Sample of literary figures
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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’.
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Vera Stanhope
Female
An eccentric, middle-aged, controversial detective chief inspector in Northumberland and in a series of police novels by Ann Cleeves. Stanhope is a grim lone wolf and workaholic, in part because as a child she was subjected to sexual abuse by an acquaintance of her single father. She still lives in her childhood home, drives her father’s old Landrover and solves murder cases in her own very special way.
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Aurelio Zen
Male
Detective Inspector Zen is a loner based in Rome, but he solves crime all over Italy. He may seem clumsy, but his determination and laissez-faire attitude to police protocol means that he is both successful and unpopular with his superiors. Aurelio Zen featured in one book by the British author Michael Dibdin, but he became so popular that Dibdin wrote another ten about him.
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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.