Elijah Baley
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Elijah Baley is a fictional character in Isaac Asimov's Robot series. He is a plainclothesman, a homicide detective on the New York City police force. He is a doleful character with a quick temper. He has a strong sense of duty and loyalty and is very protective of his family and his status. Although Asimov's novels do not mention specific birth and death dates, they can be determined by close reading and inference: Elijah was born in 4679 and died in 4762.[citation needed] His wife, Jezebel Baley, prefers to be called Jessie. Their son, Bentley, became a leader in the second wave of interplanetary space exploration. The planet Baleyworld is named in Bentley's honor.
He is the main character of The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and the short story "Mirror Image". He is talked about heavily in Robots and Empire, which is set roughly two hundred years after his death.
Asimov's novels are typically devoid of profanity. Consequently, Baley's favourite expletive is "Jehoshaphat!" which he says in times of great stress or excitement.
In the 1964 British television adaptation of The Caves of Steel, Baley was played by Peter Cushing.
Baley, like most human beings of his century, is strongly agoraphobic, as The Caves of Steel reveals that almost all natives of Earth of Baley's time spend all of their time from birth to death in immense domed cities (caves of steel) and rarely, if ever, travel to the outside surface. Baley's agoraphobia is an important personality characteristic and plot point in several of the novels in which he appears. This somewhat mirrors Asimov's own personality, as he was a well known claustrophile, a person who preferred to be in closed spaces. Baley is also depicted as something of a prude, as sexual separation of public facilities is common on Earth in his time, but is unknown on the Spacer worlds which he visits.
In The Caves of Steel, he is called to help solve the murder of a Spacer. The Spacers assign to him a robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, with whom he becomes life-long friends. He meets up with R. Daneel again in The Naked Sun, where again he is asked to investigate the murder of a Spacer, this time on the planet Solaria, making him the first Earthman to leave Earth since the first wave of colonization. Later, in the Robots of Dawn, he realizes R. Giskard's telepathic abilities long before anyone else does. Giskard modifies Baley's mind to prevent him from being able to tell anyone.
