Martin Jones franchise (Napoleon's World)

Martin Jones is an enormously well-known and popular character in both literature and film; over fifty short stories about him were written between 1958 and 1983 by English author William Hamilton, who also wrote twenty-three books in that span. Peter O'Neal wrote six Jones books in the late 1980's and early 1990's, but the series had evolved into a film franchise by that point. The Jones character is an archetype and the movies have made Crown Pictures a mainstay US film studio after it nearly went bankrupt in the late 1960's.

Historical Basis
Will Hamilton survived the Anarchy at his home on the Isle of Wight; the fighting there was less severe than in other parts of England, although he did see his fair share of violence and admittedly had used a shotgun similar to Jones's preferred twelve-gauge to fight off marauders attacking his estate once. Hamilton was not a Socialist and had grown up supporting the more liberal, progressive Socialist politicians such as Charles Morgan; when the Anarchy ended and Morgan was put in power largely due to American help, Hamilton decided to emulate his virtues in an English freedom fighter.

Many real-life heroes of the Anarchy are thought to be the basis behind Jones; among them, Patrick Meal. Meal was famous for fighting the "unwelcome Scots" in Yorkshire between 1952-55, when he was at last killed in a massive Scottish raid to find him specifically. This is mostly based on the short story Martin Jones and the Barbarian, where Jones goes to Yorkshire to assassinate a Scottish general who has been authorizing the kidnap, rape and murder of local girls.

Another historical fighter Jones may be based off of is David Clark, a woodcutter who had similar humble roots, lived on a farm in southern England and began fighting mainly to protect his family and neighbors from the EWA. Clark survived the war, where he was known as "The Axe," due to his preferred fighting method. Clark, however, didn't meet Hamilton until the late 1960's, when the Jones character was already well established.

Traits
Martin Jones is a tall, handsome Englishman who is comfortably middle class; he and his brother Alexander ran a farm together in an unnamed part of southern England and hired a handful of farmhands. They make it through the earliest parts of the Anarchy unscathed, and feed a handful of London refugees on occasion. The English Workers Army arrives in late 1951 to recruit them; they refuse, and Alexander is shot and wheelchair-ridden, and several farmhands are killed. Martin escapes into the forest.

The origin of the character is merely referenced, never depicted, in Hamilton's work; although his unfinished manuscript concerned Jones learning the identity of his brother's attacker and hunting him down several years after the Anarchy had ended. This unfinished novel lent itself as the primary basis for the 2005 film I'm Jones.

Jones has a loose moral compass, as is required by the Anarchy; Hamilton never seeks to make him an incorruptible hero. As he stated in a 1975 interview, "Jones isn't a white knight. He was never intended to be a messianic, virtuous, apostolic saint. He protects the innocent from the violent, and later he protects the fledgling English Republic from her enemies. He sees the world somewhat in black and white and right and wrong, but the appeal of Jones is that he has to make difficult decisions the reader or viewer can relate to. He's a human, and that's his most important element."

Throughout the literary and film series, Jones encounters a whirlwind of romantic interests, and they do not always ride off into the sunset together. While he saves several, in one short story he sacrifices one young woman in a burning barn in order to capture and kill her uncle, who is planning to bomb a survivor food stock.

Jones's friendship with his wheelchair-ridden brother is key to the plots of the stories and films; Alexander has every reason to hate the ones who handicapped him, but he's often Martin's advice giver, and he's a sympathetic, kind character. The farmhands, who are intermittently killed as they try to assist Martin in his adventures, are important sidekicks often. However, the running pattern of "the farmhand always gets killed" itself became an inside joke within the series, in the 2000 film The Irish Defector, Jones pauses and asks a will-be unlucky farmhand "So you're positive you want to come?" Jones also has a series of horses he rides throughout the series, and usually carries a hunting rifle of some sort as his favored weapon.

Evolution of Character
While almost every short story concerns some adventure during the Anarchy, as do most of the early books, Hamilton soon started to run out of intriguing adventures during the Anarchy.

"After a while, you've written 'Jones comes to village, kills some baddies, gets the girl, and rides off into the sunset.' He started to turn into an English cowboy, a western set in our bloodiest years of history. Jones was more than just a wandering hero. He was an adult character, and I needed to make him one."

In 1965, Hamilton published his sixth short-story collection and his sixth novel, and now the character had taken a twist; the French and Americans had arrived in England. Hamilton used the English Adventure, London Airlift, Yorkshire Wars, and English Republican Army as backdrops for his next eight novels and three short-story collections, all the way into the early 1970's. Now, Jones was helping rebuild England, and facing far more complex issues than 'save the village, kill the EWA.' The Jones character was also an obvious Cold War hero too; he went on adventures to France and Ireland to help England, and he even ventured once to America and once to Zanzibar on distant, exotic adventures.

In the late 1970's, Hamilton expressed a desire to bring Jones back to earth. He wrote Sea Star, his last book to be finished, in 1982, and was editing it and Vengeance when he died suddenly. Among his things were found five unfinished short stories with similarly mature themes and grounded plots. Vengeance was never published, being mostly notes and halves of chapters, but Sea Star was complete enough to be published and became the most successful book in the series.

Transferral from Radio to Television
The English Republican Radio began broadcasting radio-plays of the Jones short stories in the mid-1960's, with Roger Moore, a young actor recently returned to England from time playing bit roles in New York, providing the voice. Hamilton was himself a self-described fan of the