Sample of literary figures
-
Anastasia Kamenskaya
Female
The young, later middle-aged, Anastasia Kamenskaya is an analyst and investigator for the Moscow Police Department. She is linguistically gifted and beautiful, but is careless about her appearance and how she dresses. Her kind live-in partner (later her husband) looks after their home and accepts that she is often too tired for sex. She is also the main character in a long suite of novels by Alexandra Marinina (pseudonym for Marina Anatolyevna Alekseyeva).
-
Jackson Brodie
Male
He is a middle-aged divorced detective, former soldier and police officer, born in Yorkshire but living in London despite the fact that he has never liked southern England. So he is happy to travel north, and some of Kate Atkinson’s novels about him are set in Scotland. Jackson Brodie’s strength as a detective does not lie in logical reasoning, but in his empathy with the afflicted: the victims of crime and their loved ones.
-
Siri Bergman
Female
Psychologist and psycho-therapist Siri Bergman, 30-something years old, lives alone in a converted summer cottage on Värmdö island near Stockholm, since her husband drowned. She eventually can move on after her loss, embarks on a relationship with police officer Markus and is given a role in the police profiling group. But her past haunts her in a suite of crime novels by the sisters Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff.
-
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.