The Secret Agent

Mr. Verloc

Verloc sells dubious photographs and sundries from a Soho storefront while quietly serving as a paid informer, a man whose entire method is to be overlooked. His marriage, his household, and his anarchist acquaintances all function as camouflage, and he treats them with the same dull, proprietary patience he gives his stock. When his handler demands a spectacular outrage, Verloc's comfortable inertia collides with the violence he has spent years merely talking about, and the novel's middle turns on how badly a man of his temperament handles a real bomb.

Mrs. Verloc

She keeps the shop, keeps house, and keeps her simple-minded brother Stevie close, having chosen Verloc as a husband chiefly because he offered the boy a home. Her manner is stony and practical, her gaze deliberately turned away from whatever her husband actually does upstairs and out of doors. That refusal to look into things is her armor, and it is exactly what the story will test, since her love for Stevie is the one force in the book capable of moving her past endurance.

Comrade Ossipon

Ossipon talks revolution in pubs and meeting rooms while quietly pocketing money from women he charms and abandons, his physique impressive and his moral substance thin. He is both drawn to and intimidated by the cold little bomb-maker who barely acknowledges him, and his vanity makes him a poor judge of the people he thinks he is manipulating. His pursuit of Mrs. Verloc, and his terror of being implicated in what her husband has done, make him the novel's most queasily human conduit between the drawing room and the police.

Stevie

Stevie is Winnie's younger brother, a boyish figure with a horror of cruelty and a habit of drawing circles on paper when his feelings overwhelm him. He adores Mr. Verloc with a doglike devotion that his brother-in-law finds merely inconvenient, and he is easily worked upon by anyone who speaks to him kindly. His innocence is the moral measure of the book: the anarchists and the police alike treat him as a tool, and the reader is made to feel the cost of that carelessness long before the plot makes it explicit.

Chief Inspector Heat

Heat has spent decades building a quiet network of informers and a settled conviction about how the revolutionary underworld should be policed, and he resents interference from above. He regards Verloc as his own property, a tool to be used rather than surrendered to the department as a whole, and his professional pride is bound up with that arrangement. When the Greenwich affair forces him to explain himself to a superior who sees the case differently, Heat's certainty becomes the story's sharpest instrument for exposing how the machinery of order actually works.

Mr. Vladimir

Vladimir is the First Secretary of a foreign embassy, a man of polished manners and genuine scorn for the exiles he is supposed to be managing. He regards the British police as complacent and the revolutionists as fat and useless, and he demands an outrage that will embarrass the government and justify harsher measures. His cold insistence on a specific target, and his willingness to humiliate the agent he employs, sets the entire plot in motion and gives the book its particular chill.