Michael Brooks is an agent for the British Secret Service.
He is also a lovable rogue, as they would say in olden days, but a man who saw more as a young man than he would like to remember and has done a good job of forgetting most of it, or pretending to.
During WWII, he had lied about his age to get into the military and then served with enough distinction to get noticed as someone with brass and skill. He was transferred to an infiltration unit where he received specialized training in stealth, blending in, bomb making, and other handy tricks to survive behind enemy lines. Then he parachuted into occupied Holland and began working with the Resistance. His work there was highly successful though he was forced to do things that he would rather have not, and he was made to decide to do them without hesitation.
With the end of the war came the end of the need for men such as he, or so he thought. He went back to school for a while and then took a job in the white collar world where he was almost instantl bored. He expected that was where he would always be, bored and restless with no hope of the excitement he had known, until the day he died.
But it was someone else who died. An aunt who had a nice nest egg and a fond memory of Brooks passed away and left him a tidy inheritance. It was not a huge one but it was enough, he felt, that he could afford a break with his boring life. He spent a good chunk of it on a beautiful sloop named the Ariadne and then he quit his day job. He was determined that he would spend his days as a writer, sailing as needed to relaxation and inspiration. He was suddenly a lot happier.
The same could not be said for Janet, the woman he loved and wanted to bed and who loved him and wanted to wed. She was already a writer of sorts being a reported for a Fleet Street newspaper and she was stunned that he would give up a good paying job to just float about. She wanted to be his wife and she wanted a stable homefront, one that didn't rock with the tides. The fact that Brooks had already written and sold several short stories to magazines didn't count.
That is how things stood at the start of the series, when Brooks was onboard his boat trying to seduce Janet and she was there to convince him to marry her and life took a strange turn for both of them. Soon Brooks would, at age 38, make another career change as the British Secret Service would take note of how well he handled the matters in the first book and offer him a job making use of te skills he had learned almost two decades before and he, sensing the action and adventure that was likely, accepted.
Janet, however, did not go away. She had no love of his new profession and even less love of the luscious Deirdre that Brooks would soone become entangled with in his job and she sticks around to keep him straight and more than once to save his behind.