Paul Temple is a fictional character created by English writer Francis Durbridge. Temple is a professional author of crime fiction and an amateur private detective. With his wife Louise, affectionately known (and almost exclusively referred to) as 'Steve' in reference to her journalistic pen name 'Steve Trent', he solves whodunnit crimes through subtle, humorously articulated deduction. Always the gentleman, the strongest expletive he employs is "by Timothy!".
Created for the BBC radio serial Send for Paul Temple in 1938, the Temples featured in more than 30 BBC radio dramas, twelve serials for German radio, four British feature films, a dozen novels, and a BBC television series. A Paul Temple daily newspaper strip ran in the London Evening News for two decades.
Overview Paul Temple was a professional novelist. While he possessed no formal training as a detective, his background in constructing crime plots for his novels enabled him to apply deductive reasoning to solve cases whose solution had eluded Scotland Yard.
Over the course of each case, Temple eschewed formal interviews or other police techniques, in favour of casual conversations with suspects and witnesses. Yet even this informal style of investigation invariably precipitated attempts by the suspects to hamper him, through traps, ambushes, even assassination attempts. Always surviving these, Temple would arrange a cocktail party or similar social event at which he unmasked the perpetrator. In many of the serials, the perpetrator in question had been operating under an assumed name, as the mastermind of complex criminal operations in the shadows while meeting Temple openly under their true identity.
At the end of each tale, Paul, Steve and Sir Graham Forbes of Scotland Yard held a post mortem. Here, Paul explained why certain events in the serial took place, which of these had been red herrings, and which had been genuine clues. In general, the serials feature similar types of events, often in the same sequence.
Works
Original radio serials
The Paul Temple characters and formula were developed in a series of BBC Radio serials broadcast between 1938 and 1968, with various actors portraying the Temples. In the initial post-war period the detective was played by a succession of different actors: Barry Morse (1945), Howard Marion-Crawford (1946) and Kim Peacock (1946–1951). The longest-running team, and the most popular with audiences, was Peter Coke (pronounced Cook) and Marjorie Westbury, who starred together in every serial made between 1954 and 1968; Westbury had held the role of Steve since 1945.
The supporting characters of Sir Graham Forbes and the Temples' cockney butler Charlie were also repeatedly recast. Lester Mudditt was the longest lasting Sir Graham, playing the part from 1939 to 1958. He was replaced by Richard Williams, (who had previously voiced Paul in the 1944 version of News of Paul Temple), then James Thomason. Gareth Thomas of Blake's 7 fame essayed the role for the Crawford Logan-Gerda Stevenson remakes.
The radio series was a collaboration between writer Francis Durbridge and BBC producer Martyn C Webster, both of whom worked on all of the Paul Temple radio broadcasts aired over the thirty years from 1938 to 1968. Durbridge was still at college when he approached Webster, who was then with the BBC Midland Region, with a proposal for a mystery series about a gentleman detective.
Initially the serials were broadcast only on the Midlands transmitters of the BBC's pre-war Regional service. As they gained in popularity, they aired nationally on the newly created Home Service. However, in 1945 they found a new permanent home on the Light Programme, another national service, where they remained (except for occasional repeats on Home Service) until the final serial in 1968. The introductory and closing music for the majority of the serials was Coronation Scot, composed by Vivian Ellis, although the earliest serials (those aired up to December 1947) used an excerpt from Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.Prof Jeffrey Richards (ibid) Repeats of some serials were heard on the successor to the Home Service, Radio 4, during the 1980s, and as late as 1992 (when The Spencer Affair was repeated to celebrate Francis Durbridge's 80th birthday).
Many of the earliest serials, in which the eponymous hero was played by many different actors, have not survived. Several were remade in the 1940s, in abridged form, as feature films. However, some of the early radio serials do still exist, including Paul Temple Intervenes from 1942, featuring the first appearance in the series by Marjorie Westbury, in a supporting role. All but one of the serials starring Peter Coke also exist: since 2003, these have been regularly repeated on digital station BBC Radio 7 (now BBC Radio 4 Extra). In 2005 the station tracked down the then 93-year-old Coke for a half-hour interview programme, Peter Coke and the Paul Temple Affair, and the actor was also interviewed in 1998 for a half-hour documentary Send For Paul Temple, an episode in the series The Radio Detectives.
Because no recordings survive for many of the early serials, in 2006 BBC Radio 4 began recreating them, in as authentic a manner as possible: as mono productions, employing vintage microphones and sound effects, and using the original scripts. In all cases Crawford Logan starred as Paul Temple with Gerda Stevenson as Steve, in place of the original leads. The first of these broadcasts, in August 2006, was a new eight-part production of Paul Temple and the Sullivan Mystery, originally aired in 1947. A new production of The Madison Mystery, from 1949, aired between May and July 2008, followed by the 1947 serial Paul Temple and Steve in June and July 2010. A Case for Paul Temple, from 1946, was transmitted in August and September 2011. The final such production was Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair, aired in 2013 (the longest of all the serials, running to ten episodes). Many of these new productions featured Welsh actor Gareth Thomas as Sir Graham Forbes, the Head of Scotland Yard. Each of the new recordings was also released on CD.
Paul Temple's catchphrase, "by Timothy", is used in his first scene in episode one of Send for Paul Temple, in the first line he speaks. He is describing his response to criticism by a reader of his last book: “I said, ‘My dear madam, the story may be hackneyed, the psychology may be warped, the characters may be unpleasant - but, by Timothy! The spelling’s terrific!’”. Interviewed in 2005, Peter Coke said he hated the phrase, because even in the 1950s he thought it sounded old-fashioned.
In 1998, on the death of author Francis Durbridge, the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about Paul Temple written and presented by Jeffrey Richards, entitled Send For Paul Temple (aired 20 May 1998), which featured extracts from surviving recordings held in the BBC Sound Archive including from the first ever serial in 1938, and a new interview with Peter Coke.
List of radio serials