Sample of literary figures
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Carl Hamilton
Male
The Swedish secret agent Carl Hamilton, code name Coq Rouge, was born in 1954 to an aristocratic family and later became a leftist activist. He trained as an attack diver and after being trained by the CIA he worked for the military intelligence organization OP5 and was later appointed director general of the Swedish Security Services. Hamilton is the protagonist in about a dozen bestselling thrillers by Jan Guillou.
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Jakob Studer
Male
Perhaps the most famous problem solver in German-language crime fiction is Wachtmeister (approx: sergeant) Jakob Studer, a single elderly gentleman, overweight, with a pale, gaunt face and a heavy moustache. He was created by Swiss-Austrian Friedrich Glauser, is mainly active in the countryside and in small towns and solves his cases with the help of intuition and human knowledge.
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Gereon Rath
Male
A police detective and war veteran in Köln, who after a fatal mistake in his work in 1929 is transferred to Berlin. According to author Volker Kutscher, Gereon Rath is between 30 and 40 years old, slim, skilled, stubborn and a morphine addict on account of traumatic war experiences. In Berlin he meets police stenographer Charlotte ‘Charly’ Ritter; they start a relationship, get married and build a family.
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Karen Pirie
Female
She is an overweight workaholic, but also exceptionally skilful when it comes to investigating old, unsolved cases in police novels by Val McDermid. Karen Pirie is the head of the Historic Cases Unit with its head office in Fife in Scotland. Her private life is minimal – but includes a sweetheart, her colleague Phil Parhatka, and she mourns deeply when he is killed on duty. But she soon throws herself into the next ‘cold case’.