Sometimes I’m asked why most of the protagonists in my stories are older, ordinary folks. The mystery/thriller genres are awash with ex-navy seals, CIA agents, hard boiled policemen, and other ‘super’ operators who are seemingly omnipotent. If the protagonist is a woman, she is frequently, beautiful, brilliant, and sensual. These protagonists are often involved with saving the world and/or engaging in highly improbable behaviors and heroics to win the day. I find these works irksome. I like my characters to be average, imperfect individuals, not all-powerful, unstoppable plastic personages operating on the far side of what is actually possible. Apart from Harry Neal, who is 63, a bit of a curmudgeon, and carts around a handicapped cat, my protagonists are often older women who have lived a mundane life for decades, then that life is disrupted and they find themselves out of their groove and engaging in extra ordinary actions . . . trying to solve a mystery or struggling to stay alive. An ordinary, older protagonist struggling to cope with a perilous predicament is, to my mind, more interesting and more engrossing, than an all-powerful man or woman defeating a supposedly unstoppable rogue. (although in my novels, Mudgett and Brewster and A Thousand Joys, the protagonist is goaded into action by a persistent, irritating ten year old, as I like to juxtapose the old and the young and have them trying to solve a mystery and getting into trouble doing so.) Of course, the fact that I’m an older, ordinary individual, and like Harry Neal, a bit of a curmudgeon might have something to do with my choice of protagonists.