Sample of literary figures
-
Lindsay Boxer
Female
Homicide investigator with the San Francisco police, a well-built and well-educated lady with a weakness for beer and ice cream. Lindsay Boxer has a collie, Martha, and a husband, Joseph Molinari. She is a central figure in the Women’s Murder Club, a gathering of professional women who discuss (and solve) murder cases in their free time in books by James Patterson and two of his co-authors.
-
Erlendur
Male
A detective inspector in Reykjavík, and the main character in a row of police novels by Arnaldur Indriðason. Erlendur – his surname, Sveinsson, is rarely named as is customary in Iceland – is a skilful and empathetic police officer, but rather tired and sometimes anxiety-ridden. One reason is that he left his family when the children were small, for reasons that he can’t himself remember. His ex-wife still hates him for this, and both his son and his daughter ended up abusing drugs.
-
Tom Thorne
Male
Tom Thorne is a middle-aged, somewhat worse for wear detective inspector in London. In the early books he is dull and conventional. However, his creator, Mark Billingham, has subsequently turned him into a multi-faceted character with bad as well as good qualities. He is persistent and conscientious, but he can also be short-tempered, grumpy and prone to making disastrous mistakes. Well into the series he becomes involved with Seargeant Helen Weeks.
-
Anna Holt
Female
Anna Holt is a police officer, later commissioner of police, in Stockholm. She is the creation of authors Jan Guillou and Leif G.W. Persson who wrote the screenplay for a series of television episodes about her in the 1990s. Over the years, she has featured in some of the novels each has written independently. Holt is a complex woman, a determined and inventive investigator and a skilled interrogator.