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
As far as Press and public were concerned the Weldon case was finished.
Harold Weldon, an impetuous architect in his early thirties, had been tried and found guilty of strangling his fiancée, a fashion model named Lucy Staines. The customary appeal addressed to the Home Secretary had been made, considered, and rejected.
No murder trial can possibly be dull, and the violent death of a beautiful young girl such as Lucy Staines had attracted a fair amount of attention. If the case had failed to reach the bigger newspaper headlines this was in some way due to a particularly nerve-racking international crisis, the kidnapping of a famous TV star’s pet poodle, and the audacious daylight robbery of a City bank.
All the same, the Weldon case might have claimed more space on page one had there been a greater element of mystery involved – perhaps a missing corpse, a nation-wide manhunt, or a fascinating trail of clues to whet the appetites of all amateur detectives. But none of these factors had been present. It had all the semblance of an ‘open-and-shut case’. One summer’s evening before going to the theatre Weldon had been seen and heard quarrelling violently with his fiancée; a few hours later her body had been found near a deserted bomb-site in Soho Square, and a witness had seen Weldon running wildly from the Square shortly after the medically established time of the killing. Harold Weldon had been arrested, the witness had identified him beyond any doubt, the police had found bloodstains on one of his handkerchiefs which he had carelessly left in a suit sent all too hurriedly to the cleaners, and the accused’s alibi had failed to stand up to interrogation.
The trial might have gone better for the young architect if he had cut a better figure in Court. Weldon, however, had taken almost palpable pains to rub everyone up the wrong way. His aggressive, sarcastic tongue had not only succeeded in losing him the sympathy of Judge, Jury and public but had eventually upset even his own Defending Counsel. His frequent outbursts of rage, instead of helping to prove his innocence, had only added fuel to the Prosecution’s fire – there you have standing before you, it was forcibly hinted, a clear-cut example of a heavily opinionated young man unable to control his violent emotions. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and there was no popular wave of feeling to support the appeal submitted by Jaime Mainardi, Weldon’s Defending Counsel. A date for the hanging had been officially announced; the book containing the story of Harold Weldon’s short and stormy life was about to be closed.
This was the precise situation when Mike Baxter, criminologist and ex-Fleet Street crime reporter, entered the case. Interested as he was in all aspects of crime – since they were grist to the mill of the crime articles and books by means of which he earned a very respectable income – he had nevertheless paid the trial only scant attention. His publishers and literary agents were pressing him over the deadline of a book that was overdue, and his wife, Linda, was pressing him to take a holiday which was equally overdue. When the phone rang one morning as he was half-way through typing the final chapter he mentally heaped mild abuse on Linda for being absent and irritably picked up the receiver.
‘Conway and Racy’s heah,’ sang an overbred, fluty, female voice.
‘Who?’ he muttered. It sounded like a firm of racing bookies. Mike did not go in for gambling, except on certainties.
‘Is that the home of Mrs Baxter?’ the fluty voice went on.
‘My wife’s out at the moment,’ said Mike politely.
‘Oh … I see. Well, I wonder if you would be so good as to deliver a message to Modom—’
‘I’m very busy. Could you ring again?’ Mike cut in, realising that it was his wife’s Bond Street dressmakers on the phone.
The