Sample of literary figures
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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.
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Kouplan
Male
He calls himself Kouplan, but his real name is Nesrine Amipour, born in 1968, and he is a transsexual guy in a woman’s body. He has trained as a journalist, but is now a refugee without papers in Sweden, homeless and unemployed. He supports himself by collecting drink-cans (and thus being able to cash in on the deposit) and works as a ‘private investigator’ in four novels by Sara Lövestam, while at the same time trying to ascertain what has happened to his Iranian family.
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Harry Hole
Male
Harry Hole is Jo Nesbø’s creation. Hole is immensely popular among readers even outside Nesbø’s native Norway. He is a police officer with a serious drinking problem and countless scars acquired in the line of duty. His methods are unconventional, he is headstrong and he is unpopular with both his superiors and his colleagues. The stories about him are more like hardboiled American thrillers than traditional detective stories.
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Dave Gurney
Male
A well-built police detective in New York who commands respect, renowned for having caught several serial murderers, who retires already when he is about 50 years old. He moves to the countryside with his wife Madeleine and their son, but can’t resist from privately investigating murders. He admits that this affects his family life, and thus always has a bad conscience, according to his creator John Verdon.