I like a good, smart thriller, one that forces me to forego all else, including sleep. But paper-thin female characters will stop me in my tracks and cause my boredom meter to skyrocket. As comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick said, “If you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft.”

In the world of male-authored thrillers, there are female characters who don’t hold my attention for long because, for starters, they often don’t rise above the old tropes of hookers, cheating wives, or objects of sexual desire for the male protagonist. Some female characters seem to be so enthralled with the male protagonist that they flip up their skirts after the first hello.

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Rather than rag on the authors who only have stock characters of sex workers or helpless victims for their women, I interviewed two male authors who excel at their craft with can’t-put-the-book-down thrillers and create female characters who ring true as human beings. Both authors write a series with a male protagonist, but there is something decidedly different about the protagonist’s view of the world, and women populate their fictional world in varied roles. In fact, I purposely selected male authors whose protagonists were male because we can see the women of their fictional world through the eyes of the main character.

First is Lee Child, the world-famous author of the Jack Reacher series, and next, Paul Doiron, the award-winning author of the Mike Bowditch series. The premises for the two series are substantially different. Reacher is a drifter and former MP in the Army, doesn’t own a car or a home, carries only a toothbrush, and is 6 foot, 5 inches tall with rather remarkable physical strength. If you want injustice to take a beating, he’s your man. Bowditch is younger and struggles with self-doubt in the surprisingly volatile world of Maine game wardens but will persist in the daunting environment of the New England woods until he gives the bad guys what’s coming to them. Both live in a man’s world.

Or do they?

Both characters do something extraordinary: They give us a view into the military and a testosterone-fueled Maine Game Service with an awareness of how these worlds work for women. It is difficult for people in power to observe those who struggle to obtain power, whether it is race, gender, or ethnicity. Yet both Child and Doiron have made a huge effort to showcase women beyond a container for men’s desires.

Lee Child’s newest novel in the series, Past Tense, features a female character who is young and uncharacteristically from a non-military background. Her analytical skills make her a thrilling parallel to Reacher. Fair warning: The plotting, pace, and high-stakes story are so engrossing I nearly had to take a sedative.

Paul Doiron’s most recent Bowditch novel, Stay Hidden, takes place on a remote island off the coast of Maine, where Bowditch encounters women with big muscles, moxie, and motive. As always, the environment of Maine comes alive in Doiron’s skillful writing.

I asked both authors to share how they render complex female characters on the page. Yet both authors seemed genuinely surprised when I honed in on their female characters. It was difficult for them to parse out why they did what they did because to them, it seemed only logical, realistic, and just plain good writing. They are both storytellers in the classic sense of the word, very much “let me tell you what thrilling, terrifying thing just happened,” but inclusiveness is so natural to them that it is no longer something that they consciously manufacture.

What influences how you write female characters?

Lee Child: The negative influences are easy to spot; the thrillers of the ’50s and ’60s, even ’70s, were a sort of Dark Age. The female characters were there to heighten the stakes. Some beautiful young girl was in danger. They were used as a plot device because they twisted their ankle and needed to be rescued. I spend a literal six months writing with my invented characters, so I’m going to make them as interesting as possible. All of them. They are going to be strong and interesting. So to me, it’s not that I’m doing something positive, rather, I’m just doing reportage. Women are just as strong and tough as men. If you’re going to have an honest portrayal of women, you have to recognize that.

Paul Doiron: I am influenced by the women in my life. My mother was a voracious reader and had keen insight about human behavior. Even though I studied at Yale and earned my MFA at Emerson, it was my wife, poet Kristen Lindquist, who introduced me to authors P.D. James, Louise Penny, and Tana French. These are authors with intelligence and psychological insights into human behavior, and those were qualities that I wanted to develop in my writing. Kristen is also my toughest reader, and that is valuable to me. I hope to internalize her feedback. She’s saved my bacon a few times. She also introduced me to birding. All of this has helped me to create female characters with as much agency as possible. Not the birding part, but all the rest.

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Which of your female characters is your favorite?

Lee Child: My favorite is Frances Neagley. And she is also the most popular among my readers. Because of the structure of the Reacher series, I am reluctant to bring back any of the other characters, because Reacher doesn’t dwell on what happened before; he is a totally in-the-moment guy. But Neagley is the exception and has appeared in five of the books. Frances Neagley has a certain mystery about her, and, like nearly all the other women in the series, she has a military background. She has never had a sexual relationship with Reacher, she is a former MP and currently runs a successful private security firm.

Paul Doiron: Without question, my favorite is Kathy Frost. She is Mike Bowditch’s mentor in the Maine Warden Service, one of his best friends and personal advisor. They have a full relationship that includes getting angry with each other, but they never give up on each other. This is probably a reflection on the relationships I had with women that were not sexual but were full of admiration professionally. These relationships have a lasting quality. They were friendships in the true meaning of the word.

Both of your protagonists live in what could be called a male-dominated world. How do the women fare in this environment?

Lee Child: Reacher was raised in a military family and was a major in the Military Police. Many of the women in the series also have or had careers in the military. This has certain implications for men and women. The military has been a social experiment for the past 50 years. Everything is based on rank. If women outrank you, that means men have to obey them. No questions asked. In Past Tense, Brenda, currently the chief of police in a town in New Hampshire, is a former MP officer who outranks Reacher. When she tells him not to return to her town in the midst of an investigation, he obeys her, even though he disagrees with her. He also understands that as the police chief, her first priority is to protect her town. There is an organic integrity that Reacher honors. But in this case, Reacher goes beyond the military structure since neither of them are currently in the service. He bows to her authority in the present day.

Paul Doiron: The world of Maine Game Wardens is heavily weighted toward men. In reality, of the 135 officers, only four or five are women and none have been promoted to sergeant. So the women who are game wardens face the kind of gender challenges that you can imagine when there is such a numbers disparity, and I bring that into the story to reflect reality. One character, Dani Tate, started out in the Maine Game Service, and she resigns to join the State Police, where women are in senior command positions. I use the discrimination that she felt as motivation for a subtle development in her character. Dani made the change because she saw the concrete opportunities for advancement. These are the sorts of decisions women make every day. In the Game Service, she builds a hard and defensive personality to counteract the onslaught of sexism, and Mike Bowditch can only see fleeting aspects of who she really is. When she makes a proactive career choice to become a state trooper, her personality begins to emerge.

How do you write about romantic relationships between your protagonist and women?

Lee Child: Some reviewers have said that Reacher is a “love them and leave them” guy. That is not at all true. He is attracted to smart women, with meaningful careers and full lives. It’s the women who leave Reacher because they know that he is an impossible mate. He is flawed in a tragic way; he fears loneliness yet is most comfortable alone. He loves women and has the highest regard for them, yet none of the women that he picks would choose to stay with him. He invariably gets a note on the pillow that says goodbye. He understands that he is the problem, not the women.

Paul Doiron: Mike Bowditch is only going to appeal to a certain kind of woman who finds beauty in the rough and tumble and invariably muddy world of the Maine woods. He has several long-term relationships with women, but they are women who are as unique as Bowditch. They are driven by their professions and passions, often in the world of science, and they are not willing to toss away their pursuits. Mike understands this, even if he wishes it weren’t so.

What advice do you have for writing female characters?

Lee Child: This is not going to sound remarkable, but we live in a world populated with a diverse lot of people. Look around you. Take a really good look at the people in your life, the women in your life, and that should give you an in-depth sampling of characters. Take note of what matters to women, and their hardships. Get beyond your personal schoolboy fantasies.

Paul Doiron: This is going to sound simplistic, but if I was teaching a workshop about this topic, I would say ask yourself if you are creating clichéd female characters. Are they as interesting as women you know or as the women your character would know? They need to show that they have agency in their lives. No one is interested in a character who is passive.

“Women are just as strong and tough as men. If you’re going to have an honest portrayal of women, you have to recognize that.” — Lee Child

Both authors write female characters who have motivations, desires, and drives that may or may not coincide with the desires of the protagonists. This is a reflection of reality that resonates with readers given the huge popularity of their books. Another characteristic of the women is that they are not always classically beautiful. In The Midnight Line, Reacher encounters Rose, whose face was shredded by an IED in Afghanistan. Rose struggles with all the traumas associated with active duty, in addition to facial disfigurement, and Reacher is attracted to her. Rose is not defined by beauty or her physical disability.

When Doiron writes about Tate in Stay Hidden, he describes a woman who cuts her own dirty-blond hair, has an unremarkable face, and yet when she smiles, “…you had the thrilling sensation of having witnessed something beautiful that few people were gifted with seeing.” Bowditch lights up with true desire when he finds the window into Dani’s personality.

So do these protagonists live in a man’s world or is something else going on here? If the authors had created only a man’s world, we wouldn’t have the powerful female characters who populate both series. And we wouldn’t have male heroes who have characteristics traditionally associated with both genders. Mike Bowditch has a high level of empathy, or the ability to imagine the feelings of others, often seen as a female characteristic. And “Reacher has a feminine sense of justice,” says Child. “Women sense when there is injustice. Men are more inclined to accept shades of gray and just say shit happens.”

The worldview of both authors is represented in their thrillers, a world view that is decidedly filled with female characters defined by strength, intelligence, and agency. Fellow male thriller authors, take note.

Jacqueline Sheehan is a New York Times best-selling author and a psychologist. Her novels include The Comet’s Tale, a novel about Sojourner Truth; Lost & Found; Now & Then; Picture This; The Center of the World; and The Tiger in the House. She writes NPR commentaries, travel articles, and essays for a variety of publications, including the New York Times column “Modern Love.” She edited the anthology Women Writing in Prison, and she teaches at international writing retreats. jacquelinesheehan.com