John Dortmunder
[1] A career criminal and a "planner," creating schemes for burglaries and assigning responsibilities to his team, Dortmunder is similar to Parker in several ways.Unlike Parker, however, Dortmunder is a nonviolent character whose schemes start out fairly straightforward but usually turn out outlandish and over-the-top.It is mentioned in more than one book that he was abandoned at birth and raised in an orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery in the fictional town of Dead Indian, Illinois.In most novels, Dortmunder's team earn only small amounts of money; the resulting heists, therefore, are only Pyrrhic victories, and the moral for the reader is that Crime Does Not Pay—at least not very well.Over the course of the series, several other regulars are gradually added to the mix, including: Several other specialists appear less frequently in the series, such as Ralph Winslow, a lockman; Wally Whistler, an extremely absentminded lockman who once accidentally released a lion from its cage at the zoo; Jim O'Hara, a recently released burglar who still hasn't lost his prison pallor, and Herman Jones, a black lockman formerly known as "Herman X" when he was a black radical and as "Herman Makanene Stulu'mbnick" when he was briefly Vice-President of the fictional African nation of Talabwo.Other memorable characters include Wilbur Howey, a lockman recently released after a forty-eight-year sentence (originally ten years, but he kept escaping and getting caught immediately); Roger Chefwick, a lockman who is crazy about model trains; and Fred and Thelma Lartz, a husband-wife driving team (Thelma now does the actual driving because Fred has lost his nerve after nearly being run down by an Eastern Airlines flight on a Kennedy Airport runway).But they are all seen frequently, and could certainly be accused of aiding and abetting Dortmunder and his cronies in all their endeavors: When planning their heists, the group usually meets in the back room of the O.J.