Think I've finally arrived at a design for Mikael Lindroos that I feel kind of satisfied with. I might want to make him a bit thinner, but this one I feel kind of encapsulates what I was going for sufficiently well:
The character of Mikael Lindroos was originally
@Ares96 's idea, and he was very much going for the kind of Scandinavian Noir of the Sjöwall/Wahlöös genre. Unfortunately, I've never really read Sjöwall/Wahlöös, but I have seen my fair bit of Scandinavian Noir on TV, and so I pieced him together from a wide variety of influences, and characters I've come across, including in real life.
Mikael Lindroos is the most talented investigator that the police force of Åbo/Turku (the capital of the Grand Principality of Finland) has, but for reasons that we'll delve into later on in the description, is popular with neither the public at large, nor his superiors.
His backstory is meant in a sense to be an "anti-version" to the romantic tale of Benedetto di Ratta, Marquis of Mandal. Lindroos was born in the mid-1820s to a Finnish-speaking tennant farmer family in Turku County, his Swedish name derives from that when his grandfather was drafted in the Napoleonic Wars some thirty years earlier, the Swedish-speaking clerk draw names from a hat to assign to soldiers as they came in, and so his family ended up with a Swedish surname. Though by the 1860s, there is a movement among Finnish-speakers to Fennicize their names, Lindroos doesn't. Not because he is eager to be accepted by the Swedish-speaking elite as some middle-class Finns are, but just because he cannot be bothered to go through with it. The way Lindroos sees it, his grandfather viewed himself as a Finn and didn't let his Swedish name bother him, his father viewed himself as a Finn and didn't let his Swedish name bother him, so why should the third generation feel any different?
He is as such in his early forties by 1867, but he looks at least a decade older. In the 1850s, Lindroos joined the army, not out of a deep sense of patriotism, but merely because it seemed like a decent-paying job. Then a few years later the Great Baltic War broke out, and as a soldier, Lindroos had to fight. He unfortunately found himself one in the army that participated in the nigh-suicidal Assault on Reval early in the war, and since he was "lucky" not to be killed, he instead became a prisoner of war of the Russians, and was shipped off to Siberia to work on the railroad. Thus, Lindroos learned Russian. Interestingly, the whole ordeal did not make Lindroos feel any animosity towards the Russians. The Russians were his fellow prisoners, and he had to deal with them on a daily basis. Many of them were there simply because they espoused politics the Tsar's regime did not approve of, were ordinary blokes, no different from himself.
He first received news of his release and the end of the war over a month after the Great Baltic War actually ended in early spring of 1859. The Russian government would not offer to bring him back to Finland, and so he had to walk the distance himself. Not the nicest of experiences. On the other hand, the Swedish government did not do anything to get him home either, so he could hardly blame the Russians. When he got home, he received a medal, of course, but no pension, on the grounds that he had not been in combat enough, and so he had no other choice but to get back to work. His military service did interestingly enough entitle him the right to vote in elections, but he has yet to ever exercise that right, as he is fairly indifferent to politics in general, holding a view of "they're all basically the same".
By 1867, he has become quite possibly the most talented detective in the Åbo Police Force, which is viewed by half the city as an occupying army, and the other half as a drain of the public purse. The police force is ridiculously underfunded, but fortunately, Lindroos particular talent is in doing a lot with little.
He is not well-liked though, as his superiors do not much approve of his interests in new investigatory and forensic techniques from Down On The Continent and the British Isles, and feels that his insistance on leaving nothing unturned and doing everything by the book is tedious and annoying, and would often prefer him to just trust what they consider "gut feeling" and close a case when a convenient opportunity presents itself.
A few months prior to 26 June 1867, there was a minor incident in the port that Lindroos was involved in. Lindroos was leading a team tracking down a gang of Russian smugglers, and in order to infiltrate the gang and expose and arrest them, Lindroos instructed the officers under him to conceal the fact that they were policemen and "go undercover". Though he was successful and the gang was arrested, the fact that Lindroos accomplished this by deceit, it ended up being a rather controversial affair in the papers. Going undercover and infilitrating criminal gangs is most decidedly an ungentlemanly thing to do, and one would expect better from the city's police force.
His superiors would very much like to fire him, but they cannot because they know they're unlikely to find anyone as talented as him to accept the job he currently occupies at the meagre salary it draws. Instead, he was merely chewed out, disciplined, reprimanded, and told to keep a low profile.
Which didn't really bother Lindroos that much.
He has never sought public praise or fame or glory or anything of the sort. He's just a guy who wants to do his job, and do it properly.
And what with the police force to start with being fairly unpopular a little motley crew (to a great extent consisting of the very dreg of society that might well otherwise have turned out to be criminals), it's not like he blames his superiors. Keeping a low profile is, if anything, exactly what Lindroos wants to do anyway.
All Lindroos has ever wanted out of life is a good pint of ale or two at the end of a hard day's work, some pipe tobacco to smoke, and a steady stream of black, salted coffee.
Just don't try to bullshit him, or deny him that, and generally leave him alone, and you'll be on his good side.