Sample of literary figures
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Gunnarstranda
Male
Detective Inspector Gunnarstranda – his first name is never mentioned – is a middle-aged man who smokes too much. He works for the Oslo police and solves crime in a string of books by the Norwegian author Kjell Ola Dahl. Gunnarstranda can be cynical and disillusioned, but he is also kind and helpful. He general works alongside his seargeant, Frank Frølich.
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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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Tuppence Beresford
Female
She is actually called Prudence Cowley Beresford, but is known as Tuppence by everyone, including her husband. She is not exactly beautiful, but has a sharp mind and is charming, and she is quite often the one who finds vital clues in the cases that the couple solve in detective stories by Agatha Christie. Now and then the solutions are based more upon Tuppence’s intuition than upon logic. In the last book about them, they are both 70+.
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John Madden
Male
Scotland Yard detective John Madden suffered from an explosion during the First World War, but nevertheless in 1921 still solves the murder of four persons in the Surrey countryside. After that, he and his wife, Dr Helen Blackwell, settle as farmers in Surrey, but for various reasons Madden nevertheless takes part in investigations of several brutal murders in England during the Thirties and Forties in a suite of novels by Rennie Airth.