Paul Temple

Paul Temple
First appearance	Send for Paul Temple (1938)
Created by	Francis Durbridge
Portrayed by	Carl Bernard Hugh Morton Barry Morse Howard Marion Crawford Kim Peacock Peter Coke Anthony Hulme John Bentley Francis Matthews Crawford Logan
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Author, detective
Spouse(s)	Louise ("Steve") Temple
Nationality	English

Paul Temple is a fictional character, created by English writer Francis Durbridge (1912–1998). Temple is a professional author of crime fiction and an amateur private detective. Together with his journalist wife Louise, affectionately known as Steve after her pen name "Steve Trent", he solves whodunnit crimes through subtle, humorously articulated deduction. Always the gentleman, the strongest oath he ever utters is "by Timothy".

Created for the BBC radio serial Send for Paul Temple in 1938, the Temples have featured in over 30 BBC radio dramas, 12 , four British feature films, a BBC television series, and several novels. A Paul Temple comic strip ran in the London Evening News from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.

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. 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. Some elements of the plot had already been explained during the serial, while others were occasionally never fully explained, due to limitations of time.

The Paul Temple characters and formula were developed in a succession of BBC radio serials broadcast between 1938 and 1968, with several voice actors portraying the Temples. The longest running team, and the most popular with audiences, was Peter Coke (pronounced Cooke) and Marjory Westbury, who starred together in every serial made between 1954 and 1968 — and Marjory Westbury also co-starred as Steve Temple in every serial aired between 1945 and 1954.

...
Wikipedia