Sample of literary figures
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Mma Ramotswe
Female
In Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, Mma Precious Ramotswe runs The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The cases she works with, don’t usually concern major crimes, but are more about solving everyday problems for the clients. Mma Ratmotswe loves tea and her husband, the kind J.L.B. Matekoni, as well as their two adoptive children: all tenderly described by the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith.
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Rebecka Martinsson
Female
Beautiful and well-educated lawyer – who first works in a law firm and later becomes a public prosecutor – who has a central role in all of Åsa Larsson’s crime stories. In the first books, Rebecka Martinsson is living in Stockholm, but her work takes her to Kiruna, where she grew up, and she later moves back there. She has quite a lot of problems at work as well as in her private life, but is supported by friends, including the police officer Anna-Maria Mella.
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Vera Stanhope
Female
An eccentric, middle-aged, controversial detective chief inspector in Northumberland and in a series of police novels by Ann Cleeves. Stanhope is a grim lone wolf and workaholic, in part because as a child she was subjected to sexual abuse by an acquaintance of her single father. She still lives in her childhood home, drives her father’s old Landrover and solves murder cases in her own very special way.
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Vesper Johnson
Male
Detective Inspector Vesper Johnson is a unique, and very entertaining, character. He is vain with a “beaver” face and rakish moustache; he wears high heels and dyes his hair. Johnson solves crime in a string of novels by Stieg Trenter in which the protagonist is the photographer Harry Friberg. After Trenter’s death, his wife Ulla continued to write her own books about Friberg and Johnson.