Roger Wagner is an agent with the CIA.
We are told in a blurb for the first recorded adventure that he was "CIA supersleuth with a gift for wry jokes - and too smart for his own good". That last complaint was nothing new to Wagner as he had heard it, or of it, in one form or another for years as he went about earning the accolades which had amassed to earn him 'supersleuth' status. And there had been quite a few of those years by the time we initially meet him.
It is in that moment that we learn he had reached, as he put it, the period of his "final obsolescence". Now as the world moved into the new decade of the 80s, he would occasionally look back at the Agency's - and his - golden years. He missed those days, he admitted to himself even as he had an "awareness of the anachronism he now represented".
"The CIA was now a country day school, an amalgam of computer babies and Brahminism on the half-shell. There was no longer room for the Roger Watners, those Error Flynns who'd swing from ship to ship with cutlasses in their teeth. The cloaks were not double-knits, the daggers were now ballpoint pens".
He may feel his best days, as well as that of the Agency, were behind him, Wagner nevertheless still insists on doing his job to the very best of his abilities, which are considerable. Even when, in the second recorded adventure, he has retired with his new wife and was settling down, he would not be too reticent to climb back into the saddle for yet one more ride.
Good Lines:
- Calling in to check in with his handlers after finishing a report, Wagner tells a friend on the other end of the line, "Wagner. I am going to my hotel now. I may commit suicide" to which the friend chirped, "Well, have fun!"
- When it is pointed out by an informant that Wagner was not too concerned to learn of a plan to assassinate the sitting President, Wagner observed, "Vote for one President, you've voted for them all".