Sample of literary figures
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Hanne Wilhelmsen
Female
Hanne Wilhemsen comes from a family of academics, and her father is a professor. She surprises and annoys her family by becoming a police officer. Wilhelmsen is a lesbian, she is good looking and she rides a pink Harley Davidson until she is shot and ends up in a wheelchair. Anne Holt has written a string of internationally acclaimed novels about Wilhelmsen’s professional and private life.
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Frank Frølich
Male
Frølich is a sergeant with the Oslo Police, where – in a suite of novels by Kjell Ola Dahl – he works together with a cynical and disillusioned Chief Inspector Gunnarstranda. The two are each other’s opposites, for better or worse. The somewhat younger, extrovert and impulsive Frølich is especially interested in women which often lands him in embarrassing situations in his private life as well as in his work.
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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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Gideon Fell
Male
The enormous Dr Fell, whose physical traits are modelled on G.K. Chesterton, is one of crime fiction’s foremost problem-solvers when it comes to ‘locked-room’ mysteries and other ‘impossible’ crimes. He also works on an ever-growing doctoral thesis about English drinking habits from bygone days, he likes his beer and is married – although his wife is only mentioned in a few of John Dickson Carr’s books about him.