Dominic Flandry
Flandry is a dashing field agent of the Imperial Intelligence Corps who travels the stars to fight off imminent threats to the empire from both external enemies and internal treachery.
His long-time archenemy is Aycharaych, a cultured but ruthless telepathic spymaster who weaves plots for the expansionist rival empire of the alien Merseians.
The illegitimate son of a minor nobleman, Flandry rises to considerable power within the decadent Empire by his own wits, and enjoys all the pleasures his position in society gives him.
He can cheerfully deceive, seduce, and blackmail; in A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, he orders the mind-probing of his traitorous illegitimate son, reducing him to a vegetative state, and bombards Aycharaych's uninhabited homeworld into radioactive ruin in part for vengeance, as Aycharaych's latest plot had resulted in the death of the woman he loved and planned to marry.
He also appears – with Anderson's permission – in the novel The Dark Dimensions (1971), part of the John Grimes series written by A. Bertram Chandler.
Similar to the James Bond stories (which started two years later), every new adventure brings Flandry another beautiful damsel to woo and rescue.
The women are of many different backgrounds – Queens and haughty aristocrats as well as slaves and peasants, courtesans as well as blushing virgins, and at least two alluring non-human female; but they all tend to be brave, intelligent and resourceful and to lend significant help to the success of Flandry's mission.
[8] And in one case, Flandry's current lover and partner gets herself and her entire family freed of slavery and settled on a piece of land, a suitable recompense for seeing him depart at the end of his mission.
But Kathryn – though far from indifferent to Flandry's charms – remains steadfastly loyal to her husband, and eventually chooses to join his exile far outside the Empire's boundaries.
Several centuries before Flandry, the well-meant expedition to Merseia by Anderson's earlier character David Falkayn is the rough equivalent of Admiral Perry's opening of Japan to the West in 1854.
