Dennis Tanner

Dennis Tanner is the manager of J.W. Wells & Co. and, as he eventually reveals, a goblin and the firm’s Boss Goblin. He hires Paul Carpenter and Sophie Pettingell, directs the work that initially seems pointless, and helps bind them to the company through their employment contracts. His later explanation of why he brought them in complicates his brusque authority: he says he recognized that both were naturals for the work, even as he casts his decision as an act of practical self-defence.

Identity and Introduction

Paul first meets Dennis in the company office, where the new employee arrives late after getting lost. Dennis has already complained that he should have arrived twenty minutes earlier. Behind a large desk, amid cigar smoke and folders, Dennis gives Paul little welcome beyond directing him to clear a chair and sit down. Paul recognizes him from their earlier encounter and finds him unforgettable; Dennis’s narrow, sometimes pointed teeth add to the striking impression. His manner is impatient, but not ceremonious: he puts an employment contract in front of Paul and presents signing it as the quick alternative to reading its substantial contents.

Paul signs both copies, using a replacement pen Dennis provides when his own runs out. Dennis signs as well, returns one copy, and locks the other in a drawer. The exchange establishes the practical character of his authority: the contract is treated as routine paperwork, yet Dennis takes care to secure the company’s copy. When Paul later meets him in a supermarket, Dennis is shopping from a list, carrying household goods and a melon in a wire basket. The ordinary errand briefly makes the intimidating manager seem more recognizably domestic, without changing his sharp manner; he remembers Paul’s address from the application form and comments on the pepperoni pizza in his hand.

Work and the Firm’s Hidden Business

Dennis’s managerial role becomes clearer when he catches Paul in the office after a goblin has been struck by falling volumes. Paul, who has just seized the goblin by the ear, is confronted by Dennis in the doorway. The encounter leads into the revelation that the company’s strange occupants are not merely an office nuisance: Dennis confirms that he is a goblin, adding that he is a quarter human on his father’s side, and explains that goblins own the building.

The firm’s personnel list gives his formal designation as Dennis Tanner BA (Plymouth) BG. He explains that BG means Boss Goblin, a title he delivers with evident satisfaction. His account places him within an organization whose partners and specialists work in different supernatural fields, while his own connection to goblins is also tied to the company’s mineral business. Goblins dig extensive tunnels in search of minerals; in the region of New South Wales where Dennis comes from, the relevant resource is bauxite. He tells Paul that this is why he hired him: Paul is a natural scryer, and his demonstrated success rate is ninety per cent. Dennis thus links Paul’s apparently unusual aptitude directly to the firm’s practical needs.

The office work assigned to Paul and Sophie also has an operational purpose, though they are not told what it is at first. Dennis’s family interferes with the printed reports from the Mortensen Counters: goblins collect the sheets from the machines, scatter them around the Mortensen Room, and sometimes eat them or use them as toilet paper. The employees must sort the remaining printouts. Dennis’s role in this process is indirect in the available account, but the episode shows the disorderly household and workplace conditions surrounding the business he manages—and helps explain why the ostensibly menial task is necessary.

Contracts, Authority, and Conflict

Dennis’s control over the new employees is more than managerial. After Sophie says she will not return to the office, he points to a clause in the employment contract: its third clause, fifth paragraph, allows the firm to force an employee to work if that person tries to quit. He does not recall the exact wording, but makes the consequence unmistakable and warns her against testing how the company would enforce it. When he then uses magic to compel her, the contract is revealed as an instrument of coercive power, not merely a formidable document. The episode makes the gap between the casual signing at Paul’s interview and the contract’s actual stakes impossible to ignore.

Dennis’s conduct is not presented as harmless simply because he can be personable or funny. He distinguishes himself from Humphrey Wells by saying that, unlike Humphrey, he does not go out of his way to cut people in half. His mother qualifies the contrast: Dennis may be unpleasant, and might use comparable violence if it suited him, but the minerals business rarely calls for it. The distinction is about the direction and context of his conduct, not a declaration that he is incapable of cruelty. Dennis exercises power over Sophie through the contract, while his work and interests place him in a different line of business from Humphrey’s.

His family ties also shape his decisions. Much later, Dennis explains that he learned only after joining the firm what Humphrey had done to John Wellington. He says he could not free John without also releasing his own father, whom he describes with contempt, and that he would have preferred Humphrey’s removal if it could have been achieved without that consequence. His account exposes a conflict between opposing Humphrey and protecting his mother from the return of Dennis’s father. It also shows that Dennis’s choices are entangled with a family history he neither controls outright nor describes with affection.

Paul, Sophie, and the Final Reckoning

John Wellington confronts Dennis in front of the other partners and asks whether he was involved in the events that left John imprisoned. Dennis acknowledges that he knew of Humphrey’s actions only later and explains why he did not intervene. John then credits Dennis with insisting that Paul and Sophie be hired, sending them the swords in the stones, and arranging the encounter that brought them together on the evening Paul bought frozen pizza. He interprets these acts as a deliberate effort to put the two new employees in position to set things right—and as evidence of Dennis’s matchmaking.

Dennis gives a less romantic explanation. He says that insisting on their appointment was self-defence: he wanted Humphrey to stay away from his mother. When Sophie asks whether John’s account is true, Dennis jokes that he is Cupid, then confirms that he pressed for both hires because he could see they were right for the job. He calls them naturals and says that the other partners had failed to recognize what was obvious to him. His explanation does not erase John’s account of the staged meeting and delivered swords; instead, it leaves Dennis’s practical motive alongside the possibility that his actions served a larger purpose. He does not disclose what, exactly, he recognized in Paul and Sophie.

Dennis’s character therefore turns on an unresolved mixture of calculation, candour, and evasion. He can use a contract to keep an employee at work, but he can also identify the recruits whom the rest of the partnership overlooks. He presents his intervention as self-preservation rather than benevolence, while John reads it as part of a broader plan that helped bring events to their resolution. Dennis neither fully confirms nor simply rejects that interpretation. His final insistence that Paul and Sophie were right for the job leaves their significance acknowledged but unexplained, preserving the secrecy and wry ambiguity that have accompanied his management from the beginning.