•
Victor Crabbe, initially a resident teacher at the Mansor School, seeks to tackle the threat posed by a boy Communist who appears to be conducting clandestine night-time indoctrination sessions with fellow students. But the headmaster,
Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings. Crabbe later becomes a headmaster and, in the third book, an education officer. •
Fenella, Crabbe's second wife •
Nabby Adams (in
Time for a Tiger), an alcoholic police lieutenant who prefers warm beer ("he could not abide it cold"). He persuades Crabbe to buy a car, enabling Adams to make a commission as a middleman, even though Crabbe will not drive because of a traumatic car accident in which his first wife died and he was the driver. •
Ah Wing (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), Crabbe's elderly Chinese cook, who, it emerges, has been supplying the insurgents with provisions • Ibrahim (in “Time for a Tiger”), the Crabbes’ transvestite servant who fears being found by his wife whom he was forced to marry by his family •
Abdul Kadir (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), Crabbe's hard-drinking and foul-mouthed teaching colleague at the school, whose every sentence includes the words "For fuck's sake!" • The hard-up lawyer
Rupert Hardman (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), who converts to Islam in order to wed a domineering Muslim woman, '
Che Normah, for her money. He later bitterly regrets it and tries to return to the West in order to escape the marriage. •
Talbot (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), the State Education Officer, a fat-buttocked gourmand whom Victor Crabbe cuckolds, and who himself cuckolded Crabbe years earlier •
Anne Talbot (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), Talbot's wife, a wanton but unhappy adulteress • The womanising
Abang of Dahaga (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), who is also a devotee of chess, and who aims both to seduce Crabbe's wife and to purloin his car •
Father Laforgue (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), a priest who has spent most of his life in China and longs to return there. but is prevented from doing so, having been banished by the
Communist regime •
Jaganathan (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), a fellow teacher who plots to supplant and ruin Crabbe •
Mohinder Singh ( (in
The Enemy in the Blanket), a shopkeeper trying desperately, and failing, to compete with Chinese traders •
Robert Loo (in
Beds in the East), a brilliant boy composer whose musical career Crabbe seeks to further •
Rosemary Michael (in
Beds in the East), an "eminently nubile" Tamil with "quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure" and an inability to tell the truth, even to herself •
Tommy Jones (in
Beds in the East), a beer salesman. "That's my line. I sell beer all over the East. Thirty years on the job. Three thousand a month and a car allowance and welcome wherever I go." •
Lim Cheng Po (in
Beds in the East), an Anglophile lawyer •
Tuan Haji Mohammed Nasir Bin Abdul Talib (in
Beds in the East), an Australian judge who harbours a secret resentment against the English •
Moneypenny (in
Beds in the East), an anthropologist living in the Malayan jungle and studying hill tribes. He has lost touch with civilisation to the extent that he believes it is lethal to laugh at butterflies and "now regarded even a lavatory as
supererogatory". ==Bibliography==