Johnny Fedora

Johnny Fedora is a fictional British secret agent who was the protagonist of 16 novels published between 1951 and 1984. Written by Shaun Lloyd McCarthy, under the pseudonym of Desmond Cory, Fedora was dubbed by literary critics as the 'thinking man's James Bond'. Preceding Bond, Fedora was also a hired assassin ("hired to kill"), but for many the Fedora plots were more complex and intellectual. The son of a Spanish father and Irish mother, Fedora was driven as much by a need to avenge the death of his parents as by patriotism or loyalty to British Intelligence. The debonair Fedora was always a tough and competent agent, and his first adventures were written in a more light-hearted manner than the latter ones. The final books in the series featured his nemesis, Feramontov, a deadly and highly skilled Russian agent, whose ruthlessness went as far as trying to detonate a nuclear bomb.