Francis Durbridge - Send for Paul Temple

‘Yes!’ exclaimed Sir Graham. ‘And just at the moment, I should be considerably relieved to hear the last of Mr. Paul Temple. Ever since this confounded business started, people have been bombarding us with letters— “Send for Paul Temple!”’ His tones, impatient and bitter to start with, had gradually worked up into a fury. But he was prevented from going any further. As he finished his sentence, the door opened and Sergeant Leopold, his personal attendant, appeared. The Commissioner looked round, angry at being disturbed.

‘What is it, sergeant?’ he asked.

‘The map, sir,’ Sergeant Leopold replied. ‘Remember you asked me to—’

‘Oh, yes,’ the Commissioner interrupted him.

‘Put it on the desk, sergeant.’

Sergeant Leopold cleared a space on the fully loaded desk, and left the room. Instead of continuing his heated discussion the Commissioner opened the map and spread it flat over the top of his desk.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said, as the two officers stood up and bent over it. ‘This is a map covering the exact area in which, so far, the criminals have confined their activities.’ He pointed to the circles, and other marks, which had been neatly inscribed in the Map Room at Scotland Yard. ‘You will see the towns which have already been affected. Gloucester, Leicester, Derby, and Birmingham.’ He pointed to each of the four places in turn. ‘The map, as you see, starts at Nottingham and comes as far south as Gloucester…covering, in fact, the entire Midlands.’

The Commissioner stood back from the table. He flourished his hand with all the emphasis he might have used in addressing a large and important gathering.

‘Gentlemen, somewhere in that area are the headquarters of the greatest criminal organization in Europe. That organization must be smashed!’

The press of the country had seized on the idea of a mysterious gang holding the Midlands in its grasp, and were making the most of it. Both Spanish and Chinese War news had begun to grow wearisome. Moreover, news editors found it both difficult and tedious to try to follow the latest moves. Only an occasional heavy bombardment, the capture of a big city, or the sinking of a British ship could now be sure of reaching the front pages.

The mere killing of hundreds of men a day had long ceased to be news. There had not even been a really good murder story for months, and editors were falling back on such hardy annuals as Gretna Green and the ‘cat’ for their very large and strident headlines.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, the ‘Midland Mysteries’ arrived. The circulations of the evening papers immediately reached heights no national or international crisis could produce. Special investigators made their special investigations and produced lengthy summaries of what they had not been able to find out. Articles appeared by well-known psychologists, judges, the Chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform, and Mr. George Bernard Shaw.

Every newspaper produced different theories and suggested different methods of apprehending the criminals. One ran a competition for readers’ solutions. It was won by Mr. Ronald Garth, a Battersea bricklayer, who was convinced, in no very certain grammar or spelling, that the crimes were a put-up job and part of a new attempt to foster interest in A.R.P. He received a cheque for 10s. 6d.

On one point, however, all the newspapers were agreed. The urgent necessity of sending for Mr. Paul Temple. ‘Send for Paul Temple’ became almost a national slogan.

His name appeared on almost every poster in the city. His photograph was blazoned from the fronts of buses.

Scotland Yard remained quiet and merely writhed in exquisite agony. They did not enjoy the ‘Send for Paul Temple’ campaign. Nor did they enjoy reading the letters which reached them by the hundred every day instructing them, in the public’s interest, to—Send for Paul Temple!

All this publicity, however, was not without its value, for booksellers very quickly reported high sales for Paul Temple’s detective stories, and one of the more lurid of Sunday newspapers, hoping to scoop the rest, commissioned an article by Mr. Temple on the growing rat menace in Britain and paid him the record sum of £1,000 for it. Unhappily for them, on the day it appeared, another equally lurid Sunday newspaper published an article by Mr. Temple on the growing spy menace in Britain, which he had written five years before and for which he received £4 14s. 6d. after his agent, overjoyed at selling the ancient manuscript, had deducted his usual 25 per cent commission.

It had taken Paul Temple six years to rise from the dark obscurity of an unknown author to the limelight of a popular novelist. On coming down from Oxford he applied for a newspaper job and eventually became a reporter on one of the great London dailies. After twelve months of writing everything from gossip paragraphs to sports reports he became interested in criminology, and eventually started to specialise in ‘crime’ stories.

While still in Fleet Street, he tried his hand at the drama, and in 1929 his play, Dance, Little Lady , was produced at the Ambassadors Theatre. It ran for seven performances. In a fit of irritation, caused through the unexpected failure of his play, Paul Temple started his first thriller.

Death In The Theatre! appeared early the following year. It achieved a phenomenal success, and Paul Temple promptly left Fleet Street.

Oddly enough, Temple very quickly acquired a reputation as a criminologist. From time to time he had been asked by popular papers to investigate some sensational crime on their behalf. Thus, although it is not generally known, it was Paul Temple who was really responsible for the arrest of such notorious criminals as Toni Silepi, Guy Grinzman, and Tessa Jute.

On the subject of the present crimes, however, Paul Temple refused to be drawn. To the reporters who called to see him, he was invariably out of town. No telephone number or address could possibly be given. He was thought to be travelling in the Ukraine.

Several energetic reporters, however, went so far as to set up camp stools outside the big block of service flats in Golder’s Green where he stayed when in London. The only vacant flat in the building had already been engaged on a year’s lease at a rental of £460 (inclusive) by the Queen Newspaper Syndicate of America!

Meanwhile other reporters and photographers patrolled the grounds of Bramley Lodge, Paul Temple’s country house not far from Evesham.

Bramley Lodge was an extensive old Elizabethan house which Paul Temple had secured at a very low figure owing to its poor condition. He had managed to have it partially rebuilt without completely ruining the beautiful façade, the old oak beams and other ancient features of the building. In addition, central heating had been installed, tennis courts laid, and a rather delightful rockery planned. Altogether, Paul Temple had contrived to make Bramley Lodge a very comfortable place.

All these alterations had done nothing to spoil it, and Paul Temple was often asked by artist friends (and strangers) as well as photographers, for permission to make some permanent record of the lovely old mansion. Only to Surrealists did he refuse.

The house was set in the middle of a large park with a drive fringed by luxurious old beech trees to the main Warwick Road below. About the exact size of his grounds, Temple felt rather dubious. He had bought a half-inch Ordnance Survey map only a few weeks before and by dint of laborious calculation and lengthy use of compasses and dividers, discovered that he possessed eighty-five acres of very pleasant land. But his confidence in his own mathematical knowledge was not exactly great. (‘When I was at Rugby, my marks for mathematics used to be 8 per cent with the most monotonous regularity,’ he used to tell his friends.) He had not yet remembered to pass the problem on to more mathematically minded friends and as in addition, all the papers concerning the estate were ‘locked away somewhere’, he had only very vague ideas about his own property.