Ishmael Jones is an agent with the Organization.
I would normally put the description of this individual in my own words but I really like the synopsis he gives of himself:
"Call me Ishmael. Ishmael Jones.
"I go walking in dangerous places, and if I do my job right no one ever knows I'm there. I work for an organization that doesn't officially exist, dealing with all the weird and unnatural things that shouldn't exist in any sane and rational world. It's my job to deal with what lurks in the shadows, on the borders of the rational, and stamp on them hard if they look like getting out of hand. To keep Humanity safe, and blissfully unaware of just how big the world really is.
"Back in 1963 a star fell from the heavens to land in an English field. Or, to put it another way, an alien starship dropped screaming from the outer dark and buried itself in the earth. Before I left the cracked-open ship its transformation machines made me human, right down to my DNA, so I could walk the Earth unobserved. But the machines were damaged in the crash, and they wiped all my previous memories.
"Of who and what I used to be.
"I haven't aged a day since I first came to myself, staggering bewildered across a forgotten field, in 1963. I like to think of myself as human. It's all I ever want to be. But sometimes in my dreams I look into my mirror and catch glimpses of something else looking back at me ... Then I wake up screaming.
"Together with my partner and my love, Penny Belcourt, I solve mysteries and protect people from all the monsters of the hidden world. And sometimes from the monsters inside people.
"I walk among you, but I'm not one of you. Which is probably why I'm so good at seeing things and people for what they really are."
Working beside Jones on his adventures for the Organization is the lovely and quite resourceful and always interesting Penny Belcourt, a young woman that Jones meets and falls for in the first recorded story. Of his first impressions on her he notes, "Penelope Belcourt had long dark hair, flashing dark eyes, a pretty face with a good bone structure, seriously dramatic make-up, and a smile that suggested there wasn't much she took seriously. As though the whole world was one big joke laid on for her entertainment. Just standing still, she burned with barely-suppressed nervous energy. Like someone who had a lot to give and was just looking for the right person to give it to. She was dressed fashionably, but sensibly, for a weekend in the winter countryside. No jewelry, as though she didn't want anything about her that might distract you from looking at her."
Together they make a very interesting and fun pair to follow. They both work for the Colonel, a man who exudes an air of power and danger and who met Jones fifteen years before the first adventure and makes him an offer to work for a group he runs called the Organization. "Whatever that might be. Some day, I hope to find out exactly who and what I'm working for. It would be nice to know. But as long as the Colonel continues to protect me from all the people who want to find me; and as long as he keeps pointing me in the direction of really bad people who need taking down; and as long as he keeps paying me really good money to do it ... I'm happy to go along."
Prior to the Colonel and his offer of employment, Jones had worked for "Black Heir", described by the Colonel as "the United Kingdom's very own department for alien affairs. Real aliens, that is. Visitors from Beyond, and all that. They will keep coming here, even if no one on Earth knows why. Someone has to clean up the mess they leave behind and cover up the damage when things get out of hand. The general public is much better off not knowing who and what walks among them, unseen. I was given to understand that you had a really good track record at Black Heir. A real gift for tracking down those who had gone ... off reservation. And for keeping a lid on things, with a deft and only occasionally violent hand." Jones left Black Heir when someone "higher up the political good chain decided that the old ways, of containment and observation and handing out the occasional spanking, just wasn't good enough."
The work that Jones and Penny do is a cross between what a secret agent would do and what a private eye would do but is always unusual and thrilling.