Sample of literary figures
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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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Erlendur
Male
A detective inspector in Reykjavík, and the main character in a row of police novels by Arnaldur Indriðason. Erlendur – his surname, Sveinsson, is rarely named as is customary in Iceland – is a skilful and empathetic police officer, but rather tired and sometimes anxiety-ridden. One reason is that he left his family when the children were small, for reasons that he can’t himself remember. His ex-wife still hates him for this, and both his son and his daughter ended up abusing drugs.
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Avi (Avraham) Avraham
Male
He isn’t so successful and sometimes makes mistakes which make him uncertain and melancholic. But author Dror Mishani describes the short, everyday detective Avraham Avraham in Holon – a suburb of Tel Aviv – as stubborn, and that means he gets results. He is single, spends his evenings in front of the telly, and admires his female boss, Ilana Lis, of whom he is a little afraid.
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Camille Verhœven
Male
Author Pierre Lemaitre doesn’t make life easy for his middle-aged detective chief inspector, Camille Verhœven, in Paris. His pregnant wife is tortured to death in the first book: in the fourth book, his girlfriend Anne Forestier is almost killed in connection with a robbery. The short and entirely bald police officer, who isn’t always particularly sympathetic, solves the cases; then he resigns.