Richard Jeperson

Fictional character

Richard Jeperson is a fictional character created by British horror / fantasy author Kim Newman. He appears in many of Newman's short stories as both a central and background character, primarily within the Diogenes Club series; however, an alternative version of the character appears in the Anno Dracula series as well. He is the focal point of a collection of short stories entitled The Man from the Diogenes Club.

Jeperson – among the first characters created by Newman in his early efforts at fiction – is a homage to many of the 'telefantasy' heroes present on British television during the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Jason King (Department S / Jason King), John Steed (The Avengers) and the Third Doctor (Doctor Who). As such, he shares many character traits with them – a flamboyant dress sense, upper class tastes and sensibilities combined with a youthful appreciation of the 'trendy' aspects of 1970s culture, a chivalrous and patriotic nature, and a healthy disdain for most representations of establishment authority. The stories in which he appears also parody / homage these telefantasy shows, and frequently examine 1970s British culture and society through this lens. In the story "Swellhead", set in the 2000s, a character compares him to Austin Powers. In these stories, the character acts as an investigator for the Diogenes Club (established in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle), a branch of Britain's intelligence and law enforcement community existing outside of regular channels designed to investigate (and where necessary, put a stop to) psychic, paranormal and unusual phenomena. The character himself is unusually empathic to an explicitly paranormal level, possessing a keen sensitivity to both these phenomena and to the thoughts and feelings of others. Jeperson's background in the stories is the subject of much mystery and examination; a war orphan, he possesses no memories prior to 1945, where he was found by his adoptive father, Geoffrey Jeperson, in a Nazi death camp, possibly held as the subject of experiments into his psychic abilities. He was subsequently raised by his father within the Diogenes Club, replacing the occult investigation position held by Carnacki and eventually becoming the club's 'Most Valued Member'. Jeperson frequently shares his adventures with two other operatives – Vanessa, an amnesiac Emma Peel like agent whom Richard once saved from a demon like creature that was possessing her, and Fred Regent, a police officer seconded to the employ of the Diogenes Club following an adventure against psychically induced demon Nazis.