Sample of literary figures
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Patrick Kenzie
Male
Patrick Kenzie is a private detective from Boston. He works with his childhood friend Angela ”Angie” Gennaro. He is tough and quick-witted, he has a black sense of humour and a weak spot for his married partner, which makes their relationship complicated. Dennis Lehane has written a string of much acclaimed hardboiled, urban, violent police novels about the pair.
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Nestor Burma
Male
Private eye Nestor Burma is a famous character in French 20th century crime fiction. He runs his own detective agency, Fiat Lux, in Paris with his secretary Hélène Chatelain, who is hopelessly in love with him. They feature in a string of hardboiled, humorous books by Léo Malet. Burma also features in films, television dramas and a cartoon.
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John H. Watson
Male
Sherlock Holmes’ chronicler and permanent companion in the stories by A. Conan Doyle has given his name to a particular type of character in crime fiction: a detective’s right hand, conversational partner and admiring friend is called ‘a Watson figure’. In books by other authors, Dr Watson has solved cases by himself. The ‘H’ in his name (according to Sherlockian research) stands for Hamish, the Scottish for James.
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John Madden
Male
Scotland Yard detective John Madden suffered from an explosion during the First World War, but nevertheless in 1921 still solves the murder of four persons in the Surrey countryside. After that, he and his wife, Dr Helen Blackwell, settle as farmers in Surrey, but for various reasons Madden nevertheless takes part in investigations of several brutal murders in England during the Thirties and Forties in a suite of novels by Rennie Airth.