Meny

Sample of literary figures

  • Diane Fry

    Female

    Detective Diane Fry, who features in a string of novels by Stephen Booth, is a competent investigator, but under the surface she is an insecure and vulnerable woman. She has a complicated relationship with Ben Cooper, one of her subordinates at the police station in the fictional town of Edendale in Derbyshire’s Peak District. They neither can or want to admit that they are in love.

    Further reading

  • Dudley Smith

    Male

    Police officer in Los Angeles in four of James Ellroy’s novels. Dudley Smith was born in Ireland, he is tall and broad shouldered, and goes all in brown, one could say: he has brown hair cut very short, brown eyes and he usually wears a shabby, brown suit. Few police officers in crime fiction have been described as so unsympathetic: he is an egoistic and violent bully and, it turns out, a murderer. And he is happy with that!

    Further reading

  • 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.

    Further reading

  • Kurt Wallander

    Male

    Wallander lives and works in Ystad, southern Sweden. But it does not prevent him from leading investigations of especially difficult cases, chasing serial killers and international criminals. Through Henning Mankell’s books as well as adaptations for film and television, he has become a popular figure and one of Sweden’s best-known fictional characters worldwide.

    Further reading