In November 1951, when John Long published Design for Murder, Francis Durbridge (1912–1998) had for many years been the most popular writer of mystery thrillers for BBC radio and was soon to make his mark on television and in the theatre. He remains best known as the creator of the novelist-detective Paul Temple, who first appeared in the 1938 BBC radio serial Send for Paul Temple. This was an immediate hit, and led to Paul and his wife Steve rapidly becoming cult figures of the airwaves in the sequels Paul Temple and the Front Page Men (1938), News of Paul Temple (1939), Paul Temple Intervenes (1942), Send for Paul Temple Again (1945) and many more. These first five radio serials were all novelised, published by John Long between 1938 and 1948, and most recently reissued in 2015 by Collins Crime Club.
In 1950 there was an interesting development in Durbridge’s career with the publication of Back Room Girl, a novel that was not based on any of his radio serials. He followed this in April 1951 with Beware of Johnny Washington, a rewrite of his first novel Send for Paul Temple with various plot changes and a new set of characters, including replacements for Paul and Steve.
From this it appears that in the early 1950s Durbridge was trying to widen his appeal to the reading public, and although his radio serials had made him a household name his books gave him the opportunity to be recognised as more than the creator of Paul Temple. This might also have been insurance against the slim possibility that after five novels some readers might have begun to tire of the Temples, which was a factor that shortly afterwards influenced Durbridge to create a brand of record-breaking television serials that deliberately excluded them.
Design for Murder, his next book, was the novelisation of his radio serial Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair. Originally broadcast from 17 October to 19 December 1946, its ten episodes made it the longest Temple serial. The plot was vintage Durbridge, with Sir Graham Forbes of Scotland Yard enlisting Temple’s help in investigating the murder of a young woman found in the sea off the Yorkshire coast. As always Temple is reluctant to become involved, until he finds the body of another young woman in his garage and the two murders are linked by the message ‘With the compliments of Mr Gregory’.
Given the passion for Durbridge on the continent, several European countries produced their own radio versions. In Holland it was broadcast as Paul Vlaanderen en het Gregory mysterie, in Germany it was Paul Temple und die affäre Gregory, in Denmark it was Gregory-mysteriet and in Italy it was Paul Temple e il caso Gregory. The BBC maintained for many years that the original UK ten-episode scripts had been lost, but several decades later a full set was recovered and used to re-create the serial for broadcast in 2013.
In respect of his books, however, Durbridge was keen to continue demonstrating his non-Temple credentials to his readers. So Design for Murder, instead of the Temples, features Detective Inspector Lionel Wyatt and his wife Sally who have retired to a smallholding in Kent. Wyatt has left the force with the nagging regret that he never succeeded in identifying and arresting the one person who merited the description ‘master criminal’, but soon his former chief convinces him that his arch-enemy is again terrorising Londoners with kidnappings and murders. The latest victim is Barbara Willis, found strangled in the sea off the Devon coast, and this has been linked with the disappearance of a policewoman whose body Wyatt later finds in his garage. As with the radio serial, in both cases there are cryptic messages – but this time it is ‘With the compliments of Mr Rossiter’. Although almost every character name is changed, the book follows the plot and dialogue of the radio serial very closely and Durbridge’s trademark cliffhangers make effective chapter endings.
Rather strangely, there have been two versions of this novel published in Germany. Schöne Grüße von Mister Brix appeared in 1961–62 as a serial in the magazine Bild und Funk, with yet another change of names as Inspector Richard Grant and his wife Margaret pursue Mr Brix! The slightly later version, Mr Rossiter empfiehlt sich, was a direct translation of Design for Murder with the Wyatts pursuing Mr Rossiter.
After Design for Murder Durbridge went on to produce many more novels. Apart from his standalone title The Pig-Tail Murder (1969), they consisted of two series that could always be assured of a devoted readership: the Paul Temple mysteries and novelisations of his phenomenally popular television serials. Paul Temple books continued to appear from 1957 to 1988, of which three were original novels and five were based on his radio serials, and sixteen of his television serials were also novelised between 1958 and 1982. There were two more books that showed Durbridge to have retained the art of recycling long after the 1950s, because Another Woman’s Shoes (1965) and Dead to the World (1967) were both originally Paul Temple radio serials (Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case and Paul Temple and the Jonathan Mystery respectively) that became non-Temple novels with new characters.
So there can be no doubt that this reprint of Design for Murder, a title that like Back Room Girl and Beware of Johnny Washington has been out of print for more than sixty-five years, is something of an event for Durbridge fans. Similarly, the bonus short story ‘Paul Temple’s White Christmas’ has not been reprinted since its publication in Radio Times on 20 December 1946 – the day after the final broadcast episode of Paul Temple and the Gregory Affair, which is mentioned in the story.
MELVYN BARNES
June 2017
Ex-Detective Inspector Lionel Mandeville Wyatt sat back and mopped his forehead. It was a warm July afternoon, and he was sitting at his roll-top desk, wrestling with the intricacies of a Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries form.
Even in his palmiest days at the Yard, Wyatt had been notoriously averse to what was known as desk work, and his hectic life during the war years had not helped him to concentrate his energies upon comparatively minor details.
His gaze strayed to the window and beyond, where the Kent orchards stirred gently in the hot wind, and there was a shimmery heat haze over the corrugated iron roofs of the sheds in a distant meadow. Away to the right he could see the ample figure of Fred Porter in the midst of a field of beans, hoeing slowly and methodically between the rows as if he had been doing it all his life. It seemed hard to believe that only a year ago Fred had been one of the most reliable drivers in Scotland Yard’s famous Flying Squad.
Wyatt had been quite surprised at the time when Fred Porter had asked him if he required any help on the small-holding he had bought. The Inspector proposed to retire there at the end of the war, following a series of operations on his right leg that had been badly burnt in a flying accident. Wyatt still limped quite noticeably, and at times leaned rather heavily on the walking-stick he took with him when he went out, but his general health had improved steadily ever since Sally had kept a careful eye on him in this pleasant little house.
He wished Sally were within call now, but she had gone to Faversham on her weekly shopping expedition, and would not be back until about tea-time. She understood more about the poultry on the holding than he would ever begin to learn. With a sigh, he tore a scrap of paper off a scribbling block and tried to work out how many ducks under six months old they had now.
Somehow he could never summon up much interest in poultry; on the other hand, bees had fascinated him right from the start. Sally said he seemed to enjoy getting stung, and he was always ready to spend an hour peering into the hive and watching its thousands of inmates minding their own business as avidly as any respectable citizen.
