Sample of literary figures
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Archie Goodwin
Male
The voluminous private detective Nero Wolfe, created by Rex Stout, rarely leaves home. He lets his secretary, Archie Goodwin, do the legwork, and Goodwin is not a bad detective either. He is good looking, polite, tough when he needs to be, quick-witted and he can memorize interrogations word for word. He is usually the narrator in the Nero Wolfe books. His employer would never have been able to solve crime as elegantly as he does without him.
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Alex Morrow
Female
Morrow is a working class detective from Glasgow. She is the mother of twins and the protagonist in a series of tartan noir books by Denise Mina. Morrow is not always very forthcoming or correct, but she struggles to combine her job with being a mother and against misogynous bosses and colleagues in a city characterised by increasing class differences and violent crime.
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Annika Bengtzon
Female
Annika Bengtzon is the creation of the Swedish author and journalist Liza Marklund and possibly Sweden’s best-known journalist. She is married with two children, but she is also a highly competent crime reporter with a bad conscience on account of neglecting her family. Bengtzon is a complex woman who can be hard and tough one minute and reduced to tears the next. Nevertheless, she is portrayed as a highly capable modern professional woman.
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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.