For reasons… I’ve been playing around with character cameos for Instagram… Which admittedly is partly procrastination. As I am making them anyway, I’ve decided you, dear readers, may enjoy seeing them, with a little background on the characters featured.

The world of Hannibal Smyth has a vast array of characters, some more influential than others and some whom’s influence on Hannibal’s life is yet to be felt in full. Among the most influential characters in the stories are the ladies in his life. This is not for romantic reasons, though that does happen to a degree, but because the characters themselves all tend to have a great deal of agency, indeed more agency than Hannibal much of the time. In the first two novels this is certainly the case for Hannibal’s perpetual sparing partner Bad Penny but it is perhaps even more true in the case of Saffron Wells.

Saffron the granddaughter of H G Wells, flits in and out of Hannibal ever idiosyncratic narrative through out the novels. While that narrative tells the story from his perspective and with a certain bias towards his own experience, astute readers have picked up on the mirror to his personal story that is Saffron’s. When we first meet her she too is an unwilling agent for The Ministry, being forced to work for the shadowy part of the British government, and her eye has also been implanted with the same spider-like device that Hannibal so often bemoans. Unlike Hannibal, Saffron is proactive in solving her dilemma, but then Saffron is in many ways the negative image of  Hannibal, strong willed, morally capable and driven for a cause greater than her own self-interest.

Hannibal has never had the best of luck when it comes to the ladies in his life, possibly because they are all so much more capable than him… this is certainly true in the case of of Saffron Wells. Which is why she graces the cover of book 2 ‘from Russia With Tassels’.

Saffron is often ‘off screen’ as far as the narrative is concerned. Part of her grandfathers network of freedom-fighters or terrorists depending on who’s pint of view your listening to, she is at times a air-pirate, warrior and inspires the exact loyalty in others that Hannibal doesn’t. While her relationship with Hannibal himself is complex, he certainly has feelings for her as well as a strong feeling of personal attraction. How she feels about him is more of an open question… Certainly she can be disparaging of our ‘hero’ at times, she is not one to suffer fools gladly and she is probably even more dangerous to Hannibal in the long run than even his favorite Bad Penny, but fans will have to wait to see if she survived the final events of book two until ‘A Squid on the Shoulder’ comes out later this year..

These cameos were build for Instagram, if you would like to follow me there the link is www.instagram.com/markhayes6/