Gentleman Adventurer / Literature

• Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan is independently wealthy and looking for adventure to stave off boredom when adventure finds him. He returned for several sequels, but doesn't count as this trope in those: the first two sequels are set during the War and his adventures are primarily a matter of patriotic duty, and then after the war he's had enough of adventure and is perfectly happy to settle down with his family, only occasionally stirring out of retirement because some friend really needs his help.
• Allan Quatermain in adaptations, although in the original H. Rider Haggard novels, his pals Sir Henry Curtis and Capn. John Good fit the trope much better than him. Quatermain himself is a much earthier type: a former miner turned Great White Hunter.
• A Shilling for Candles: Edward Champenis comes from five centuries of aristocratic lineage and has the appearance of a dignified gentleman, but Grant reminds himself that this look is deceiving, as Edward explores for fun, writes books, and "married an artist picked up at the other side of the world."
• Arsène Lupin is one of the earliest examples of this trope, appearing in the early 20th century. He's turned to robbery, rather than African wilds, using a mix of subterfuge and audacity that leaves the police unable to apprehend him. But his taste is just as considerable as his skill. He's such a discerning burglar that he once broke into someone's house only to leave a note letting the owner know that he would return once the reproductions were replaced with something worth stealing.
• Biggles ended up as one of these in the inter-war period, albeit not entirely of his own free will; many of of his adventures from this period started out with him working a relatively mundane airfreight charter and minding his own business before being dragged into the Mystery of the Week by circumstances out of his control. On at least one occasion he was hired by a more conventional example of the trope to fly his expedition out to some remote location, and then had to bail him out when everything went wrong.
• Bulldog Drummond is a classic inter-war version, an officer and a gentleman of independent means who gets into adventures for the excitement rather than for any personal gain. He is often seen as a bit of a thug and accidental deconstruction by later standards.
• Agatha Christie had a fair number of these in her novels. Sometimes, they would be the hero, such as Colonel Race who appears in several books, but sometimes subverted, as with Lombard, an amoral gun-for-hire in And Then There Were None or whenever the traditional type turned out to be the murderer in the book.
• Phileas Fogg from the Jules Verne classic Around the World in Eighty Days.
• The Jackal in The Day of the Jackal is supposed to be the Evil Counterpart of this kind of character.
• Dispatches by Michael Herr is a downplayed example in that we are told nothing about Herr's personal circumstances, but the chapter "Colleagues" shows that Herr had a different Vietnam from the average reporter. They were employed by newspapers and TV channels, he was loosely attached to Esquire magazine. They had to file copy every day, he could hang out with his friends if he wanted to. They were working for companies that belonged to the US establishment, and were encouraged to write stories that followed the official line, he could write what he liked. For them, covering the war was a job; for him, it was an adventure.
• Doctor Syn ("The Scarecrow") is an Oxford scholar who somehow turns out to be a peerless swordsman, horseman, navigator, and criminal gang leader.
• Bilbo and later Frodo in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo's father married the wealthy Belladonna Took, whose money built the finest home in Hobbiton, Bag End. Neither wanted adventure at first, but after some prodding found they had a talent and a taste for it. Merry is also a Brandybuck, who are also an old respectable family, and Pippin is a cousin on the Took side (the Tooks technically being the closest hobbits have to a royal family, as the patriarch is the Thain—though nobody but the Tooks really take an interest in that) but are also heirs to large farm estates, unlike the Bagginses. Sam, by contrast, is an actual working-class laborer. We never find out much about Fatty Bolger's source of income.
• In James Bond novels at least, the desire to quit playing Cowboys and Indians actually referred to his decision to quit having fun catching field agents and to start striking directly at SMERSH, the subsection of the KGB that enforced undying loyalty to the Soviet Union. This was right after the fear that SMERSH was after he drove Vesper to suicide in Casino Royale.
• Lord John Roxton in Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912). Travels the world for the thrill of the hunt, and is happy to drop everything to accompany Prof. Challenger on his quest to find a Lost World in South America.
• Murder in the Mews: Sir Gervase is a risk-taking baronet. In his youth, he traveled to the South Pole, sailed around the world in a windjammer, and discovered a South American mine.
• Prince Florizel of Bohemia in Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights
• Julien Advent, Victorian Adventurer from the Nightside. To the surprise of the main character, he's the real deal and genuine to boot, and one of the few people for whom Hardboiled Detective John Taylor would cry Manly Tears.
• The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens.
• Rudolph Rassendyl in The Prisoner of Zenda
• P. G. Wodehouse's Psmith takes on this role in the novel Psmith, Journalist.
• The Gentleman Thief Raffles from the short stories by Ernest William Hornung affects the style of an adventurer, but really relies on crime to support himself financially.
• Rivers of London has this as being part of Nightingale's backstory. Between the wars, he was out adventuring in the British Empire, India, and Far East, discovering all sorts of magical strife and acting as a one man troubleshooting squad. Then WW2 and Ettersberg happened.
• The unnamed protagonist of Rogue Male appears to be one of these. Apparently just for the fun of it, he tries to see if he could get into a position to assassinate a dictator (implied to be Hitler), but is captured and brutally tortured. His experiences afterward resemble a much darker version of Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, until it turns out that he is an Unreliable Narrator with motives very different from any thirst for adventure. The dictator's regime murdered the hero's probably Jewish girlfriend, and he really was trying to kill him. The book ends with the hero preparing for another attempt.
• The Saint: Simon Templar, although most of the money he has was extracted from crooks he'd taken down.
• The ur-example of that trope, The Scarlet Pimpernel, fits this trope as well. As do the members of his band, who pose as Upper Class Twits while risking their lives to save aristocrats from the guillotine.
• Sherlock Holmes doesn't travel as much as many of the other examples on this page, but he is implied to come from the gentry (as his family are said to be country squires), he is an expert at Good Old Fisticuffs, is often a Sharp-Dressed Man, is impeccably courteous to women even despite his general dislike of them, is a Gentleman Snarker and a Gentleman and a Scholar, and one of the reasons he works as a consulting detective is to avoid Rich Boredom, which to him is a Fate Worse than Death.
  • Although not so rich, at least at the start of his career. In A Study in Scarlet, he takes in Watson as a housemate because he cannot afford the rent on 221B Baker Street on his own.
• The Stainless Steel Rat once wrote a paper on this trope. He held that society moving past the stage where a man could be both a respected member of society (Gentleman) and totally apart from it (Adventurer) forced individuals to choose which they wanted to be, and stay with that choice for the rest of their lives. DiGriz himself chose to be outside of society, as a thief.
• The Time Traveler in The Time Machine.
• Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series has Ransome's Rangers, a group of very wealthy men who are specifically looking to be Gentlemen Adventurers. They are extremely stylish, fancy in dress, full of bold and flowery statements, but also prove themselves brave in battle. The fact that they are rich enough to fund the weapons and materials that are needed to carry out the war doesn't hurt either...
• Wax and Wayne:
  • Parodied with the Two Fisted Tale of "Allomancer Jak". Complete with trusty Terrisman sidekick and designated Damsel in Distress, who edits his lurid accounts of the savage Roughs with copious footnotes.
  • Wax himself is not an example, but his insistence on dressing finely even when dragging in outlaws has given him a similar reputation. He dislikes the implication that he's doing it all as a hobby. He fights crime because someone has to. There are several implications that he and Jak have met—Wax mentions Jak by name once, and Jak references Wax's habit of replenishing his Allomancy with whiskey. They hate each other.
  • Possibly due to the exploits of Wax and Jak, "gentleman adventurer" clubs have become popular among the rich and powerful. Wax notes that they don't actually do any adventuring, instead hanging around in townhouses smoking and talking.
    Wax: At least that fop Jak actually left his rusting house.
  • The Bands of Mourning has Wax admit to Marasi, to his embarrassment, he styled himself as a Gentleman Adventurer when he first left Elendel. It's his In-Universe Old Shame and he only got snapped out of the behavior by the harsh reality of life in the Roughs.
• Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows. Or so he'd describe himself. The rest of the world regards him as a Upper-Class Twit.