David Flame is an adventurer.
It might be more accurate to label him as a traveling vigilante. As we are told in one of the televised adventures, "Flame's playground is the world. His diet? Adventure. His main aim in life? To bring to justice all those who abuse it."
In one of the blurbs for a printed escapade, we are told that "David Flame was always quick off the mark - he needed to be, very often to keep alive, in the strange profession which was his. When you spend your life fighting the crooked and the ungodly, on their own ground and with their own weapons, you can't afford to take much time off to think or to act. Flame had learnt this golden rule long since..."
An early one of these outings of his lets us know that "David Flame, aged twenty-eight, as tough as they come, as brown as a berry - for he had known the suns of the tropics-could think fast, could act fast . . . and possessed an instinct: an instinct for danger, for trouble. He and his pals called trouble fun; but whatever you call it, David had an instinct for it."
When we meet him initially, he is a civil engineer by profession and he has a contract to build a railway in a South American nation. It is while working there that his inclination to get involved in matters far afield from his day job comes out. He is particularly incensed at the cruelty and injustice he found in that small country's dictator. He would later find a reason to return to that continent to help a friend and in so doing, take up against that leader.
After that, he seems to go where he is asked to help out or offers to help when he happens to be somewhere there is trouble brewing. Either way, he and his two close friends find a lot of danger and excitement and a chance to defy the odds.
Those two friends are:
Tony Carstairs, 19 years old and initially an intern engineer working as Flame's assistant.
Ginger Johnson, a "thick-set, pugnacious" man nearly a decade older than Flame and his business partner and companion for many years.
It is often Carstairs who shows his youth through his impetuosity and it is Johnson who routinely demonstrates a caution before entering into any trouble but Flame is right in the middle, it seems, at all times. Flame is anxious for adventure but not foolhardy, which is why though he finds trouble all over the place, he invariably solves it.
In case there is some question as to why David Flame is a member of this compendium, it is because either he is asked by the Foreign Office to look into an international matter here or there, which is not uncommon, or he decides on his own.