is a call to read the novels of Robert Smith Surtees, who died 140 years ago last March.

I went looking for some of them the other day and none of the assistants in the Charing Cross Road bookshops had even heard of him.

According to the computer, Foyles apparently had two in stock but sadly they had actually gone moments - or possibly months - earlier.

How is that we have allowed this man, whose creation John Jorrocks is the literary father of Pickwick, to fade away?

Surtees, a second son, was born in Durham on 17 May 1805 and in 1822 was articled to a Newcastle solicitor.

Like so many, he hated every minute of it.

A man of uneven temper he quarrelled with his principal, Robert Purvis, and took the Highflyer coach to London where he was re-articled to William Bell of Bow Churchyard.

He was lonely, poor and without friends.

Although his character Charley Stobbs in Handley Cross is at the bar, the account of his time in the law seems to have been largely autobiographical.

Stobbs is ignored by the head of chambers the Honourable Henry Lollington and the other members follow suit.

His only friend is the clerk, Mr Bowker, who introduces him to the grocer John Jorrocks.

'But for Jorrocks and perhaps Belinda [Jorrock's niece] Stobbs would very soon have left the law whose crotchety quibbles are enough to disgust anyone with a taste for truth and straightforward riding.' It is curious how life imitates art.

The devoted clerk to Sir Edward Marshall Hall was AE Bowker.

Surtees qualified in 1828, set up practice at 27 Lincoln's Inn Fields and lived over the chambers.

Although he stayed in the law he still seems to have loathed the profession, and his books are peppered with scathing portraits of members of the bar.

For example, there was Mr Carroty Kebbell in Ask Mamma: 'He was in good practice for he allowed the police a liberal percentage on bringing him prosecutions, while his bellowing bullying insured him plenty of defences on his own account'.

It is a description that still rings a bell.

In general, Surtees thought lawyers came in three categories - 'able, unable and lamentable'.

The year after he qualified, Surtees turned to writing.

He was fortunate that the then great hunting correspondent of the Sporting Magazine, Charles James Apperley, who wrote as 'Nimrod', was having legal troubles that sent him leaping out of danger to Boulogne, that safe haven for the indebted Englishman, where the local gaol was known as the Htel D'Angleterre.

Surtees took over Nimrod's column and from then on law took a distant second place.

He remained in the Law List until 1835, but his main contribution to the profession seems to have come in 1831 when he wrote the grand sounding The Horseman's Manual; being a Treatise on Soundness, the law of Warranty, and generally on the laws relating to Horses.

His novels were reasonably successful, but Surtees - a man who could quarrel in an empty room - fell foul of publishers, critics, and horsemen alike and his work came in for some harsh criticism.

Curiously, when in 1842 he was appointed a justice of the peace, he was a good one, taking copious notes of the cases and ensuring that defendants were given a fair hearing.

It was not wholly altruistic behaviour.

Many of the incidents from his time on the bench appear in his later novels.

The Jorrocks books and some of his other novels suffer from the Victorian tendency to moralise, digress and have signposted characters such as Lady Scattercash, the Duke of Donkeyton and his son the Marquis of Bray.

But in 'the beautiful and tolerably virtuous' horse-breaker Lucy Glitters, Surtees created a female character to rival that of his friend Thackeray, Becky Sharp, for charm and ingenuity.

She appears in Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour, and in Surtees' final novel published posthumously in 1865 Mr Facey Romford's Hounds.

She, Sponge and Romford make as entertaining a trio of rogues as can be found anywhere.

Surtees died in Brighton on 16 March 1864.

He had travelled there to avoid the worst of a northern winter.

Awaking, he complained of chest pains and died within a quarter of an hour.

For those who might care to dip a little deeper, John Brennan, the Irish solicitor who wrote as John Welcome and who shared Surtees' dislike of the law, penned an attractive biography, The Sporting World of RS Surtees.

There is also the Surtees Society, which produces handsome reprints of the great man's works.

But the real fun is finding him in the second-hand bookshops around the country.

Despite my troubles in London there are copies about.

I recently found a couple in Bournemouth.

James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist