the corner shop

Lucille Abbey runs her London secretarial agency with utmost efficiency. When, therefore, a certain Professor Hallam rejects three girls sent by her to apply for the post of his secretary and they each pronounce him “impossible”, Lucille herself sets out to interview the Professor at his home in Hampshire. He is, she finds, eccentric—even impossible; but he represents a challenge and, what is more, an excuse to delay what promises to be a trying holiday in Paris. She stays on to tame and to organize him—a less formidable task than she had imagined; in fact, she grows fond of him. But the atmosphere is somewhat disturbed first by the arrival of a debonair French art expert in search of paintings left to the Professor by his mother, and the next by a hysterical girl on the track of her runaway fiancé. The paintings have unaccountably disappeared; the mystery is still unsolved by the time Lucille’s work for the Professor comes to an end and she has to set off for Paris. At her aunt’s shop in the Rue des Dames, the arrival there of the indomitable art expert, the hysterical girl, the Professor, and a persistent suitor to boot, throw Lucille’s normally orderly life into complete upheaval.

*Audiobook performed by Helen Taylor