Richard Carnac Temple

Sir Richard Carnac Temple was a military officer and writer born in 1950. He served in the Indian Army as Lieutenant Colonel and held positions as Cantoment Magistrate in the Punjab and Assistant Commissioner of Burma.

In his time as Superintendent of the Penal Settlement at Port Blair, Temple became the authority on the Andoman islanders, co-writing a book on their language. Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes' comments about the islanders in The Sign of the Four on Temple's work.

Temple believed something grand and terrible was at work in the Order of the White Peacock, which he believed originated not among the Yezidi but in China. He described this in his commentary to R. W. H. Empson's book The Cult of the Peacock Angel. Through this opinion, he inspired the character Denis Nayland Smith from Sax Rohmer's 1914-15 Fu Manchu story The Devil Doctor.

Temple died in 1931. (PROSE: The Book of the War)