oops, that’s Graham without an e.
Just remembered another:
Julian English, Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara.
Jessie. I came explicitly to post Night, Mother, as it’s one of the most powerful plays I’ve ever read.
Major Tetley at the end of The Ox Bow Incident.
Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine) in “the Children’s Hour.” (I’m guilty! I’m guilty! I’m guilty!)
How about Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks” who, as her shrink related, didn’t commit suicide but rather “allowed” herself to be murdered.
Don’t forget Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid.
The main character in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
The chick in the poem The Highwayman.
[spoiler]You’ve got the order wrong. The murderer fakes his own murder as # 6, making it look like he’s been shot in the head. Later, he kills # 7 (the doctor) and # 8 (the corrupt cop). The two survivors, the governess and the adventurer, each conclude that the other is the murderer. The governess shoots the adventurer (# 9), then goes up to her room and commits suicide as an act of remorse for having originally killed her student, before the story opened.
The murderer tidies everything up, making it clear that someone was in the house after the governess committed suicide, then commits suicide himself by shooting himself in the head, consistent with his own original faked murder. Since they’re isolated on an island in the middle of a storm, the police can’t reach the house until several days have passed. All the bodies have started to decay by the time the police get there, so the forensics can’t tell that the murderer survived everyone else by about a day.
(And technically all the numbers are out, since the murderer killed someone else before the story opened, which we only find out at the end. We’ll just call that guy Victim 0 to keep the sequence matched to the chronology of the story.)[/spoiler]
Lux, Mary, Cecilia, Therese and Bonnie Lisbon, The Virgin Suicides.
Miggs from Silence of the Lambs
Hercule Poirot, in “Curtain” by Agatha Christie.
John Singer, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Billy Bibbit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Was that actually famous? I wouldn’t know, because I decided, after reading about fifty Agatha Christie novels, that she absolutely sucked at what she did (MHO, and I don’t wish to engender an extended hijack with this opinion, it’s just so rarely that I get an opportunity to broadcast it).
But if the demise of M. Poirot gets to be famous literature, then I offer the far superior suicide of (spoiler for anyone who has not had the pleasure of reading it)Orrie Cather in A Family Affair by the far superior Rex Stout.