Character Profile - The Commander
Appears in: All Novels in the Series
Who is he?
When we first meet the Commander in the opening scenes of 'Hainault', our first impression is of a tough stubborn commanding officer of the Haychester Division of the Department of National Security & Civil Defence.
Indeed one of the first things we see him do is to very unceremoniously fire his deputy! That is where the lady who makes such an impact on his life, Commander Tracy Caverner enters his life and changes him forever.
Later in the series, we learn that he is a far more complex individual than he makes out to be with a very secretive past that comes back to haunt him with potentially fatal results.
Characterisations:
Healthy eating is a mysterious concept to the Commander as we seeing him almost constantly surviving on an endless diet of chips, cakes and biscuits, a trait he has inherited from the author and is used to great comic effect and key points throughout the series.
Other features of the character are a strong sense of duty and honour but still ready to bend the occasional rule here and there to get the job done. We also later see him get the girl when, much to the relief of everyone, he marries Tracy Caverner at the end of Waterloo.
Inspired by:
The Commander is a complex mix of characteristics from the various people I have met over the years, and had been in development for the best part of twenty years on and off.
His diet belongs to me - sorry! Also from me he gets his fear of heights, the rest of him comes from elsewhere though. If someone waved a gun at me, I'd probably duck!
Known Associates:
The Commander makes up one quarter of the the infamous 'Four Commanders of the Apocalypse', the only four officers who survived the Hainault Inquiry massacre that forms the background story for the first novel in the series.
He also has the respect and ear of a number of highly positioned members of society ranging from the senior most Security Service personnel through to Prime Ministers, the chief of MI5 (who we meet for the first time in Moor Park) and even links to more shadowy figures, particularly in the East London organised crime fraternity, about which we discover more from Waterloo onwards.
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