Podcast Transcript 97: An Interview with L from the FBI

Here is a text transcript of DBSA 97. An Interview with L from the FBI. You can listen to the mp3 here, or you can read on! 

This podcast transcript was personally crafted with artisan alphabet letters by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

 Here are the books we discuss:

 

We also mentioned the Belgrave House website, and Regency Reads, where you can find a ton of digital copies of classic Regency romances are low prices. And, as L mentioned, you can learn more about all the different things the FBI does on the FBI website.

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[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to another DBSA podcast. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me is Jane Litte from Dear Author and a woman named L. L emailed us a little while ago. She works for the FBI, and she had a lot to say about accuracy of portrayals of FBI agents in romance novels, so of course we begged her to do an interview, and I hope you find this as fascinating as we did. We talk about FBI roles, the different purposes of different offices. We give her some Regency recommendations. It’s a pretty good conversation.

This podcast is brought to you by New American Library, publisher of Riding the Wave, Lorelie Brown’s sexy new Pacific Blue novel, on sale now.

The music you’re listening was provided by Sassy Outwater. I’ll have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can buy it.

I want to thank those of you who have emailed us with your recommendations for young readers. They’re awesome! Keep them coming; we’re going to start building that podcast very soon. There are going to be some really happy young readers in the world when we’re done.

And now, on with the podcast with me, Jane, and L.

[music]

Sarah: So you work for the FBI.

L: Correct.

Sarah: And you’ve asked that we refer to you as L, which is totally cool. Can you tell us a little bit about the capacity in which you work in the FBI?

L: Yes. I have been with the FBI for about nine years now. I’ve had two different jobs with the FBI. The first one I will choose not to speak about. The second one, I am an analyst for the FBI. I am what is called a support employee. I am not an agent; I do not carry a gun. That was the first question my mother asked me when I told her I was going to go work for the FBI.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Do you know Fox Mulder?

L: I do not –

Sarah: Bummer!

L: – and I don’t know where the X-files are.

Sarah: [Laughs] What about that
big-ass basement in the end of, at the end of Indiana Jones where they put the,
the Ark of the Covenant and all that other weird crap. Do you know where that
warehouse is?

L: I, I know we have some
warehouses in different places –

Sarah: [Laughs]

L: – but I don’t know if the Ark
is there or not.

Sarah: In your capacity as an
analyst, can you talk about some of the things that you do? Like, what does
that mean?

L: I mostly work national
security matters, so I don’t, I choose not to talk about specifics. I do a lot
of reading, a lot of looking through data, and a lot of talking. I brief a lot
to people, so I talk in front of groups of people, including executive
management. You know, being a reader and being a former, being a history major
and liking current events, this job fits me very well.

Jane Litte: So I’m guessing that
reading Julie James isn’t the type of reading you’re referring to?

L: No, it’s not. [Laughs] Some
of it’s very dry; some of it’s very interesting. It just all depends upon the
intelligence that I’m reading.

Sarah: Initially, you contacted
us because you wanted to talk about accuracy in representing the FBI in romance
fiction, and in the beginning you had talked about how some of Julie James’s
novels were, like, really bothersome in little inaccuracies, although you did say
that the latest one was much, much more accurate and that you, you enjoyed it.
Is that right?

L: That is correct. I
understand currently she has an FBI agent in Chicago as her technical
consultant. She actually did an interview with him on her blog that was very
interesting, and I believe that has helped wear down some of the inaccuracies
that some of the previous books had. Little things like the shoulder holsters
wearing, with agents wearing their weapons in shoulder holsters. No one wears
a shoulder holster. Everyone, all males carry on their hip or their ankle, and
the females I know carry, usually, in their purse or a backpack.

Sarah: One of the things that
you mentioned in, in the email to me was that your major issue with romance in
general, not just Julie James, but all of the romance that includes the FBI,
[laughs] can be summed up by serial killers and violent crime.

L: Absolutely.

Sarah: So you’re saying that the
FBI just, isn’t just about serial killers and violent crime and, and aliens?

L: That is correct.

Sarah: I will be damned.

L: If you look at our
priorities, which are posted on our main website, crime, what you would call crime,
is the fourth priority of the FBI. The first priority is counterterrorism, the
second priority is counterintelligence, the third priority is cybercrimes and
national security cyber issues, and the fourth priority is criminal, and
actually violent crime and murder, et cetera, what ends up in a lot of books,
not just romance novels, is, like, the fourth priority within the criminal
priorities. White collar crime and civil liberties, civil rights issues are
much higher than the actual violent crime. But it, that’s the easy thing for
people to talk about, because that’s a lot of what is in the news and in the public,
because that’s unclassified. A lot of our higher priorities only come out into
the public view when there’s a case, when someone is arrested, when someone
goes in for prosecution, so it’s much easier, I think, for authors just to
glean information on what’s open to the public, and we’re much more open about
ourselves and what we put out on even our website, because those are things
that are easy because of the classification level to give to the public. But
it is frustrating, because there are so many other things that we do, and there
would be so many interesting stories that could be told that I don’t think
people are looking for, and, you know, serial killers and violent crime is just
not all it.

Sarah: One of the things that
you mentioned in your email was, for example, the FBI support personnel that
are in embassies and the art theft team. Are they the ones that go after the
Works Progress art that belongs to the federal government, or are they dealing
with private art theft, or is it both?

L: They’re dealing with both.
There is an art theft database, and I don’t deal with that much; most of what I’ve
read about it, I’ve actually read about it on our, you know, website in
different articles that come out. Every so often we’ll, we’ll be able to gain
a, a painting back, and, for someone, and there’ll be a big presentation to
give the painting or the sculpture or the Incan bowl that was stolen from a
museum, and then there was a Matisse or a Monet that we got back in Florida, I
think through the Miami office, a year or two ago. So, you know, that’s just,
that’s really a side job that has just, something that we’ve had to develop
because there is this international, you know, interest in, in art theft. I
mean, you know, these things are worth billions of dollars sometimes, you know,
if you get a really important piece.

Jane: I saw that there was some,
I saw that there was some news that they might be ha-, they might have some
leads on that Boston –

L: Yes.

Jane: – art theft, which has
been a mystery for, what, three decades now?

L: I think it’s, like, two, 20
years, something like that? I, personally, I don’t know this for a fact, I
think they know who did it, but they just can’t prove it. That’s a personal
opinion; that is not, you know, that’s just something being read from the
outside. That happens; you know, sometimes you, you, you basically know who
did it, but you don’t have the strong evidence that you could take to court to
get a conviction, and we’re probably not going to try to arrest someone if they
cannot feel they cannot get a conviction.

We were speaking about our legal attaché
offices. Every – not every embassy – many embassies, I believe we’re in almost
80, 60 or 80 offices now around the world – if there is a legal attaché there,
that person is an FBI agent, and that goes back into the 1940s, when we had
legal attachés in South America during World War II and had a lot to do with
espionage during the war, and that program ha-, just continues to grow. As,
you know, the world becomes more connected, we need to have representation to
get help from other countries. I actually have, I actually spent two months in
one of our legal attaché offices on a temporary duty, what we call a TDY, four
years ago almost, and it was a really interesting experience. I
actually, one of my goals in my career is to go back permanently for a two- to
three-year job in one of our embassies overseas.

Jane: So I have two questions
for you. 1: What types of stories would you like to see involving the FBI? And
2: How would authors go about becoming more accurate in their writing of FBI
agents?

L: The first thing I would like
to see is for authors to look beyond the FBI agents. They’re great, don’t get
me wrong; they’re the front lines in our organization. Our organization, we have 34,000 employees. Only approximately 13+
thousand of those are special agents, and they’re great, don’t get me wrong,
but there are a bunch of us in the background who are supporting the mission of
the FBI, and we rarely get mentioned in fiction. I mean, I’m an analyst. We
have, you know, linguists. We have people who do malware analysis. We have
victim advocates. We have people who work with dogs, like doing explosive
detection and cadaver dogs. Photographers. We even have auto mechanics. I
don’t know if you would write a book about someone who was an auto mechanic,
but people who do explosives analysis. You know, all these things that, that
we help to support the mission of our organization, and people go to the easy
again, which is the agents, because they’re out there in the front. And don’t
get me wrong, I have good friends who are agents. I, you know, sit next to one
who’s a great guy, but, you know, there are those of us, you know, who do other
things that, as I said, cool, kind of cool and interesting things also.

I think one way a, an author
could get more information is to most likely ask the FBI. Ask your local
office. We have 56 field offices all over the United States, and within those
field offices, most of the field offices have what we call resident agencies,
which are smaller offices, which are usually anywhere from five upwards number
of people, and some of them are in very small cities across the United States,
so I think authors could just contact the FBI. Talk to people, if you’re in a
place that has an FBI office, talk to people who might know FBI agents or
people who work for the FBI to get some support. Also, there’s an organization
that is of retired FBI agents. They have an organization. To be – I’m sorry,
I can’t give you the name, but if you do a little research, I’m sure you could,
an author could be able to find that, and those guys would be, love to
talk about their careers, and women, you know, would love to talk about. Now,
they might not be quite up to date if they retired in a, a while ago, but
still, they could give you much better feel of, you know, our organization and
what we do and how we do it and things that might be of interest for other
types of stories.

Sarah: One of the things you
also brought up was the, you don’t really talk about what you do to people in
your life.

L: I don’t.

Sarah: Is that part of your job
responsibility, or is that just self preservation so you don’t get a lot of
questions you can’t answer?

L: A little bit of both. The
previous job I had within the bureau, I, it was a little bit more “secret” –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

L: – and so I got used to not
speaking about my job –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

L: – and part of it is
preservation to not, people not ask a lot of questions. Mostly I’ll – again,
it depends on who I’m speaking to. My friends and my, my close friends and my family
know I work for the FBI, and they know I’m an analyst, but they do not know the
subject matter I work.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

L: Some people do choose to
share with their spouse or their kids or whatever, their subject matter that
they work. I have just chosen not to, ‘cause it just, it eliminates a lot of
questions. And then when I’m in public and someone asks me what I do, I either
say I work for the bureau, if I feel like it that day –

Sarah: [Laughs]

L: – or I say I work for
Justice. [Laughs] Which is true; I do work for the Department of Justice,
underneath the FBI, so I’m really not lying. Usually that stops it, ‘cause
they think I’m an attorney or something for them, and they don’t want, you
know, they don’t – I’m sorry, Jane, but they don’t want –

Sarah: [Laughs] So, how long
have you been a romance reader?

L: I have been a romance reader
on and off since I was probably about 12. I started with, like, Victoria Holt
and moved on from there to maybe, I remember reading a Johanna Lindsey, one of
the pirate ones, when I was about 13. That’s, like, my first really true
romance I remember reading, and then I moved on to Danielle Steele and a few
others like that in the ‘80s, ‘cause I’m 46, so –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

L: – I’ll date myself here. And
then in college I kind of got away from it, and when I, I still was a reader,
but not romance, and then when I got, later, out of college, one of the libraries
where I moved had a lot of paperbacks, you could just take one or two and bring
them back, and I slowly got back into, starting with Regencies, the old short
Regencies, the Signet, Signet Regencies, and then sort of moved on from there
and found a wonderful used bookstore. I am the type of person that even though
I’ve gone mostly electronic now, I miss just going through used bookstores and
just pulling out books. I would never go with, like, a list of books to buy.
I would just wander through the used bookstore and pull off what I wanted. So
that’s why, finding really good things electronically is hard for me sometimes,
so I do use review sites like, blogs like yours to help me, give me some
recommendations. I’m also somewhat a little bit cheap, I’ll admit it, so I do
get, do a lot of the free or cheaper things that, for my Kindle. [Laughs] But
that’s –

Sarah: Totally understandable.

L: At least when I had the used
books, I could take them back and get some credit, and you know, with
electronic, I can share them, and I’ve started sharing a few things with my
sister, ‘cause she just got a Kindle about six months ago, but our reading
tastes aren’t quite the same. I have gotten her to read a few things, but she’s
still not totally on board being a true romance reader. And I can read upwards,
you know, if, two or three books a week, probably.

Sarah: Nice!

Jane: So, L, since you are a big
fan, or, I don’t know if you still are a big fan of Signet Regencies, but do
you remember the author Joan Smith?

L: I don’t.

Jane: All right, well, if you
like those, she actually has quite a few out that were published through Bell –
oh, God, I don’t –

L: Bell Books?

Jane: No, it wasn’t Bell Books.
There was a, there was a publishing house early on, this was back in early
fiction-wise days, that was publishing Regency romances for authors whose
rights, I assume, had reverted, like Joan Wolf, for example, who is one of my
favorite Regency authors, and Joan Smith wrote the, a couple really wonderful
Signet Regencies, and they’re very inexpensive. I want to say that they are,
they’re, like, $2.99, or they’re under $3. I don’t really know who owns that
company right now or who has those books, but if you search the Dear Author
archives for Joan Smith, we have done several reviews for her. If you haven’t
read Joan Wolf, I highly recommend those. There’s a funny story behind Joan
Wolf and Sarah. So, her husband emails me, and he says, I, I want to buy a book
for Sarah, but obviously – [laughs]

Sarah: I know nothing of these
novels, yes.

Jane: – and she buys all of her
own books, so I suggested that he buy her the book His Lordship’s Mistress,
and he did, and my understanding, Sarah, was that you really enjoyed that book.

Sarah: Oh, it was wonderful, and
I was completely floored that my husband had bought me a romance, and I, I was
like, w-, w-, w-, how did, how did you do this? Did you, like, close your eyes
and point? He was like, no, I emailed Jane! I was like, oh, I can’t wait to
read it! It was so good, and, and I know what you mean about loving the
classic Regencies, L, because they are a true, they’re very unique in the
language and in the romantic and sexual tension. Like, you might just get some
intense handholding, and that’s all you get. And they are completely
different, and they’re so, so good, some of them.

L: I –

Jane: I am very romantic, you
know –

Sarah: Yes.

Jane: The, the tension, you’re
right, is really through restrained glances, but they’re also often driven by
very witty dialogue –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jane: – dialogue that often has
more than one meaning. Just kind of everything around them is, is full of
tension. Like, every interaction, because there’s no physical expression, it
has to be built through other ways, and, and I think that it almost takes more
effort and craft to do that than to rely on, you know, the, the characters
thinking lusty thoughts about each other.

Sarah: Yes. I like her eyes,
and her breasts are amazing! Like, there’s no, there’s, there’s no, like,
openly checking out someone’s bum in a, in a Regency. Is the publisher you
were looking for Belgrave? Belgrave and Regency Reads?

Jane: Yes, yes, that’s exactly
it.

Sarah: Yes, they have a ton of
classic Regencies, as I call them. And the, the covers are not always optimal,
but if you’re reading digitally, you don’t them anyway. They have a very, very
large selection, and they’re not that expensive at all. And we, we apologize
to all of the time that you are going to lose, now that we have made this
recommendation for you. [Laughs]

L: Recommendations are awesome,
because, as I said, it’s sometimes hard, ‘cause there’s just so many things out
there now, and I’m pretty specific in my taste.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

L: I li-, I don’t care for some
of the subgenres. I don’t get into the vampires. I don’t do different
worlds. I like it pretty straightforward, and then the historicals, too, but,
so, you know, it’s sometimes hard to just find those good, like, books if you’re
just searching through page after page after page, and you need
recommendations, and that’s why sites like your guys’ sites are great, because
if it, you know, if it feeds that sort of ooh, that sounds really good, then
you can go look for it.

Sarah: Thank you. Do you look
at FBI or, or romantic suspense involving the FBI and think, oh, I can’t do
that, or do you, do you go for it when you see them? Is that a genre that you
read easily, or are you very cautious about picking up any books that involve
the FBI?

L: Very cautious. I, normally
if I see the word FBI agent in a description, it’s really got to have something
else that sort of clicks with me, because otherwise I just move on. Again, as
we spoke about earlier, it’s just, most of them just, they’re so, so wrong, at
least in my world, that I, I actually, when we started talking, emailing about
doing this, I looked on Amazon for some FBI books, just a real quick search,
and I pulled up a couple and downloaded either a portion or bought them for,
like, 99 cents, and none of them I could get through, basically. [Laughs] They
were, they weren’t poorly, necessarily, written, but just the details, like,
one of them in the first chapter, I mean, some of the details just drove me
insane, like, the character was an FBI agent, and her mother was a high-up FBI
agent, and she sent a car to pick up her daughter to bring her to her office.
Nobody has a driver in the FBI except the director, okay?

[Laughter]

L: They drive their own cars.

Sarah: [Laughs]

L: I just, little things like
that, and she was suppo-, the mother was supposed to be an assistant to the
director but was in the New York office. All the director’s assistants are in
Washington, D.C., in the Hoover Building, you know, and they’re not in New
York. Yes, we have high-up, you know, people who are high up within the
organization in New York, but they run the New York field office. An assistant
director in charge, what we call an ADIC, runs the New York field office. That
is a very high position within our organization, but it has nothing to do with
the director’s office. And that’s another thing I would like to maybe mention
for authors is find out how we are organized, because they, they have all of
these small subgroups running out of headquarters. Ninety percent of all
investigations take place in our field offices. Headquarters is for
management. The one thing I will say that is at headquarters is our hostage
rescue team, which was involved in grabbing the guy in Libya last weekend, they
were involved. They are out of headquarters; they’re actually based at
Quantico and are at the academy, at the FBI Academy at, at Quantico. But most
of investigations are run out of the field. The head-, headquarters is for
managers, and they manage the field. They manage what goes on. They don’t actually
do investigations. They help the field move their investigations forward, but
they don’t actually do that. A lot of authors also create all of these secret
groups, you know, who, you know – and I guess that’s good for tension and sort
of story, but they don’t exist. I’m sorry.

Sarah: [Laughs]

L: We don’t have little secret
groups, you know, running around, nobody knows who they are. That’s just not
the way it is. Another issue that I would hope that I could help some authors
out with is authors tend to have people, FBI agents especially, travel to
other, other – say a person is from the Washington field office. They will
have them travel to New York to do an interview, and that’s traveling into
someone else’s jurisdiction. Your jurisdiction is in Washington, D.C., and
northern Virginia. That’s what the nor-, the Washington, D.C. field office
covers. If you have to go to New York, you have to have permission from New
York to go into New York and do any investigation. So there’s got to be
paperwork to do that. There’s got to be money to do that. Most of the time,
you send what we call a lead, you send a request to New York to do it for you.
And I understand in fiction you, you’ve got to get around some of these things
somehow, but it, authors just make it, like, so, one book I was reading, the
guy jumped on a plane ‘cause he thought his bad guy might show up in Florida,
and he was from Boston, and then he came back and said, oh, he wasn’t there.
I, I mean stuff like that just would not happen, and I know it’s fiction, but
for those of us who see this every day, it, it makes it difficult, you know, to
read stuff like this.

Sarah: Jane, do you have any
other questions?

Jane: Yeah. What’s the last
good book you read?

Sarah: That was my question!
Get, get, get out of my office. [Laughs]

L: Well, I sat on a beach last
week –

Sarah: Oh, that’s just horrible.

L: So, while I was at the beach,
I read Kristan Higgins’ Waiting on You, which I think is part of the
Blue Heron series –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

L: Really good. I also read
Jennifer Ashley’s Lady Isabella’s Scandalous Marriage, which, a historical,
which I really liked. She also writes a male historical fiction series also,
which I’ve read and are very good, under another name, but I’m not, I can’t
remember what her other author name is for that series.

Jane: It’s Ashley Gardner.

L: Yes. And, yes, and those are
very good also. I haven’t read all of them, but I’ve read the first four or
five of those. I also listened to That Summer by Lauren Willig, who
writes the Pink Carnation series? Liked it; it’s a standalone; didn’t love
it. It skips from the mid-Victorian period to current. I like the current
story better than the Victorian story, but it dealt with pre-Raphaelite
painters, which was very interesting. She always does the history so well in
those books. All of her books, ‘cause of course she was, she has her Master’s
or a Ph.D. in history and does the history very well. And then, this week, on
my commute, I have been listening to the Pink Carnation, the last one, the
purple plumeria, I think it’s The Passion of the Purple Plumeria, which
is, was very good. I liked it. It’s actually one of my favorite of the Pink
Carnation series so far.

Sarah: I haven’t read that one
yet. I get the feeling, though, that eventually she’s going to run out of
flowers.

L: They’ve let the, there’s one
out, I was looking at her website last night. There’s one out in August, and
then the last one will be the, the pink carnation, Jane, her story, and that’s
going to come out, I believe, in late summer next year.

Sarah: Oooh. You know, if you
like historicals, would you like some recommendations of authors that you might
like?

L: Yes!

Sarah: You might really like
Theresa Romain’s historicals, especially the ones that are published by
Kensington. I love them. They’re very, very sort of elegant and very opulent
writing. You get the sense that even when the scene is moving characters from,
you know, point A on the lawn to the other side of the lawn, there’s a reason
why those scenes and those words are there. Every word is there deliberately,
and things that happen in little tiny moments become much, much more important
later, and I love when books do that. You might really like her books.

Is there anything else you wanted
to add, L? Is there anything you want to ask Jane?

L: Well, I did want to add, if
you don’t mind –

Sarah: Bring it on! Feel free.

L: One of the things that Julie
James, that started this discussion was the interaction between her heroes and
her heroines, how they actually could get in serious trouble for their actions,
and I find that a lot in police books, dealing with police personnel who are,
like, protecting people, and even FBI, you know, spy, anything, anyone who is
protecting someone, they always end up with the romantic relationship, ‘cause
it’s a romance novel!

Sarah: Hold on here, are you
trying to tell me that bodyguards do not regularly fall for the women that they
are protecting?

L: They shouldn’t, let’s put it
that way.

[Laughter]

L: – practice to fall for your
protectee? Yes, the protectee. Just, you know, for sort of information, you
know, any agent who has a relation-, and intimate relationship with a protectee
or a source or a witness within their case can get in some pretty serious
trouble if that is discovered and reported. There are issues, especially with
the criminal agents –

Jane: Yeah, I was going to say,
not only, not only that, but it taints the evidence and his ability to be a
witness later on.

L: Absolutely. I have a friend
who got in trouble with – it wasn’t a, an intimate relation, but she basically
became friends with a source, and it got ugly, and you can have what we call
days on the bricks. Our Office of Professional Responsibility reviews these
kind of cases, and we call it days on the bricks, and you can have upwards of
30 or 60 days on the bricks, and that means you don’t get paid, and that goes
into your permanent record, and that has to be turned over to defense
attorneys, so she will never be able to get back on the stand in a criminal
case. She had to transfer out of criminal investigations into something else
where she will not have to be, go on the stand, because she can never,
basically, go on the stand again without being raked over the coals by a
defense attorney. So I understand why this happens for novels, but just sort
of FYI, this is not a good thing. [Laughs] You can get in a lot of serious
trouble with it. The other thing, like, with Julie James, her characters,
like, who ended up being married, the, you know, the U.S. Attorney marrying an FBI
agent, that could cause some serious, probably, issues, conflict of interest
issues also, I mean, for that office. I’m, I’m sure they would get around it,
but there are, you know, everything in romance land sounds a lot easier than it
might actually be.

Sarah: [Laughs] You don’t say.
[Laughs]

L: Another thing is I see a lot
of authors make characters, like, FBI agents, but it doesn’t really matter to
the story. It’s like they’re adding in that –

Sarah: It’s a shorthand.

L: Yeah, and it doesn’t, they
have no sense of place about the agent or whatever. It doesn’t make any
difference. He could have been Joe Schmo almost, but they add in the title to
get, maybe hook people in –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

L: – but they, I, I don’t feel
any sense of place, where at least, at least with Julie James, I did feel like
those guys were –

Sarah: Real agents.

L: – real agents, and they –

Sarah: And had a reason for
being so.

L: Yes. And the other thing, in
the latest book, and, I really appreciated was there’s a scene in the book
where Vaughn, the agent, is talking about his past and where he worked with
crimes against children, and here I could tell she had talked to an actual FBI
agent, because he talks about how it hurt, basically, his soul, and he didn’t
like that feeling and didn’t want to have children and needed to get out of
that work and to get some healing to move on, and those words could have come
out of the mouth of a friend of mine. He actually is back doing it again, and
that just rang so true with me. And just little tidbits like that just make it
so much more real, I think, because that, I could hear that just coming out of
an agent’s mouth, because I’ve heard it before.

Sarah: It’s sort of like when
every person in the, in the military is a Navy SEAL. I, I did an interview with
someone who had served in the army, and, and she made the point that, you know,
not everyone is elite services. Not everyone is a high-end super,
super-trained, you know, specialist. Not everyone is a Navy SEAL. There are
plenty of people who are in the military, like you said, who do support
positions, who work behind the scenes, who aren’t the ones who are on TV, who
do some really neat stuff. But, you know, everyone in, in a romantic suspense,
there’s a serial killer, everyone’s an FBI agent, every Regency has about 85
dukes, there’s all Navy SEALs, someone’s a vampire. The, the, the established
shorthand for characters is something that makes me nuts too, so I completely
understand your frustration with that.

L: Though I will say I, I do
love Navy SEAL books. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, I can totally
understand that! [Laughs] ‘Cause they’re kind of amazing!

L: I’m a Suz-, I’m a huge
Suzanne Brockmann fan from way back, you know, and that sort of got me into the
whole Navy SEAL thing, so – I, I’m drawn to those books, but now there’s so
many, I, you do have to be sort of careful, ‘cause again, you just make them a
Navy SEAL and it’s supposed to make everything all right for your novel, and it
doesn’t always work out that way.

Sarah: And it doesn’t add, it
doesn’t add anything to the character. It’s a, it’s a shorthand
characterization.

L: Yes.

[music]

Sarah: And that’s all for this
week’s podcast. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. While
we were recording, I was pretty much vibrating in my seat. I thought it was so
interesting, and I learned a ton. Even though I don’t usually read romantic
suspense or books with FBI agents, I thought that was wonderfully interesting.
I really hope you enjoyed it too. I want to thank L for taking a lot of time
to talk with us and for explaining so many things that I had no idea about.

This podcast is brought to you by
New American Library, publisher of Riding the Wave, Lorelie Brown’s sexy
new Pacific Blue novel on sale now. And I will tell you that at RT, Lorelie
Brown’s promotional item were little bottles of sunscreen with a hook on the
top of the bottle so you could hook onto a bag. They’re awesome! Like, one of
the best promo items ever, so when I saw the sponsor tag and text for this
particular book, I was like, oh! It’s the sunscreen book! Never let it be
said that good promo doesn’t work, ‘cause good promo, when you’re keeping me
from getting a sunburn, totally works!

The music this week was provided
by Sassy Outwater. This week’s music is “Calgary Capers” by the Peatbog
Faeries. This is from their album Dust, which you can find at their
website, on iTunes, at Amazon, you can find it all over the place. And
everyone needs more Peatbog. It’s like a law, right? Totally!

We are still working on our books
for young readers recommendations, and we have so many awesome suggestions
already. If you would like to add yours, or if you want to have a comment or a
question answered, you want to have a moment to yell at Jane that she’s wrong
about something, I totally support this idea, and somewhere right now she is
rolling her eyes at me. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call our
Google voice number, 1-201-371-DBSA. Please don’t forget to give us your name
and where you’re calling from so we can include your messages in upcoming
podcasts.

We have feeds for the podcast all
over the place. We’re on iTunes, you can subscribe to the direct feed through
the website, you can subscribe doing PodcastPickle – I still don’t know who
names these things – and we’re also on Stitcher radio, which I have heard is
pretty rad and is a fun service to use.

However you are listening and
whatever you are doing, thank you for listening. Jane and L and I wish you the
very best of reading.

[lovely music]