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.