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 (and almost exclusively referred to) 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.

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. In many of the serials, the perpetrator in question had been operating under an assumed name, as the mastermind of complex criminal operations in the shadows while meeting Temple openly under their true identity.

At the end of each tale, Paul, Steve and Sir Graham Forbes of Scotland Yard 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.

The Paul Temple characters and formula were developed in a series of BBC Radio serials broadcast between 1938 and 1968, with various actors portraying the Temples. In the initial post-war period the detective 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 Cook) and Marjorie Westbury, who starred together in every serial made between 1954 and 1968; Westbury had held the role of Steve since 1945.

The supporting characters of Sir Graham Forbes and the Temples' cockney butler Charlie were also repeatedly recast. Lester Mudditt was the longest lasting Sir Graham, playing the part from 1939 to 1958. He was replaced by Richard Williams, (who had previously voiced Paul in the 1944 version of News of Paul Temple), then James Thomason. Gareth Thomas of Blake's 7 fame essayed the role for the Crawford Logan-Gerda Stevenson remakes.

The radio series was a collaboration between writer Francis Durbridge and BBC producer Martyn C Webster, both of whom worked on all of the Paul Temple 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 a proposal for a mystery series about a gentleman detective.