Enter The Continuing Villains

"The door swung open behind him and a voice murmured gently: 'Good evening, Captain Flandry."

-Poul Anderson, "Honourable Enemies" IN Anderson, Agent of the Terran Empire (London, 1977), pp. 57-81 AT I, p. 59.

With that single sentence, Captain Flandry became a series character. This story introduces the Merseians as a collective continuing villain. They were retconned as background information into the revised version of the first Captain Flandry story, "Tiger By The Tail." "Honourable Enemies" also introduces Aycharaych, an individual villain with the potential to become a recurring villain. In fact, Aycharaych did recur but only in two works as an antagonist of Flandry. Some characters generate the impression of having appeared more often than they in fact did. Aycharaych spread himself across the Flandry period, getting a mention in A Circus Of Hells, appearing without Flandry in The Day Of Their Return and finally remembered, if nothing else, in The Game Of Empire, although with a question mark over a possible return.

Aycharaych works for Merseia but is Chereionite by species. Flandry needed an opposite number among the Merseians themselves and this role was played by Tachwyr the Dark in no less than four novels, overlapping just once with Aycharaych. All of these conflicts between Flandry and his Merseian or Merseian-employed antagonists grew from "Honourable Enemies."