Obituary: Stephen O’Rourke QC

Stephen O’Rourke’s novel, The Crown Agent (2019), started life seven years earlier as the winning entry in a national newspaper’s short story competition. “The theme was ‘tropical’ but I didn’t want to write about palm trees and golden beaches,” he said. “For some reason, I had this idea of an older professor at Edinburgh University who lectured in the movement of the seas, tides and oceans, but who had never been outside of Scotland.”

He was researching and writing the first draft from 2012 to 2015, later reflecting that the analytical nature of his job as a lawyer was the ideal background for investigating life in early 19th-century Scotland. “Much of the book is set in Jamaica, so at one point I had shelves of books and maps about the history of Jamaica,” he said. “I also plundered the archives of various organisations for the Scottish research … One of the things I really enjoyed discovering was just what the journey from Edinburgh to Glasgow would have been like then. Today you can do it in the blink of an eye, in those days it could take two or three days.”

The Crown Agent, which was shortlisted for Bloody Scotland’s Scottish crime debut of the year award, tells the tale of disillusioned young doctor, Mungo Lyon, who in 1829 is recruited by the Crown to investigate a murder and shipwreck off the coast of Scotland. It was an era that fascinated O’Rourke, not least because of the debate then raging over slavery. Two years ago he was involved in a modern-day slavery case, Miller v HM Advocate, and donated some of his book’s royalties to the Tumbling Lassie Committee, a campaign set up by Scottish lawyers to address modern-day slavery and help victims of human trafficking.

O’Rourke, an affable, generous man with a wry, lopsided smile, was the first lawyer in his family. He may have found his job stimulating, but he said writing provided much-needed respite from its pressures. “Over time I’ve been a High Court prosecutor, I’ve defended in the High Court and I’m doing a number of mainly civil cases at the moment that are very demanding,” he said in March.

“Many people have a hobby, whether it’s rebuilding MGs or playing golf. Writing is my hobby, my downtime, and is a complementary release for the kind of work I do … It is something that I really enjoy and get a big kick from.”

Stephen Robb-Russell O’Rourke was born at Greenock, Inverclyde, in 1976, the son of Jim and Patricia O’Rourke (née Barnett). He had a sister, Janet, and a brother, Brian. He was educated at St John’s primary school, Port Glasgow, and St Aloysius’ College, Glasgow. “At school I had the idea of having a vocation, doing something as a professional calling was important,” he said.

He read law at the University of Edinburgh. “When I came here in 1994 there was still very much a sense Edinburgh was the other side of the world,” he told The Scotsman. “I could count on one hand the number of times I’d been to Edinburgh in my life, although there is a picture of me, aged four, sitting on Mons Meg [the medieval cannon at Edinburgh Castle].”

His studies took him to the University of Bologna in Italy, and in 2004 he edited the fourth edition of Green’s Glossary of Scottish Legal Terms, the first of three he would edit. That year he also married Joanna Baird, although the marriage was dissolved last year. He is survived by their daughter, Martha.

O’Rourke had been called to the Scottish bar in 2002, and joined Terra Firma, the Edinburgh chambers. He went on to spend four years on the Scottish Sentencing Council, took silk in 2017, and the following year was also called to the bar of England and Wales.

In 2012 he was the prosecution lawyer in a case in which a Nepalese woman set herself on fire after failing her driving test four times. He acted for the prosecution in a case in which a man burst in on his former partner and her new lover while they were having sex on the kitchen worktop, and stabbed the lover to death. There were cases involving a lorry driver who fell asleep at the wheel, a fraudster who tricked a pensioner out of £500,000, and an array of drugs and firearms cases, many involving violence.

In the early 2010s he spent time in New York, becoming an accredited mediator at the Center for Understanding Conflict. Mediation became a theme in his legal life and last year he oversaw two successful days of mediation between Edinburgh City Council, developers of the new St James Centre, and the developers behind the planned concert hall on St Andrew Square.

Ranked as a leading silk for commercial litigation, O’Rourke was elected keeper of the Advocates Library in February this year, writing in Scottish Legal News that it was “at the heart of Scotland’s legal system and the heart of an advocate’s daily practice”. Three months ago he was appointed principal crown counsel in succession to Alex Prentice QC. The Legal 500 summed up his abilities by saying he was “exceptionally good at dealing with clients in difficult sets of circumstances”.

Paying tribute to O’Rourke, Roddy Dunlop QC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, voiced concern about the “isolating effect and impact on wellbeing” of coronavirus restrictions. O’Rourke had alluded to such dark moments in a quote from Dante’s Inferno on the title page of The Crown Agent: “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”