This is taken from The Times:

Ernest Dudley
July, 23, 1908 - February 1, 2006
Writer and broadcaster whose tales of the autocratic detective Dr Morelle were a hit of the wartime BBC

ERNEST DUDLEY was best known as the creator of the psychiatrist-sleuth Dr Morelle and as the host of the radio series Armchair Detective in the 1940s and 1950s. However, in a working life which lasted more than 80 years, he also worked as an actor and a journalist and wrote books on a wide range of subjects.

Vivian Ernest Coltman-Allen was born in 1908 in Dudley, near Wolverhampton, where his father was a doctor. Childhood illness prevented him from going to school, and he was educated privately.

After the First World War his father, who had served as an Army surgeon, bought a rundown inn in Cookham, Berkshire — and the 11-year-old Ernest was expected to help out in his free time. At 16 he was sent to a religious boarding school but had an unhappy time and a year later he left to become an actor — “to meet girls,” as he put it.

He joined a group of touring actors, performing Shakespeare in ramshackle venues in rural Ireland for a pittance under the unsteady hand of an often inebriated manager. It was during this time that he developed the decidedly left-wing sympathies which would stay with all his life, and he changed his surname to the more egalitarian-sounding Dudley.

He moved on to a better theatre company, where he worked with the young Rex Harrison and where his pay and surroundings improved accordingly. He also met and, in 1930, married Jane Grahame, an actress from a theatrical family.

Although Dudley eventually appeared in the West End and on Broadway, he decided that he had reached the limits of his theatrical talents and, availing himself of his wife’s Fleet Street connections, moved into journalism.

He worked for various newspapers, as a boxing correspondent, crime reporter, jazz critic and gossip columnist. At one point he was the nightclub correspondent for the Daily Mail, a position which allowed him to indulge his taste for the high life.

In one scoop he described how he helped Fred Astaire to create a new dance step. He also wrote and lectured on subjects ranging from wildlife to crime and, while still in his twenties, he was giving drama classes at Goldsmiths College (University of London).

Dudley was not deemed fit for active service, and spent most of the war as a journalist. He had already worked regularly for the BBC in the 1930s, and during the war he sent out coded messages for Allied forces and agents during broadcasts — an activity he was always reluctant to discuss, even in later life.

His big break came while working in the BBC’s Variety Department in Bristol during the war when he was asked to write a crime series.

Dudley dreamt up Dr Morelle, based on his memories of the director and actor Erich von Stroheim. He had also been asked to find a comedy role in the series for a fine young actress — Jane Grahame. His bosses were unaware of the connection, and Dudley happily complied with their request.

Dr Morelle made his debut on Monday Night at Eight in July 1942. The series was an immediate hit, and Dudley’s autocratic protagonist went on to feature in 14 novels, more than 100 short stories, a play and a film.

At the same time he launched a weekly series, The Armchair Detective, in which he reviewed the latest detective novels and dramatised a chapter from each.

The series ran until the late 1950s, when Dudley transferred to BBC television to present Judge for Yourself, an early example of audienceparticipation programming.

He had written his first book in 1939: Mr Walker Wants to Know, a spin-off from the popular radio series he had written for the actor Sid Walker. His second and third books were collections of Dr Morelle short stories. In 1947 he published Menace for Dr Morelle, the first of the 14 novels about the character. The series concluded with Nightmare for Dr Morelle (1960).

Alongside his detective stories Dudley also wrote a handful of historical non-fiction novels, including The Scarlett Widow (1957) and The Face of Death (1958). In 1959 his thriller The Whistling Sands was adapted for television; but it did not lead to more work in that medium, perhaps because, as The Times wrote, “an idea of agreeably Gothic possibilities was frittered away in a series of drably written, slackly directed scenes.”

Dudley’s radio and television work offered innocently wholesome family entertainment of a kind which in the early 1960s was beginning to be overtaken by changing tastes which he did not share. However, he was perhaps ahead of his time in warning about the dangers of the increasingly explicit images then becoming more widely available.

Eschewing television in the following decades, he turned to writing a long series of animal books, including Rangi — Highlands Rescue Dog (1970), Arthur (1970) about the TV advertisement cat that ate from a tin with its paw, and Rufus: The Remarkable True Story of a Tamed Fox (1972).

Dudley’s interests in historical non-fiction and in animals came together in Chance and the Fire Horses (1972), a yarn about a dog that became attached to the fire brigade in Victorian London and was a favourite of the Prince of Wales.

Dudley was a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast — his wife’s stepfather had played the character on stage — and his stage play, The Return Of Sherlock Holmes, was successfully staged and taken on tour in 1993, with Michael Cashman as Holmes.

In 2002 a US publisher began to reprint some of his best detective novels, including a number of Dr Morelle adventures. More recently the large-print publisher F. A. Thorpe featured Dudley’s detective novels in its Linford Mystery series.

Dudley wrote to the end of his life and he had recently finished his last novelette, The Beetle. Featuring Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin, it was based on a BBC radio play, The Flies of Isis, and was accepted for a Canadian anthology of Poe’s Dupin stories.

Dudley suffered occasionally from depression and, in his late sixties, having been told it would help, took up running. He became an enthusiastic athlete, which helped him to cope with the death of his wife in the early 1980s, and he ran five London marathons and three New York marathons. He also wrote the autobiographical Run for Your Life (1985).

Although Dudley did not collaborate easily with others, having very firm ideas and being sensitive to criticism, his friends described him as wonderfully theatrical, with old-fashioned manners. He was entertaining and charming, especially with women. Never loud in company, he was always happy to share anecdotes from his long life.

He is survived by his daughter.

Ernest Dudley, writer and broadcaster, was born on July, 23, 1908. He died on February 1, 2006, aged 97.