Shadow of the Templar/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Team Templar (and Jeremy)

Team Templar

Simon Drake ("Templar")

  • Bi the Way
  • Dating Catwoman: They're not dating!
  • Control Freak: He's accused of this multiple times. Is occasionally willing to admit it.
  • Crazy Jealous Guy: Simon doesn't take the revelation that the thief in Double Down is Jeremy's ex-lover very well. At. All.
  • Domestic Abuser: Let's be honest: if Jeremy was female, Simon would be considered an absolutely horrible person, because he very often treats Jeremy like shit and once beat the hell out of Jeremy with serious intent to hurt him and had some very dubiously consensual sex. Although Simon does start getting his act together by the end of the third book.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Simon tends to be very possessive over things he perceives as his, regardless of whether he's willing to consciously admit that he wants them or not. He gets jealous over Jeremy getting along with his teammates, because they're Simon's team and Jeremy is not one of them and never will be. Of course, he then proceeds to get incredibly, bitterly jealous over Jeremy's ex-lover, and is also (momentarily) jealous of Annabelle when Jeremy is comforting her after she's rescued. Simon even shows hints of being jealous of Johnny, of all people, in High Fidelity when Johnny and Jeremy are off discussing things in the gazebo.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold
  • The Leader: Has elements of all four types, but mostly III and IV.
  • Married to the Job
  • Must Have Caffeine: The coffeemaker is labeled "Mrs. Simon Drake (♥)"
  • Oblivious to Love: In this capacity Simon may be borderline retarded.
  • Only Sane Employee: Well, he does run a team of lunatics.
  • Papa Wolf: Toward his squad.
  • Team Dad
  • Tsundere: To an almost ridiculous degree with Jeremy.

Sandra Leone ("Springheel")

  • Action Girl: Her character profile even notes that one of her roles is to be the "muscle". She's very good at smacking people around. Including her teammates.
  • Blue Blood: She did try to be the kind of upper-class daughter her parents expected her to be. But she got bored with that and joined the FBI.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: With Mike and Diana Fontaine. Shows hints of it in With a Bullet when talking to Jeremy about Simon; she's quite nasty to Jeremy when he shows up, even though she was the one who called him in the first place.
  • The Lancer
  • Mama Bear: Toward her teammates.
  • Number Two: Which causes some friction between her and Simon later on, as twice she has to take over for him as the leader of the team; once when he's out of commission, and again when he's suspended from active duty. It's difficult to go back to being second-in-command after that.
  • Only Sane Agent
  • Time to Step Up Commander: When Simon is taken out of commission by Farraday at the start of With a Bullet, Sandra is very stressed out over having to take Simon's place. When Mike tries to give her a pep talk, she hits him[1]. The second time she's put in charge, she's much more sure of herself, but still hesitant because of the complexities it could raise when/if Simon returns.
  • Took a Level in Jerkass: In the last two books she takes a level whenever she's dealing with Jeremy, but especially in High Fidelity, where she almost always seems to be about five seconds away from ripping his throat out with her teeth.

Nate Waxman ("Specs")

  • Break the Cutie: Shows signs of past breakage during With a Bullet, but on the whole he's managed to recover.
  • Captain Crash: To the point of it being an acknowledged Running Gag.
  • The Chick
  • No Sense of Direction: He was the only one who managed to get lost inside of an opera house (and twice, at that). Please note that he was also the only member of the team who had actually been there before.
  • Scars Are Forever: His chest is covered with scars from when Farraday pinned him down and sliced him up with a knife.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: He is the team's explosives expert. On Team Templar, this is a position that more often requires him to make bombs than defuse them.
  • Team Mascot: As dubbed by Simon.

Mike Takemura ("Honda")

Johnny Pilgrim ("Texas")

Rich Story ("Specs Two")

  • Insufferable Genius
  • Jerkass: Sandra (mentally) describes him as an "ill-tempered little asshole with almost no sense of humor". Even Simon, who's actually considered his friend, once calls him "a very shouty little man", much to Jeremy's amusement.
  • Irrational Hatred: Jeremy seems to be very good at inspiring this in people. Rich certainly has good reason to dislike Jeremy, but the raw hatred he displays is... excessive, to say the least.
  • Killed Off for Real: By Simon, no less.
  • The Mole
  • Too Clever by Half: What causes his downfall; he was tricked into posting a confidential memo to prove he could crack it, and Karpol began blackmailing him.

Dave Brassoff ("Stonewall")

  • Bunny Ears Lawyer: Specially mentioned because Jeremy assures Dave that he's actually the right kind of crazy to fit in with Team Templar; all Dave needs to do is grow a spine. Which he does. Epically.
  • Dead Big Sister: The murder of his older sister was what inspired him to join the FBI.
  • Dissonant Serenity: In a zen state while working on the computer. Mousepad suddenly on fire. Dump coffee on it without sparing it a glance. Continue programming.
  • Forgets to Eat: Also forgets to sleep.
  • New Meat: A textbook case until the end of With a Bullet.
  • Replacement Scrappy: In-universe, for Rich Story.
    • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: By virtue of a very well-played prank and a perfect poker face that earns him a codename and a permanent spot on the team.
  • Workaholic: While otherwise capable of working on a normal schedule, Dave will go into overdrive when he's given a specific task, pulling all kinds of lunatic hours to get the job done. His current record is thirty-five straight hours without going home.

Jeremy Archer ("Shadow")

Jeremy: I thought you of all people might understand that nothing is more fun than doing that at which you excel.

  • Becoming the Mask/That Man Is Dead: Jeremy Archer is, according to Word of God, just a facade. Jeremy abandoned his original self and took on the identity that Ethan gave him as his 'main' and 'real' identity from that point on, modelling himself after his foster father so as to leave who he was behind. See 'Generation Xerox'.

M. Chandler: And, let us be frank, Jeremy Archer is a construct. A successful one, yes, and one that is second nature by now, a real human being in his own right, but still, essentially, a carefully-crafted facade built around the heart and bones of a neglected and needy little boy.

Other Characters

Bran Lindsey

  • Blond Guys Are Evil
  • Cain: To Jeremy's Abel.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: He can be very verbose.
  • Evil Counterpart: To Jeremy. They're both criminals, but Jeremy's a Gentleman Thief and Bran's an unrepentant murderer.
  • Funetik Aksent: Played with; the way he pronounces words (Jaysis!) is mentioned in the prose, but it's heavily downplayed in his actual dialogue.
  • Freudian Excuse: He blames all of his worldly problems on Jeremy, because Jeremy "stole" what was rightfully Bran's. Which isn't true, and Jeremy lampshades just how ridiculous a thing that is to say regardless.

Jeremy: Not to belabor the obvious, but I am a thief. In fact, I'm the best thief in the world. And you're not.

  • Hair-Trigger Temper: He can and probably will take offense to anything and everything, but especially Jeremy's existence.
  • In-Series Nickname: Jeremy calls him "Irish" because... well, because he is.
  • Irrational Hatred: Jeremy used to find it hurtful; at this point, it's still hurtful, but also extremely exasperating.
  • Karma Houdini: A very ungentlemanly thief, murders innocent people, attacks Simon's team with intent to kill, tries to shoot Jeremy in the back, and his choices in life greatly saddened and disappointed his father. Yet at the end of the series, he's about twenty-five million dollars richer, presumed dead by everyone save for a few select people, and will never have to work another day for the rest of his life if he so chooses.
  • Nervous Wreck: Jeremy notes (and Bran later demonstrates) that Bran tends to dissolve into a panicked state of fight-or-flight when things don't go according to plan.
  • The Unfavourite: Subverted. Bran is wholly convinced that he is this, but Ethan and Jeremy make it clear that it's very much not the case.

"Colonel" Cole Farraday

  • Blond Guys Are Evil: Although he bleaches his hair; it's not revealed what his natural hair colour is.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper
  • I Have Your Wife: Manages to get the drop on Jeremy, of all people, with a taser, and eventually calls Simon to ask if Simon's "missing something". Of course, Jeremy being who he is, Farraday didn't have much hope of holding onto him once Jeremy woke up.
  • Insane Equals Violent
  • Killed Off for Real
  • Mood Swinger: Swings between 'calm' and 'frothing at the mouth psychotic' at the slightest provocation, and it's genuinely frightening.
  • Obfuscating Insanity: It was suspected that he used this to be discharged from the army, but if he wasn't crazy before going to prison, he certainly was when he got out.
  • Thou Shalt Not Kill: Not because he doesn't want to, but for practical reasons; the instant you murder someone, it's game over as far as the legal system is concerned. He abandons this philosophy by the end of With a Bullet, but Jeremy kills Farraday before Farraday has the chance to murder Simon.

Dorothy Langridge

Ethan West

  • A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Bran, naturally. But Ethan still loves him, because Bran is his son.
  • Cool Old Guy
  • Deadpan Snarker: Oh, is he ever.
  • Criminal Counterpart: To Upstairs. Both Ethan and Upstairs are very trusting and protective of their charges (Jeremy and Simon, respectively), will bend rules to help them, have a lot of resources at their disposal, and both act as father figures.
  • Good Father: To both of his foster/adopted sons, though Bran is somewhat less appreciative of it than Jeremy.
  • Karma Houdini: As far as we know, Ethan was never caught, either.
  • Retired Gentleman Thief: He's technically not even wanted for anything anymore; the statute of limitations for all of his crimes has run out. Of course, this doesn't mean that he doesn't do illegal things at all anymore. He's just retired from his main profession.

Upstairs (Mr. Carstairs)

  1. ↑ For which she apologizes after he gives her a What the Hell, Hero?
  2. ↑ (for a given definition of "good")
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