Читать книгу Another Woman’s Shoes: Based on Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case - Francis Durbridge, Francis Durbridge - Страница 5

Harold Weldon has been convicted of the murder of his fiancée Lucy Staines, but crime reporter Mike Baxter is persuaded to investigate further because Lucy’s father believes Weldon to be innocent. In particular, Baxter is intrigued by the fact that one of Lucy’s shoes is missing, and this becomes crucial when it proves to be the case with further murder victims …

In 1965, when Another Woman’s Shoes was published, devotees of Francis Durbridge will have experienced a feeling of déjà vu if they recalled the plot of his radio serial Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case. Indeed they would have been justified in doing so, because Another Woman’s Shoes was the novelisation of that radio serial.

By the 1960s Francis Durbridge (1912–1998) had for many years been arguably the most popular and distinctive writer of mystery thrillers for BBC radio and television, and was soon to make his mark in the theatre. His best-known characters, the novelist-detective Paul Temple and his wife Steve, first appeared in the 1938 BBC radio serial Send for Paul Temple and then proceeded to carve their place in broadcasting history in the sequels Paul Temple and the Front Page Men (1938), News of Paul Temple (1939), Paul Temple Intervenes (1942), Send for Paul Temple Again! (1945) and many more. These first five Temple serials soon became books, co-written with John Thewes (Send for Paul Temple) and Charles Hatton (the four sequels, although it has been speculated that Thewes was in fact a pseudonym for Hatton), and published by John Long between 1938 and 1948.

Durbridge then went on to produce many more books, including two completely original novels, Back Room Girl (1950) and The Pig-Tail Murder (1969). With these two exceptions (if you disregard several newspaper serials that he wrote in the 1950s that were never turned into books), his publishing output consisted of two strands: the Paul Temple books and the novelisations of his phenomenally popular television serials. Falling somewhere between the two were the Paul Temple radio scripts that he adapted into non-series novels, now reunited with the canon in these long overdue Collins Crime Club reprints.

Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case was originally broadcast in eight episodes from 29 March to 17 May 1954, and it marked the first of eleven appearances by the actor Peter Coke as Temple. A new production, also with Coke, was recorded and broadcast from 22 November 1959 to 10 January 1960. Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case was one of Durbridge’s most enthralling radio serials, given its convoluted plot and its denouement exposing a murderer that few listeners would have suspected throughout its eight-week run. Its starting point is an appeal to Temple by Wilfrid Stirling, whose daughter Brenda has been murdered and for which crime her boyfriend Howard Gilbert has been sentenced to death. When Stirling’s doubts about the verdict compel Temple to race against time to unravel the mystery before the execution day, the detective is soon faced with more murder victims who (as in Brenda’s case) are each lacking a shoe.

As always with Durbridge this radio serial was a huge success, and European countries rushed to cast and broadcast their own versions in straight translations of the original scripts. These included the Dutch Paul Vlaanderen en het Gilbert mysterie (3 October to 21 November 1954), the German Paul Temple und der Fall Gilbert (4 January to 22 February 1957) and the Danish Gilbert-mysteriet (5 July to 23 August 1957).

But why, so soon after the second UK radio production of Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case, did Durbridge novelise this serial as Another Woman’s Shoes and change all the character names, as well as introducing new investigators Mike and Linda Baxter instead of the Temples? Such questions can never be answered with certainty, but it is at least known that with his novels Durbridge tried to widen his appeal to the reading public, in spite of the fact that his radio serials had made him a household name. This diversification was even more evident in other media, with his television serials from 1952 and his stage plays from 1971 completely breaking away from the Temples.

While his early Paul Temple novels in the 1930s and 1940s adhered closely to his radio scripts and characters, this changed in 1951 with two novelisations of radio serials in which all or most of the character names were changed – Beware of Johnny Washington and Design for Murder, which were originally the radio serials Send for Paul Temple (1938) and Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair (1946). Indeed, the first 1950s Paul Temple book was another departure, being an original novel rather than a novelisation. The Tyler Mystery (1957), published by Hodder & Stoughton.

If the mid-sixties’ transformation of Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case into the standalone Another Woman’s Shoes disappointed any Durbridge enthusiasts, it isn’t borne out by the sales either at home or abroad. The book was successfully published throughout Europe – in Germany as Die Schuhe, in Italy as La scarpa che mancava sempre, in the Netherlands as Wie de schoen past wordt vermoord, in Spain as Tres zapatos de mujer and in Poland as Buty modelki. It would prompt Durbridge to apply his art of recycling one more time with his novel Dead to the World (1967), which had begun life as the 1951 radio serial Paul Temple and the Jonathan Mystery before becoming a non-Temple book with new characters.

The re-publication of Another Woman’s Shoes and Dead to the World, titles that have not been available for half a century, completes the reprinting of all sixteen novels and novelisations featuring or based on the Paul Temple radio series (plus the welcome revival of that rarity, Back Room Girl). Also included in this volume is the bonus short story ‘Paul Temple and the Nightingale’, which first appeared in the Associated Newspapers miscellany volume Late Extra in 1952. It provided Durbridge’s fans with an extra tale that kept his central character in the public eye and is another demonstration of the author’s prolific output in the post-war years.

MELVYN BARNES

September 2017