Ludovic Fender is an agent with the Central Crimes Bureau.
Though his first name points to a foreign background, Fender is as British as them come and more so than most. He is also a firmly entrenched member of the Intelligence community, now working for the rather mysterious branch known as the CCB. He is by no means a young man when the six-book series begins and he reaches and passes retirement age during the series run. Retirement is not for Fender, however, as someone with his incredible insight is always in demand.
The Central Crimes Bureau sounds like it should be a division inside Scotland Yard but though the two agencies work together often, albeit frequently testily, they are quite different. The CCB was created because there was a growing gap in enforcement circles with the globalization of crime. MI5 and MI6 were both devoted to spy craft, defensive and offensive. Scotland Yard and Special Branch were geared towards fighting criminals on their own soil. To take on international crime organizations with ties to other underworld groups as well as terrorists and foreign enemies, Britain needed a very special team.
Moreover, the CCB was a way to look for and find people in these various branches of intelligence and law enforcement who might not be maintaining a path along the straight and narrow. Since many of them wield considerable power and others are trained to work in secret and shadows, should they decide to go bad, it is very hard to find them out. That is where specialist like Fender comes in.
Ludo, as is known to many, is one of their most experienced agents. He is also one of the most unlikely appearing hunters-of-men you might imagine, although if you look at a bloodhound in the idle, it may be just as hard to imagine how determined it might be in hunting prey. That is definitely the case with Fender. But he truly does not look like he is dangerous. He is fat. He is hardly young or even close to middle age. He is not prone to swift action or demonstrative acts. He looks like, well, anything but a hunter of bad spies.
He does change a tad over the years of the six recorded adventures. He goes from grossly overweight to just being fat. He goes from being near retirement age to actually saying goodbye to his beloved office, though situations call him back. But he never loses that incredible brain of his and his ability to almost smell the truth. Like the bloodhound.