Tommy Hambledon

Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon (Tommy Hambledon) is the fictional protagonist of 26 spy novels written by the British author Manning Coles from 1940 through 1963. Tommy is a youthful teacher in a British boarding school in his first appearance in Drink to Yesterday and, during school vacations, a spy in Germany for the Foreign Office. At the end of this unremittingly grim book, which takes place in World War I, he disappears at sea and is presumed dead. He reappears as the hero of the next book, Pray Silence (published in the United States as Toast to Tomorrow), which begins in the 1920s and is somewhat more light-hearted in tone. Hambledon, who speaks perfect German, is an amnesiac in Munich who believes he is actually a German and gradually works his way up in the fledgling Nazi Party. As he and Adolf Hitler watch the flames of the Reichstag fire in 1933, Hambledon suddenly recovers his memory — just as Hitler appoints him Chief of Police. For the next five years Hambledon attempts to carry on his new duties while simultaneous battling to sabotage Hitler and some of his plans. At the end of the book, as his situation becomes increasingly untenable, he fakes his own death in Danzig and stows away on an English cargo ship bound for Cardiff. Snug on the ship, he listens on the radio to Hitler himself giving the eulogy at his funeral.

Safe in England after an absence of more than 20 years, Hambledon continues his career as an intelligence agent throughout World War II. In They Tell No Tales (1941), he is faced with the problem of a series of unexplained sinkings of ships not long out of harbour in Portsmouth. In Green Hazard (1945), perhaps his finest adventure, the Gestapo mistake him for a Professor Ulseth, the supposed inventor of a new and extremely powerful high explosive, and kidnap him from Switzerland. He then finds himself once again in Berlin, where he has to fool his hosts into believing that he actually knows something about chemistry while praying that they will fail to recognise a prominent former colleague.

After the war, Hambledon continues his career in the Foreign Office and helps defeat a number of Communist plots. In these later adventures, he is frequently aided by Forgan and Campbell, a semi-comic team of model-makers from the Clerkenwell Road in London, who first appear in A Brother for Hugh (1947). In this and some of the other subsequent novels, Hambledon plays a fairly minor role — in The Man in the Green Hat (1955), for instance, he hardly appears in the first half of the book.