Back Room Girl: By the author of Paul Temple
Never published in paperback, and back in print for the first time since 1950, Back Room Girl was the first original novel by Francis Durbridge.Retiring to No Man’s Cove in Cornwall to write his memoirs, crime reporter Roy Benton discovers that a disused tin mine has become a research station for a secret weapons project. Karen Silvers, in charge of operations, reluctantly accepts that Benton’s experience could help her fight a sinister organisation intent on stealing their plans.Having adapted five of his Paul Temple radio serials into successful novelisations, in 1950 Francis Durbridge decided to try his hand at writing his first original novel. Back Room Girl bore all the hallmarks of the famous Paul Temple stories, an outlandish mixture of mystery, glamour and suspense, in a book that was never reprinted and so became an enigma to his many fans – until now.Includes an introduction by bibliographer Melvyn Barnesplus two rare short stories written for Christmas annuals:LIGHT-FINGERS and A PRESENT FROM PAUL TEMPLE.
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FRANCIS DURBRIDGE
Back Room Girl
PLUS
Light-Fingers
AND
A Present from Paul Temple
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MELVYN BARNES
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by John Long 1950
‘Light-Fingers’ and ‘A Present from Paul Temple’
first published in the Daily Mail Annual for Boys and Girls
by Associated Newspapers 1950, 1951
Copyright © Francis Durbridge 1950, 1951
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: 9780008242039
Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008242022
Version: 2018-01-09
Table of Contents
Chapter II: Discovery of no Man’s Cove
Chapter V: Chief Inspector Leyland Explains
Chapter VIII: A Shot in the Dark
Chapter IX: Smugglers and Monks
Chapter X: The Man With the Handcart
Chapter XII: Strange Behaviour at the Inn
Chapter XIII: Midnight Rendezvous
Chapter XV: The Man in the Combe
Chapter XVI: Charlie Gets a Shock
Chapter XIX: Ordeal by Torture
Chapter XXIII: Through the Tunnel
When Back Room Girl was published in July 1950, Francis Durbridge (1912–1998) had long been the most popular writer of mystery thrillers for BBC radio and was soon to become a ‘brand name’ on television and in the theatre. In 1938 the BBC had broadcast his serial Send for Paul Temple, and the novelist-detective and his wife Steve cemented their cult status 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 radio serials were all novelised, published by John Long between 1938 and 1948, and most recently reissued in 2015 by Collins Crime Club.
Back Room Girl, however, was markedly different. It was Durbridge’s first book not to feature the Temples, and neither was it based on a radio serial. Instead it was an original one-off novel, which by the end of Durbridge’s writing career still compared only with The Pig-Tail Murder (1969) in this respect, although he had penned several standalone Sunday newspaper serials in the 1950s.
The Temple mysteries had invariably seen the sophisticated couple pursuing and unmasking murderers, so they all had a ‘whodunit?’ element. Back Room Girl, on the other hand, was not a detective mystery but an adventure/espionage thriller concerning skulduggery in a rural English setting. From the somewhat whimsical opening sentence, ‘It was early on the highly appropriate day of Friday that Roy Benton first saw the footprints in the sand,’ it must have been immediately obvious to any Paul Temple fan that this was not going to be typical Durbridge fare.
The year is 1947, and Fleet Street crime reporter and SAS hero Major Roy Benton begins a new life by retiring to No Man’s Cove in Cornwall to write his memoirs. He anticipates peace and quiet, but this seems increasingly unlikely when he discovers that a disused tin mine has become a research laboratory for a top secret project. He finds that the brilliant scientist Karen Silvers is heading the operation, and that his friend Chief Inspector Wilfred Leyland has been seconded from Scotland Yard because a sinister organisation is intent on stealing the plans.
The ringleader is Fabian Delouris, and he and his henchmen are Nazis (‘the worst Gestapo types’) who use extreme forms of torture to extract the information they require. ‘I have been,’ says Delouris, ‘a dealer in mass murder and the means to it for more years than I care to remember.’ This could account for the fact that
