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 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.
At the end of each tale, Paul, Steve and Sir Graham Forbes 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 succession of BBC Radio serials broadcast between 1938 and 1968, with several radio actors portraying the Temples. After the war the character 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 Cooke) and Marjorie Westbury, who starred together in every serial made between 1954 and 1968; Westbury had played the role in every serial aired between 1945 and 1954.
The radio series was a collaboration between writer Francis Durbridge and BBC producer Martyn C Webster, both of whom worked all of the 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 his proposal for a mystery series about a gentleman detective.
Initially the serials were broadcast on the service in the BBC Midlands Region service. As they gained in popularity, they were aired nationally instead on the Home Service. However, in 1945, they found a new permanent home on the Light Programme, which too was a national station, where they remained (save for occasional repeats on the Home Service) until the last serial in 1968. The introductory and closing music for the majority of the serials was Coronation Scot, composed by Vivian Ellis, though the earliest serials (those aired prior to December 1947) used an excerpt from Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Repeats of some serials continued to be 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 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 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 2006, 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.