Sample of literary figures
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Tom Ripley
Male
He is charming, handsome and cultivated as well as being a ruthless serial killer and psychopath totally lacking in empathy, the main character in five classic thrillers by Patricia Highsmith. Thomas ‘Tom’ Ripley became an orphan when he was five years old, and was brought up by a callous female relative. He later marries the wealthy Héloïse Plisson, but nevertheless has successfully continued his criminal career.
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Jimmy Perez
Male
Despite the surname, members of the Perez family have lived on the Shetland Islands for several hundred years – they are descendants of shipwrecked Spaniards. He is a police officer, and the main character in a number of police procedurals by Ann Cleeves. Perez starts a relationship with the single mother Fran Hunter in the first book, and suffers badly when he later loses her. He does, however, surface again and returns in several books.
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Erik Winter
Male
Winter is a detective inspector in Gothenburg, Sweden. Contrary to most other literary detectives he comes from a wealthy family and is well off. He marries a physician, Angela, and they have a child together in Åke Edwardson’s string of books about him. After a period of hard work, the family moves to Spain, but a couple of years later Winter returns to Gothenburg, without his family, and returns to his former job.
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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.