Lonely Road

Lonely Road is a novel by British author Nevil Shute. It was first published in 1932 by William Heinemann and in the US by William Morrow. In 1936 it was adapted as a film, Lonely Road, released in the US as Scotland Yard Commands, starring Clive Brook and Victoria Hopper. The novel also served as the basis for an episode (no 14) in the BBC series The Jazz Age in 1968. Plot summary The book begins with a note from the solicitor for Commander Malcolm Stevenson, who has died recently (in about 1930). The note was written by him in the months before his death. Stevenson's narration begins with a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes, of which the only one that is readily sensible occurred during World War I, leading the last survivors of a sinking decoy ship, Stevenson managed to sink a German submarine, and with the British survivors wounded and with no way of taking prisoners, killed the Germans as they attempted to surrender. That incident still haunts him. Quite wealthy, he runs a flotilla of coastal steamers in a desultory but increasingly profitable way. He awakens, after having been taken, injured, from a damaged car, on a night on which he has been drinking heavily. Still bearing the mental and physical scars of the naval encounter, he meets a dancer, Mary (Mollie) Gordon (whom he nicknames Sixpence), at a dance hall in Leeds, where she entertains lonely gentlemen by dancing with them or sitting out a dance and talking, at sixpence a dance. He has the best evening he has had in years with Mollie.