Favorite Recurring Characters in Mystery Novels

Who are some of your favorite mystery novel characters? The ones who make you stick with a particular series & keep a constant eye out for the next installment. Here are some of mine:

Lucas Davenport - John Sanford's Prey Series

Lucas Davenport is a Minneapolis detective who is also a self made millionaire (he designs computer role playing games & later on in the series sold the city a design for a police training simulater.) Davenport, like so many fictional detectives, is a driven lone wolf who's work puts strain on his personal relationships. He's also a lover of (many) women. I like Davenport being a flawed hero, not all good, but not a bad guy: he's a gambler, he's willing to plant evidence in order to get the bad guy, he's morally ambiguous in sleeping with a news reporter he leaks crime details to and sleeping with a near murder victim. I also like how we see his character evolve as the series moves on, from a semi playboy to a dedicated father & husband.

Harry Bosch - Michael Connelly's Detective Harry Bosch Mysteries

Harry Bosch is a former Vietnam War vet, a "tunnel rat" who searched for Viet Cong in the network of burrows beneath Vietnamese villages. Harry Bosch is a good character in the sense that he is a bitter and somewhat unlucky man, which gives him a closeness to the reader; he's not a super-hero and he's certainly full of flaws, like everybody we know. But he's not the common anti-hero, because he's a terrific investigator, and respected as such. His superiors only put up with his nonsense because he's so good. It's also easy to identify with him in his travails against both bad guys, unfairness and bureaucracies.

Kinsey Millhone - Sue Grafton's Alphabet Mysteries

Kinsey differs from the other characters in that she is not a cop, but a private eye. (like a female Sam Spade) She's also easy to relate to, not a wonder woman but a loner who's been divorced twice and lives in a small apartment over a garage. The neat thing about this series is it takes place in the 80's, before the internet was around to help in her investigations, so she has to rely on old fashioned gumshoe technics to solve her cases.

 

Sherlock Holmes.

 

Joe Gunther- Archer Mayor's Joe Gunther series
Awesome character.

 

Poirot. I like Agatha Christie.

 

Miss Marple - the little granny no one would ever suspect. Christie is the best!

 

Richard Jury from the Martha Grimes novels

 

Poirot, most definitely.
Peter Wimsey is pretty good as well.

 

I'm a fan of Alex Cross in the James Patterson novels as well as Robert Langdon in Dan Brown's books.

 

How remiss of me to forget Brother Cadfael - I loved Brother Cadfael's penance so much