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FRANCIS DURBRIDGE
Another Woman’s Shoes
PLUS
Paul Temple and the Nightingale
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MELVYN BARNES
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton 1965
‘Paul Temple and the Nightingale’ first published by Associated Newspapers in Late Extra: a Miscellany by ‘Evening News’ Writers, Artists & Photographers 1952
Copyright © Francis Durbridge 1965
Introduction © Melvyn Barnes 2018
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Francis Durbridge asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008276379
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008276386
Version: 2018-06-01
Table of Contents
Paul Temple and the Nightingale
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