Sample of literary figures
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Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg
Male
Adamsberg is a Paris detective inspector. His pace is slow, he is contemplative, he is well acquainted with the human character, he relies on his intuition, and he solves every case he is confronted with. These are generally full of mysteries, but Adamsberg’s unorthodox methods and competent colleagues are a great help to him. Adamsberg is the creation of Fred Vargas, pseudonym for the French author Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau.
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Maisie Dobbs
Female
Young, brave and intelligent private detective who started to work as a domestic when she was only 13 years old. Maisie Dobbs had a benevolent female employer, and got to study nursing and psychology. She fell in love with a doctor who was killed in the First World War, and in 1929 she started her own detective agency. Jacqueline Winspear has written more than a dozen books about her.
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Salvo Montalbano
Male
Commissario Montalbano, named by the author Andrea Camilleri for the Spanish crime writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, was born in Sicily, and he works in the fictional town of Vigàta there. He is short-tempered and stubborn, which causes a great deal of problems, but deep down he is a hardworking, energetic professional who is in a long-distance relationship with his fiancé, Livia Burlando.
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John H. Watson
Male
Sherlock Holmes’ chronicler and permanent companion in the stories by A. Conan Doyle has given his name to a particular type of character in crime fiction: a detective’s right hand, conversational partner and admiring friend is called ‘a Watson figure’. In books by other authors, Dr Watson has solved cases by himself. The ‘H’ in his name (according to Sherlockian research) stands for Hamish, the Scottish for James.