Claud Eustace Teal is a fictional character who made many appearances in a series of novels, novellas and short stories by Leslie Charteris featuring The Saint, starting in 1929. A common spelling variation of his first name in reference works and websites is Claude, however in his works Charteris uses the spelling without the 'e'. At some point, Teal received a promotion to Chief Inspector and he is identified with this rank for the first time in the short story collection The Brighter Buccaneer.