Moving from Incompetent to Competent Characters

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Sue Grafton

Last week, I wrote about incompetent characters in literature. So, naturally I’ll write this week about…Valentine’s Day yesterday. Oops, just kidding; I’m going to discuss competent characters in literature.

That can mean smart people, handy people, socially adept people, etc. They might be skilled in many areas, or skilled in some ways and not in others.

Obviously, detectives are among the protagonists who come to mind, although many of them are more competent in their work than in their personal lives. For instance, Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant sleuth with loner and eccentric traits in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and stories. Val McDermid’s Karen Pirie is also highly intelligent and driven in her cold-case work while not being as successful in off-duty life. Sue Grafton’s self-deprecating Kinsey Millhone is a brainy, brave, dogged, and witty private investigator who had two failed marriages, eats too much junk food, etc.

I’m currently working my way through — and loving — the Millhone-starring “alphabet mysteries” (now reading M is for Malice).

Other memorably competent characters? Hermione Granger is as book-smart as they come, and also has plenty of common sense in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Those books’ wizards — including Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall — are obviously quite capable, too, as is another wizard: Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In Stieg Larsson’s trilogy that starts with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, abuse survivor Lisbeth Salander is a determined genius with computers.

Preteen-then-teen Francie Nolan is wise beyond her years — both academically and as a navigator of difficult family dynamics — in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

When one thinks of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre character, competent is one of the first adjectives that comes to mind. Whatever she does — whether being a governess, a teacher, or generally maneuvering through the difficulties of her oft-challenging life — she does well.

Also quite skilled — and with a strong sense of morality — is attorney Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Another classic, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, features a title character (Antonia Shimerda) who’s a very competent farm spouse and parent.

In the sci-fi area, we have protagonists like Mark Watney, who has to be unusually clever and innovative to survive when stranded on Mars in Andy Weir’s The Martian. Twentieth-century Black woman Dana Franklin also has to be really skilled to deal with and survive involuntary time travel to and from the slave-holding American South in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, competent characters in fiction?

Misty the cat says: “This must be one of Norman Rockwell’s larger paintings.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a congressional candidate’s welcome win and various weird maps — is here.

23 thoughts on “Moving from Incompetent to Competent Characters”

    • Thank you, Kerfe, for the mention of the “Swallows and Amazon” books! I hadn’t been familiar with that series, and found it interesting to read about it just now on Wikipedia. And, yes, most fictional detectives are pretty competent; wish some of them were real. 🙂

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  2. When it comes to all around capability for survival, we can’t forget Robinson Crusoe. I must admit I haven’t read Daniel Defoe’s novel, only a comic book version for kids back in the 1960s. I remember admiring Crusoe for his skills in building things, growing food, etc. I think the comic book left out the cannibals, though.

    Come to think of it, Mark Watney of The Martian is sort of a space-age version of Crusoe.

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  3. For the sake of my response, I’m going to include memoir as literature. By far, the most competent woman I’ve encountered in any book is Leora Goff Wilson in the Leora series by her granddaughter Joy Neal Kidney. Despite grinding poverty during the Depression, family member’s deaths, and three of her sons killed in WWII, she took exceptional care of her family with intelligence, ingenuity, and grit.

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  4. I love your examples. I’ve read almost all of them, including everything about Kinsey Millhone.

    And come to think of it, I’d add Kinky Friedman. The author’s style sometimes makes it sound like he stumbles into solutions, but in fact he is very much like his hero, Sherlock Holmes. Well, when Kinky’s sober…

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    • Thank you, Dan! Inventing a time machine is about as competent as it gets — 🙂 — even though that character ended up visiting troubling places in the future. And then there was the guy who figured out how to travel to the moon in Wells’ “The First Men in the Moon.”

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  6. Dave, I always enjoy how your Sunday posts spark a different kind of literary inventory. Last week ineptness, this week competence.

    Since you mention detectives, I’ve been reading Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel (Rebus is now retired after a long career), and he strikes me as a fascinating example of competence that isn’t polished or performative. Rebus is not socially smooth, nor is he particularly gentle with himself, but his intelligence runs deep. It is the kind that is instinctive, persistent, and morally alert. He sees patterns others miss. He listens to what isn’t being said. His competence lies not in charm or academic brilliance, but in a kind of hard-earned discernment shaped by years of walking Edinburgh’s streets. He exemplifies a different model of intelligence that is rough-edged, intuitive, and stubbornly ethical.

    What I notice in so many of the characters you mention, from Jane Eyre to Atticus Finch, is that competence is rarely about perfection. It’s about steadiness. A capacity to act when action is needed. A moral centre that holds. Perhaps that’s why such characters comfort us. They remind us that while life is messy, it is possible to move through it with skill, conscience, and quiet resolve.

    And as John Rebus said: “You don’t stop being a detective because you’ve retired. It gets under your skin.”

    Another spectacular topic and a great follow-up conversation.

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    • Thank you, Rebecca! Glad you liked the post — and, like you, I am enjoying the conversation(s).

      John Rebus sounds like quite a character. I was VERY impressed with your detailed description of his personality, including the line about him being “a fascinating example of competence that isn’t polished or performative.”

      Yes, competent characters are rarely perfect — which of course makes them human.

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  8. Dear admired author, Your incompetent and competent characters are of special importance to me since my thesis focuses on recruiting and retaining competent diverse academics. I like inviting literature to management research, as an innovative approach. Gratefully, Ahmadou

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  9. A great idea to swap it round the other way from last week. You have many favs of mine here when i comes to competence. Sherlock Holmes especially. To return to the not so competent ones I always thought it was interesting that Dr Watson was often portrayed in films as kind of bumbling, when in the books he is anything but. .

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    • Thank you, Shehanne! I took my cue from Jack London, who flipped the story line from “The Call of the Wild” to “White Fang.” 🙂

      Interesting about Dr. Watson in the books vs. the films! News to me, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Sherlock Holmes movie. 😲

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