CHARLES BISHOP

Charles Bishop is an agent with MI6.

Considering the ease with which he handles himself at Vauxhall Cross, Bishop has considerable experience in that occupation; Bishop moves about the place as though he belongs and as if he has been here for some time. The same things goes for the way he jokes with, teases and is teased by his boss. What comes across is that Bishop is not only comfortable in his job, he is enjoying it a great deal.

There are a couple of key points that we will learn early on about Bishop and which we will find reinforced on many, many occasions in the recorded adventures that we have of him.

The first is that Bishop is a fan of the finer things that money can buy. He drives a brand new black Audi. He wears bespoke suits with expensive Italian shoes. One person he was interrogating comments that Bishop looked more like a catwalk model than an MI6 agent and Bishop took that opinion as not only true but also appreciated.

The second is that in keeping with the stereotypical role as a ladies' man, Bishop does his best to prove the rule, not the exception. "Bishop was no male vestal virgin. His skills with the opposite sex had been used many times to entice informants to supply critical information. They may have been traitors, but they were satisfied traitors. Using sex as a weapon wasn't something Bishop was especially proud of, but he had obtained indispensable intelligence for the United Kingdom. Besides, no one had been killed, and he always made sure the informer was well taken care of. In more ways than one." According to fellow agent Eva Destruction, Bishop is "like the human equivalent of Pepe Le Pew", not an exactly sterling endorsement.

Putting these two facts togethers we find Bishop "looked like Cary Grant, with Frank Sinatra's swagger. Three-piece suit, tailored to perfection, chiseled jaw, blonde cropped hair and an incandescent smile." Again using Eva's own words, "Bishop was smoking hot".

But all the good looks, style, flair, and charm will not keep an agent alive for very long in the field and Bishop has been an adept in the field for some time and that shows there is a lot more to Bishop than people normally see. Bishop is an experienced agent because Bishop, for all his swagger, is also very good at being an agent.

We meet Charles Bishop as a support, albeit a very important one, character in the Eva Destruction series, playing a major role in three of that woman's adventures. Then the author, apparently, decided to give him his own series and the three books we then got of his adventures came out. These solo adventures take place before the Eva ones.

Bishop is, as I mentioned above, very much a stereotypical British agent and that comes out as totally on purpose by the author. It is obvious to me that the author, Dave Sinclair, wanted his agent to be everything a reader would expect a stereotype to be. Moreover, the author sure reads like he had a blast making him that way. Certainly I as a reader had a blast following him that way.