Thoughts on a two-headed protagonist, plus the return of a question for readers

A December discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders concerned crime writers who shift protagonists from book to book within a series. More recently, I posted about Garry Disher's deft handling of two parallel investigations with two separate investigators in his novel Chain of Evidence.

In another entry in his guest-blogging stint at Moments in Crime, the Norwegian author K.O. Dahl discusses one practical advantage of having two main characters:

"The good side of having to protagonists is the possibility to change. When I am tired of the first one, I can go on working with the other with a fresh mind. But mostly, they fill each other out. Sometimes they remind me of an old, married couple."

One of those protagonists sounds like people I went to high school and summer camp with:

"He loves music, and music means rock from the seventies. He likes those bands from the seventies not everybody remembers, like Edgar Broughton band, Captain Beefheart, Colosseum, Gentle Giant and King Crimson. If you ask if he likes Genesis, he would say, yeah, those records with Peter Gabriel.

"In high school Frølich thought Frank Zappa was some kind of a prophet."

I always wondered what happened to those guys. My old classmates, I mean, not Captain Beefheart and Gentle Giant. I guess they grew up to become cops in Norway.
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Who are your favorite multiple protagonists? Ask me, and I'll suggest Bill James' Harpur and Iles or Janwillem van de Wetering's Grijpstra, de Gier and their commissaris, or chief. But who are your favorite dual, triple or team protagonists? How does the author make the team work? Do you sometimes with the author would settle on one of the team and focus on that character as protagonist?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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K.O. Dahl
Norwegian crime fiction
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

K.O. Dahl: A Norwegian crime writer joins the blogosphere

I have not yet read the Norwegian crime writer Kjell Ola Dahl, author of The Fourth Man and The Man in the Window. I am inclined to do so now, however, thanks to his guest-blogging stint on Moments in Crime, which includes the barest hint of salutary skepticism on a major world issue.

Elsewhere, Dahl has some interesting things to say about Scandinavian crime fiction and crime stories that cross borders in an article called Crime Pays.

(A hat tip to the hard-working and quasi-encyclopedic Euro Crime.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
K.O. Dahl
Norwegian crime fiction
Scandinavian Crime Fiction