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Portrait image of Ian Rankin Ian Rankin and Maj Sjöwall
Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex

Sample of authors

Rankin, Ian

The Scottish crime writer Ian James Rankin was born in the coal mining town of Cardenden, Fife, where his father owned a grocery store. His mother worked in a school canteen. There were few books at home, and Rankin began to visit his local library as a child and began to write short stories as a teenager. He attended Denend Primary School in Cardendan and later Auchterderran Junior High at...

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Literary figures

Leonidas Witherall

Gender: Male

He is often called William or Bill by his friends, since in appearance he is extremely like the portrait of William Shakespeare. However, Leonidas Witherall is not a man of the theatre: he is an unmarried former headmaster who was ruined during the depression in the 1930s and now supports himself by writing pulp detective fiction in Boston. There he also solves mysterious cases in eight books by...

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