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FRANCIS Henry Durbridge (1912–1998) was arguably the most popular writer of mystery thrillers for BBC radio and television from the 1930s to the 1970s, after which he enjoyed a successful career as a stage dramatist. His radio serials are regularly repeated today, while his stage plays remain among the staple fare of amateur and professional theatre companies.
He was born in Kingston upon Hull and educated at Bradford Grammar School, Wylde Green College and Birmingham University, and as an undergraduate he began to pursue his schoolboy ambition to become a writer. Although he later worked briefly in a stockbroker’s office, his career as a full-time writer was assured by the BBC in the early 1930s when he responded to the broadcaster’s voracious appetite by providing comedy plays, children’s stories, musical libretti and numerous short sketches.
It was nevertheless his first two serious radio dramas, Promotion and Murder in the Midlands, that showed the sort of scriptwriting he particularly favoured. In 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he established himself in the crime fiction field when the BBC broadcast his serial Send for Paul Temple. Listeners ecstatically submitted over 7,000 requests for more, no doubt finding his light touch and characteristic ‘cliff-hangers’ a welcome distraction from worries about the gathering storm in Europe. Almost immediately Durbridge became one of the foremost writers of radio thrillers, with a prolific output that he further expanded by sometimes using the pseudonyms Frank Cromwell, Nicholas Vane and Lewis Middleton Harvey. To place him in context, in the mid-twentieth century his closest comparators were Edward J. Mason and Lester Powell (both coincidentally born the same year as Durbridge), together with Ernest Dudley, Alan Stranks and Philip Levene.
Send for Paul Temple was broadcast in eight episodes from 8 April to 27 May 1938. In this first case for the novelist-detective he meets newspaper reporter Steve Trent, who tells him that she has changed her name from Louise Harvey in order to pursue a gang of jewel thieves. The murder of her brother, a Scotland Yard man, unites Temple and Steve in their determination to unmask the Knave of Diamonds. That achieved, they create crime fiction history by deciding to marry—thus securing a quick return to the airwaves in Paul Temple and the Front Page Men in the autumn of 1938 and thereafter cementing their position as a mainstay of the BBC.
The early Paul Temple radio serials were adapted as books from the outset, but Durbridge’s first five novelisations were collaborations with another author because at that time he regarded himself as essentially a writer of dialogue, a scriptwriter rather than a novelist. Send for Paul Temple was published by John Long in June 1938, so it was presumably written while the radio serial was being broadcast and was intended to capitalise on the serial’s success. It was described in newspaper advertisements at the time as ‘the novel of the thriller that created a BBC fan-mail record’, and it was made Book of the Month by the Crime Book Society. The co-author was identified as John Thewes, although today it is widely believed that this was a pseudonym of Charles Hatton (who used his own name when collaborating on the next four Paul Temple novels). There is further evidence that Durbridge saw the wider potential of Send for Paul Temple, because he adapted it as a stage play produced in Birmingham in 1943 and also co-wrote the screenplay of the 1946 film version.
The Paul Temple serials proved to be Durbridge’s most enduring work for the radio, and they continued until 1968. One could easily assume that in the twenty-first century they might be regarded as passé, but today the Temples have been re-introduced to radio listeners through repeats of the surviving original recordings and new productions of the ‘lost’ serials, and there is a continuing market in printed books, e-books, CDs, DVDs and downloads. A new generation, together with those feeling nostalgic, can follow the exploits of the urbane detective who is constantly faced with bombs concealed in packages or booby-trapped ‘radiograms’, who deplores violence except in self-defence, and who never uses bad language but regularly utters the oath ‘By Timothy!’ The appeal seems undiminished, irrespective of the fact that the Durbridge milieu of Thames houseboats, expensive apartments, luxury sports cars and sophisticated cocktails must surely be alien to the lives of many among his present day audience.
The Temples were by no means the only protagonists created for radio audiences by Francis Durbridge. Among others was Johnny Washington, who appeared in eight episodes from 12 August to 30 September 1949 entitled Johnny Washington Esquire. This was not a serial, but a run of complete thirty-minute plays described as ‘the adventures of a gentleman of leisure’, with a young American scoring barely legal coups in Robin Hood style at the expense of London underworld characters. Of particular interest was the fact that Johnny was played by the Canadian actor Bernard Braden, who before his move to the UK had played the title role in the Canadian radio version of Send for Paul Temple in 1940.
Given Durbridge’s astuteness in maximising the commercial opportunities provided by his plot ideas, he would have wanted to get Johnny Washington Esquire into book form while its success on the radio was still fresh. His problem was that the radio series would be unsuitable as a novel, as it consisted of eight separate stories. The popular central character could nevertheless still be used in a full-length book, which resulted in John Long publishing Beware of Johnny Washington in April 1951.
Rather than produce a new and original novel, Durbridge took his 1938 book Send for Paul Temple and re-wrote it, with every character name changed and Johnny Washington instead of Paul Temple joining reporter Verity Glyn instead of Steve Trent in the hunt for her brother’s killer. In the ‘new’ book, Johnny is framed by a gang of criminals who leave visiting cards bearing his name on their crime scenes. Although usually an object of police suspicion, Johnny has to side reluctantly with the law in order to clear his name, protect the threatened Verity and identify the ruthless gang leader who calls himself Grey Moose.
So why did Durbridge re-cycle his earlier book in this way? It is unlikely that he was so dissatisfied with Send for Paul Temple that he made a purposeful attempt to improve upon it, because it had already achieved a classic status and had been reprinted several times (and indeed is still in print today). The obvious answer must surely be that Durbridge needed to use the Johnny Washington character before the name was forgotten, given the fact that he was to write no more Washington plays for the radio, and it was therefore necessary to act with the minimum of delay. It is also likely that he was trying to widen his appeal to the reading public, and was keen to secure recognition for more than his creation of the Temples. There could even have been a degree of insurance against the slim possibility that after five Paul Temple novels some readers might have begun to tire of them, which was one of the factors that from 1952 onwards encouraged Durbridge to create a brand of record-breaking television serials that deliberately excluded the Temples.
In the case of his novels, he was nevertheless careful to keep all his options open. Paul Temple books continued to appear from 1957 to 1988 (three were original and five were based on his radio serials); sixteen of his television serials were novelised between 1958 and 1982; and he wrote two stand-alone novels (Back Room Girl in 1950 and The Pig-Tail Murder in 1969) plus several novellas as newspaper serials. In addition it must be said that Beware of Johnny Washington was not the only example of re-cycling, as his novels Design for Murder (1951), Another Woman’s Shoes (1965) and Dead to the World (1967) were all originally Paul Temple radio serials that became non-Temple books with recycled plots—although only one of these, Beware of Johnny Washington, had also appeared as a separate Temple book.
In spite of its history, or perhaps because of it, Beware of Johnny Washington remains of considerable interest to Durbridge enthusiasts. It is a good solid thriller with many of the author’s typical elements and trademark twists and turns, written in a smooth and readable style that improves upon the slightly stilted early Temple novelisations. While it follows the storyline
