Sample of literary figures
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Arto Söderstedt
Male
A Finland-Swedish top lawyer who tired of his job and moved with his family to Sweden where he trained to become a police officer. After a spell in Västerås, Arto Söderstedt was transferred to the Swedish Police Board’s special A-group unit, which Arne Dahl (pseudonym for Jan Arnald) has written about. After the group was split up, he returned in Dahl’s books about the international police force OPCOP.
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Aurelio Zen
Male
Detective Inspector Zen is a loner based in Rome, but he solves crime all over Italy. He may seem clumsy, but his determination and laissez-faire attitude to police protocol means that he is both successful and unpopular with his superiors. Aurelio Zen featured in one book by the British author Michael Dibdin, but he became so popular that Dibdin wrote another ten about him.
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Matthew Hope
Male
Lawyer Matthew Hope moves with his wife Susan and daughter Joanna from Chicago to Calusa in Florida to work with commercial law for a small law firm. But nothing goes as he wished: thanks to his detective talents, he unwillingly becomes a leading criminal lawyer and his marriage ends in divorce, as we read in the books by Ed McBain (pseudonym for Evan Hunter).
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Gavin Troy
Male
Troy is a detective in the fictive English county of Midsomer, and Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby’s right hand. In Caroline Graham’s novel, Tory is a clever and intelligent police officer, but his prejudices – he is, for example, a homophobe – and rather abrupt manner speak against him. In the TV series <i>Midsomer Murders</i>, his personality has been ‘corrected’ and he is decidedly more sympathetic, and is still a skilled investigator.