Sample of literary figures
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Erast Fandorin
Male
A Russian police officer, secret agent and spy in Tsarist Russia in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Erast Petrovich Fandorin never knew his mother, and when his bankrupt father died when Erast was 19 years old, he is forced to break off his studies and start working in the police force. His brilliant career is described in a row of books by Boris Akunin (pseudonym for Grigory Chkhartishvili).
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Thursday Next
Female
She is called Thursday Next, and is an agent for a state organisation in an absurd, parallel world (i.e. parallel to our own) that is imbued with literary features. She is newly married – we get to know that her husband Landen Parke-Laine drowned when he was three years old – and has a son Friday. Her mother is called Wednesday. Jasper Fforde has written a suite of very different fantasy crime novels about Thursday Next and her world.
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Judy Hammer
Female
Superintendent Judy Hammer is head of a police department in North Carolina, Virginia, where she has to deal with both city crime and stubborn islanders in a short suite of novels by Patricia Cornwell. Hammer is a middle-aged, unhappily married but very fond of her young colleague Andy Brazil, who becomes her right hand. In the books about them, realistic police work is combined with some less realistic elements.
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Tom Thorne
Male
Tom Thorne is a middle-aged, somewhat worse for wear detective inspector in London. In the early books he is dull and conventional. However, his creator, Mark Billingham, has subsequently turned him into a multi-faceted character with bad as well as good qualities. He is persistent and conscientious, but he can also be short-tempered, grumpy and prone to making disastrous mistakes. Well into the series he becomes involved with Seargeant Helen Weeks.