Editing Johnny Fedora (section)

{{short description|Fictional British secret agent}}
{{for|the film segment "Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet"|Make Mine Music}}
<!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:Johnnyfedora.jpg|thumbnail|The cover of "Dead Man Falling", written in 1953]] -->
'''Johnny Fedora''' is a fictional [[United Kingdom|British]] [[secret agent]] who was the [[protagonist]] of 16 novels published between 1951 and 1971. Written by [[Desmond Cory|Shaun Lloyd McCarthy]], under the pseudonym of [[Desmond Cory]], Fedora was dubbed by literary critics as the 'thinking man's [[James Bond]]'. Preceding Bond, Fedora was also a hired assassin ("hired to kill"), but for many the Fedora plots were more complex and intellectual. The son of a [[Spanish people|Spanish]] father and [[Irish people|Irish]] mother, Fedora was driven as much by a need to [[Revenge|avenge]] the death of his parents (at the hands of Spanish fascists) as by [[patriotism]] or [[loyalty]] to [[British Intelligence]]. He got his start working behind the lines during WWII, assassinating Nazis.  The debonair Fedora was always a tough and competent agent, and his first adventures were written in a more light-hearted manner than the latter ones.  Like Bond, he had passionate affairs with a wide variety of women around the world (though never as a ruse to gain intelligence), but his relationships tended to be more nuanced, and sometimes spanned several novels. The final books in the series featured his nemesis, [[Feramontov]], a deadly and highly skilled [[Russian people|Russian]] agent, whose ruthlessness went as far as trying to detonate a [[nuclear bomb]] in Spain.  1960's ''The Head'', atypical of the series as a whole, featured Johnny, temporarily without any mission from his handlers, getting involved in a publicity stunt for a film that involved carting a massive statue of Jesus to the top of a high Spanish mountain.