Happy 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago, Lt. Janet DiMarco and her partner Sgt. Cynthia Rice debuted in The Good Walk Alone. They kicked ass and shot armed men if they had to. They bent the law and made life hell for Capt. Audrey Russell and Chief Forensic Scientist Julie Levine. City Police LLC was staffed exclusively by women, checked by skeptical female judges and a plutocratic female Supreme Court. I argued intellectually for female justice and law enforcement in a series of essays and videos. The Freeman's Constitution provides for female jurors in family law.

I'm having a celebratory cup of coffee. Janet DiMarco falls in love with the Chief Executive, a Cary Grant type with vast resources and enough courage for five or six men rolled together as hereditary monarch ordered by the Supreme Court to pick a woman, marry her, and produce a prince. He picked DiMarco. Romantic comedy ensues. Heroic men are not naturally willing to be completely docile or honest, sharing every micron of their privacy and power. I tried to illustrate male responsibility and discretion in a dozen novels. We naturally out-rank women in multiple respects. If it weren't for strong men, women would never experience love and willingly agree to create children by irresistible heart-pounding intimacy.

For fun, it's also 33rd anniversary of my first fictional female cop, Lt. Laura Oak, awarded the Medal of Valor on Mars in 2157. She falls in love with an Earthman sent to do justice. Mars Shall Thunder was my first longform action adventure novel, to be topped decades later by a husband and wife team of private eye wildcats, Chris Cable and Mary Blount, Ph.D. It doesn't matter what other people write, or created in the long history of literature. I write about men and women, indestructibly bonded couples who form families and raise their children, tens of millions of moms and dads like my parents were, some of them uniquely tasked in life as heroes. Peaceful civilian life cannot exist without heroism by an elite minority of lovers. All the real life heroes I encountered were married men and women. Criminals were single and unlovable. It ain't rocket science. Strong, courageous folks are drawn to love and marriage.

We never do this perfectly. It's not perfection that men and women want from each other. If the standard of romance was perfection, it would never happen. Heroic people make more mistakes and face infinitely worse challenges than ordinary couples. That's the whole point of literature as I see it, to test the limits of what people can do in difficult circumstances. It was a specific failing of the noir genre, always a lonely p.i., destined to push away the babes, unable to love anyone, which I endeavored to fix. There's no drama without a loved one.

.