Book description
David Walker, a toy manufacturer, usually made it a rule not to give
lifts to stray young women. And on this occasion, with his business
preoccupations and anxieties about his wife, most hitch-hikers would
have forgiven him for passing them by.
But this one was an extremely pretty girl in her early twenties,
wearing a set of fairly new jeans and with a cheeky cap on her head;
there was something innocent and appealing about her. Her face fell as
she saw that he intended to ignore her signals and as he gathered speed
he was left with the impression of an almost despairing disappointment.
He relented at once.
It was the biggest mistake of his life. When she disappears, David is
caught in a sudden storm of intrigue and confusion; the picture may have
been blurred, but the frame was set. And somewhere in the picture are
blackmail, big money, and murder. Detective Inspector Martin Denson has
only the faintest of outlines from which to discover the truth. And he
has less time to do it in that he thought. Francis Henry Durbridge was
an English playwright and author born in Hull. In 1938, he created the
character Paul Temple for the BBC radio serial Send for Paul Temple.
A crime novelist and detective, the gentlemanly Temple solved numerous
crimes with the help of Steve Trent, a Fleet Street journalist who later
became his wife. The character proved enormously popular and appeared in
16 radio serials and later spawned a 64-part big-budget television
series (1969-71) and radio productions, as well as a number of comic
strips, four feature films and various foreign radio productions.
Francis Durbridge also had a successful career as a writer for the
stage and screen. His most successful play, Suddenly at Home, ran in
London’s West End for over a year.
