Characters
- Cairo Jim – The protagonist of the series, Cairo Jim is a well known archaeologist and little known poet. He lives in the fictional Valley of the Hairdressers in Cairo, along with his faithful animal companions Doris the talking macaw and Brenda the wonder camel. He is fond of wearing special desert sun spectacles and a pith helmet.
- Brenda the Wonder Camel - A camel from the Wonder Herd of Thebes, who possesses a remarkably broad knowledge of the world since accidentally swallowing a collection of encyclopedias as a calf. A long-time friend of Jim's, she is an aficionado of the Melodious Tex adventure novels.
- Doris - Doris the macaw originally met Jim in Peru (see Cairo Jim on the Trail to ChaCha Muchos) and has been his travelling companion ever since. She can speak English, is an expert in ancient languages, and enjoys quoting the works of Shakespeare.
- Captain Neptune Flannelbottom Bone - The primary villain of the series, Bone is a former friend of Jim's, having attended archaeology school with him. He seeks to exploit the treasures and secrets of antiquity for his own gain, and is obsessed by plans of wealth, power, world domination and immortality. He is described as an overweight man with a neatly-clipped moustache and beard, who is fond of wearing waistcoats, plus fours, spats and fezzes in various garish and clashing colours. He takes extreme pride in his finely-manicured fingernails.
- Desdemona - A red-eyed, flea-ridden talking raven and an accomplice to most of Bone's dastardly plots.
- Jocelyn Osgood - A flight attendant with Valkyrian Airways, she is described as a "'good friend' of Cairo Jim" and occasionally helps him on his adventures. She also has a pilot's licence.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“The major men
That is different. They are characters beyond
Reality, composed thereof. They are
The fictive man created out of men.
They are men but artificial men.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)