Oakes is mistakenly recruited into a British spy agency despite being a coward who wants to be left alone.
He features in eight novels over an eleven year period and eventually becomes the head of the agency.
He appears in eleven novels: The Liquidator (1964), Understrike (1965), Amber Nine (1966), Madrigal (1967), Founder Member (1969), Traitor's Exit (1970), The Airline Pirates (1970), published in the U.S. as Air Apparent, and A Killer for a Song (1975).
He also appears in the short stories A Handful of Rice and Corkscrew in Hideaway (1968) and in the short stories Boysie Oakes and The Explosive Device and Sunset At Paleokastritsa in The Assassination File (1974).
The first novel in the series, The Liquidator, was made into a feature film of the same name in 1965, starring Rod Taylor as Boysie Oakes.