Jessica introduction to the video and transcript here

Jessica: I wanted to talk about the women in your books, because both of you have them. Andy, yours is entirely centered around a female protagonist. Dennis, you have Abby as a major character, not perhaps the protagonist in the same way as Dan, but a secondary protagonist for sure.

Both of these characters seem to me to be women in professions that aren’t typical for women, including Abby’s position. I’m curious how you think about that.

Andy, yours is set in the 70s and 80s. Dennis, yours is set more in modern days. I’d love to hear what you think about the challenges women face in these kinds of careers, what they would have faced then, and what they probably still face today. How have things changed? How are they perhaps still the same?

Dennis: When I began thinking about Abby, there are a couple of different women I worked with who could easily be the Abby of the book.

Given that I was writing for a time in the 80s and the 90s, there was still a strong glass ceiling and a lot of chauvinism. I don’t think Abby would have been successful in her role without a male supervisor, a male mentor, someone above her who could deal with bank presidents, and with some of the chauvinistic commanders of the San Francisco Police Department.

Today, I don’t think that’s as much of an obstacle as it would have been for Abby back then. If Abby were dealing with a police chief of a major city, she might very well be working with a female police chief, because women are now in those high-ranking levels.

So I think today’s professional woman has an easier role. It’s still male-dominated, but a lot of groundwork has been done ahead of them.

I remember when I first started my career as a civilian administrator in a police department. We hired our first female recruit, and I thought, “Wow, this is going to be interesting,” because the chauvinism and rejection were heavy. Well, guess what: she retired as chief of police of that department.

After 30-some years, she went up through the ranks, fought it all the way, and opened doors for a lot more women to come on board and have successful careers.

When she was first hired, I thought I had a cakewalk as a civilian administrator, second in command, compared to her. They wanted to wash her out immediately.

The fastest way was to put her through the gauntlet like all recruits: scale an eight-foot wall, do the physical tests, drag a 150-pound deadweight dummy across an intersection. And she did it. She dug in and said, “This is what you want? Watch.”

That dummy weighed about as much as she did. But you’re talking about guts and determination.

I think she helped open doors not only in her department, but in a lot of other departments in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then others: Chicago, New York, Philadelphia.

Now it’s not unusual to see a news briefing where the police make a statement and the person wearing the stars is a woman.

I think it’s similar in criminal justice and private security. It’s easier today than it was back then, but it’s still a rough road, especially breaking through the notion that you’re more than just managing a guard force, or guards with guns and dogs.

There’s intellectual property protection, executive protection, and big, complex responsibilities. It’s not just the stereotype.

So that’s kind of where I think the challenges are.

Andy: If my memory serves me, part of my motivation for a female protagonist was, first, the subject itself, and second, the timing.

In the early to mid-70s, I was in college, and that’s when the women’s rights movement really started to take hold. My mother was involved with it. I remember her going to the bank to open a checking account in 1967, and if my father didn’t co-sign, then her father had to co-sign. Let alone a credit card.

That changed a lot by the early 70s.

I could write about a male protagonist, but everybody’s written about males. I wanted something more. And my protagonist is somebody I know.

I agree with you, Dennis, 100% about glass ceilings. And yes, it’s the “can she pull the 150-pound weight across the street?” kind of stuff.

But the era of my book is when all this is coming to the forefront, when women are taking more control of their lives.

In my story, I introduce it through this notion that the British government is going to bring in more women recruits. They need more people, younger people with their ear to the street, to do this kind of work. So there’s a program to bring in recruits, but they’re limiting the number, 15 or whatever it might be, and the women are going to have to work like heck to get in.

I thought that would be a great ongoing thread, along with Nicollette’s advancement: everything she has to fight, the demons of being in a male-dominated business, the pressure that she has to shoot a weapon, and the headwind from superiors with attitudes.

It gave a continuing story that people could root for. Root for her. Root for the women to do well, not fail.

It also gave a nice flow in a nasty business, where she can succeed, prove she can do it, fight her demons, fight the bad guys, and fight the glass ceiling.

And for me to write about it, there’s a lot of information, a lot of room to be creative, because we lived through it. I’m not a woman, but I can imagine as best I can.

You have daughters. I have two daughters and three granddaughters. And I also have a protagonist I care about.

I’m not Ian Fleming. I don’t claim to be. But in your book, Dennis, one character I really fell in love with, besides Abby, was the marksman from Mossad.

Dennis: Oh yeah. Ellen Fisher.

Andy: Ellen Fisher, that’s it. I saw a lot of similarity between Nicollette and the people she worked with, and Ellen Fisher and the people she worked with.

Not that Ellen was fighting a glass ceiling. She was brilliant. She’d already achieved that. She was above that level.

But the fact that she could organize something with such precision and accuracy, and yet in 1978 or 79, she couldn’t have done that because they wouldn’t let her.

Dennis: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Andy: I fell in love with that character because I thought, “Man, this is Nicollette down the road.”

She’ll probably be in Dennis’s and Andy’s position, retired, writing about it.

So that’s one of the reasons I wrote a female protagonist. I felt there was a sub-story in all of this. And there’s a sub-story in yours, too.