Sample of literary figures
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Gunnarstranda
Male
Detective Inspector Gunnarstranda – his first name is never mentioned – is a middle-aged man who smokes too much. He works for the Oslo police and solves crime in a string of books by the Norwegian author Kjell Ola Dahl. Gunnarstranda can be cynical and disillusioned, but he is also kind and helpful. He general works alongside his seargeant, Frank Frølich.
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Maisie Dobbs
Female
Young, brave and intelligent private detective who started to work as a domestic when she was only 13 years old. Maisie Dobbs had a benevolent female employer, and got to study nursing and psychology. She fell in love with a doctor who was killed in the First World War, and in 1929 she started her own detective agency. Jacqueline Winspear has written more than a dozen books about her.
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Alex Cross
Male
After several years as a widower and a single father with three children, the Afro-American police detective Alex Cross married Brianna ‘Bree’ Stone. But he refused to leave the slum district in Washington where the family lives and where he does charity work; but he did exchange his Porsche for a Mercedes. He is athletically built, has a PhD in Psychology and is the main character in a suite of police novels by James Patterson.
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Peter Pascoe
Male
The well-educated, well brought-up, intelligent but somewhat unimaginative detective Peter Pascoe is the permanent companion to his brusque boss Andy Dalziel in the detective stories by Reginald Hill. Pascoe has problems: apart from Dalziel, he also has a father who has never been able to accept that his son become a policeman instead of a farmer, and he has a wife, Ellie – they have a child together – in a marriage that is in danger of falling apart.