Sample of literary figures
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Cato Isaksen
Male
Inspector Cato Isaksen is successful at work, but his private life is a mess. Unni Lindell’s books are more than detective stories, they also portray Isaksen’s struggle to get comfortable with his male identity and not to let his private life interfere too much with his job. It adds an extra dimension to the books.
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Gerlof Davidson
Male
He is a former sea captain, now more than 80 years old, and in need of a walking stick as well as a hearing aid in his daily life. But there is nothing wrong with his memory and deductive reasoning. Old Gerlof – loosely based on author Johan Theorin’s grandfather Ellert Gerlofsson – is the main character, if not always the real problem-solver, in four lauded detective stories set in an Öland island environment with suggested supernatural elements.
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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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Liz (Elizabeth) Carlyle
Female
The quick-thinking British secret agent Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Carlyle has worked since 1994 for MI5 and later MI6. She is – according to author Stella Remington – 34 years old in the first book about her, is 168 cm tall, has brown hair and greyish-blue eyes and is described as pretty. She lives in a simple little flat in London and is single, but she satisfies her sexual needs with a married man that she is not in love with.