One of the Second World War's most colourful individuals was double agent Eddie Chapman. Edward or Eddie Chapman was an expert safecracker and career criminal from Northern England, not an Aryan super-saboteur. He was possibly the most daring and accomplished double agent in the world at the time, unknown to everyone but the most covert agencies in the nation.

He was taken in by the Abwehr, German military intelligence from a French prison, and after arriving in Britain, he switched allegiances. Eddie Chapman is evidence that a superhero need not be a face-masher with bulging muscles. He wasn't a huge man, he wasn't a murderer, and he avoided conflict whenever he could. He nevertheless succeeded in becoming one of the most colourful war heroes in British history by playing both the British and the Germans off one another, engaging in a variety of escapades, crossing a variety of redlines, and generally living up to expectations for a professional spy.

The villain was a hero, and the traitor was a man of loyalty. It was difficult in determining where one character ended and the other began in Chapman. This is the real-life account of Agent Zigzag, a spy who deceived the Nazis only out of his own sense of excitement.