Sample of literary figures
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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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Philip Marlowe
Male
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is the archetype of the hardboiled American private eye. Many subsequent authors of crime fiction have found inspiration in the lonesome, brooding detective. Marlowe is a former investigator at the district attorney’s office of Los Angeles County, he is well read, interested in social issues, and he moves as effortlessly in the upper echelons of society as in back alleys and shady bars thanks to his wisecracking repartee.
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Sebastian Bergman
Male
He was a popular person, respected as a forensic psychologist and regarded as Sweden’s foremost expert on criminal profiling – until he lost his wife and daughter in a natural catastrophe. Then he stopped working, became a sex-addict and generally inaccessible. Sebastian Bergman has, however, reluctantly thawed and allowed himself to be tempted back to his work by Hans Rosenfeldt and Michael Hjorth.
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Alex Recht
Male
In the Stockholm C.I.D., Detective Chief Inspector Alex Recht is something of a legend. With more than 30 years’ service and a large number of hard-to-solve cases behind him, he starts – even though he loves his job – to look forward to retirement and to being able to spend more time with his wife, Lena, with whom he has been married almost as long as he has been a police officer. In the books by Kristina Ohlsson he usually works together with Fredrika Bergman.