Boysie Oakes is fictional secret agent created by the British spy novelist John Gardner in 1964 at the height of the fictional spy mania. Oakes is a richly comic character who is inadvertently taken to be a tough, pitiless man of action and is thereupon recruited into a British spy agency. He is, in actuality, a devout coward with many other character flaws who wants nothing more than to be left alone. The cowardly Oakes starred in another seven novels over the next 15 years and eventually, once again by inadvertence, becomes the head of the secret agency that has caused him to be in a constant state of terror for so long.