Down Payment on Death: BBC Radio drama thriller

Jim Eldridge

Mar 2021 · BBC Digital Audio · Narrated by Full Cast, Manning Wilson, Frances Jeater, Glyn Owen, Dinsdale Landen, Jon Croft, and Peter Craze

About this audiobook

Dinsdale Landen stars in this gripping vintage 1970s crime drama about a retired hitman tempted by one last job

Sick of the spying business, professional assassin Art Gordo decides to quit the Secret Service - but his old life won't leave him alone.

It's Christmas, three months after his retirement, and Gordo is visited by an old colleague with a proposition. A senior MI7 agent has been selling secrets to the opposition and needs to be eliminated - and the job can't be traced back to the Department. What's more, the task must be completed within the next five days. Clarke's offering big money - but despite the temptation, Art turns him down. Only someone won't take 'no' for an answer.

Hunted by a mysterious nemesis who'll stop at nothing - including murder - to get their way, Gordo finds himself caught in a deadly game of deception, double-cross and betrayal. To stay alive, he must find out the truth about his shadowy target, and re-enter a world he thought he'd left behind. A world with only one rule: kill or be killed...

Originally produced in the 1970s, this twisty, fast-moving suspense thriller stars Dinsdale Landen as Art Gordo and Frances Jeater as Louise.

Production credits
Adapted from his own novel by Jim Eldridge
Produced by John Fawcett Wilson

Cast
Art Gordo - Dinsdale Landen
Clarke - Manning Wilson
Louise Lenehan - Frances Jeater
Ben/Roberts/Man on phone - Jon Croft
Joe/Ferguson - Peter Craze
Charles Allweather - Glyn Owen
Paul Le Clerk - Donald Gee
Sally Le Clerk - Joanna Wake
Leon Young - Basil Henson
Francis/Forbes - Douglas Blackwell
Parsons - Terrence Hardiman
Hotel porter - Frank Coda

First broadcast on BBC World Service, 3-31 May 1976

© 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

About the author

Jim Eldridge is an author and scriptwriter. He has had 90 books published which have sold over three million copies, and has had hundreds of radio and TV scripts broadcast in the UK and across the world. Among his radio credits are Parsley Sidings and Lines From My Grandfather's Forehead, which won him a Writer's Guild of Great Britain Award.