About Fanchon Blake

FANCHON BLAKE dreamed of being a top cop. She knew she was going places. She had already made a mark in the Army. Why not try a career in law enforcement? In 1948, she joined the LAPD, sure her efforts and talent would be rewarded. Instead, despite long hours and high achievement ratings, she was not allowed to promote. 

Fanchon tried to challenge the department’s increasingly discriminatory agenda from within. By 1971, when then-Chief Ed Davis openly mocked her objections, making it clear that he felt women had no business being police officers, she’d had enough. “You don’t know it, Chief,” she later wrote in her memoir Busting the Brass Ceiling, “but war has just been declared between us.” 

Two years later, she filed a legal complaint, thereby initiating one of the country’s landmark discrimination cases. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out in Fanchon’s obituary, “she won the war.”

Blake’s sex discrimination class action suit against the LAPD propelled her to national attention. “This tough ex-cop and former Army major is the reason why there are now female lieutenants and captains on the Los Angeles Police Department—and why there may eventually be female commanders, deputy chiefs, and possibly even a woman chief of police,” read a 1990 Los Angeles Times article, one of dozens written about this trailblazer.

Part of that prediction has already come true. As of the publication of this book in 2020, the LAPD’s Command Staff included fourteen female captains, three female commanders, a female deputy chief, and a female assistant chief (the department’s second-highest position). Blake, who died in 2015 at age 93, would have been thrilled.

About Linden Gross

LINDEN GROSS is a bestselling writer. She ghostwrote Julia “Butterfly” Hill’s New York Times bestseller The Legacy of Luna. Gross is also the writer behind Kathryn and Craig Hall’s national bestseller, A Perfect Score: The Art, Soul, and Business of a 21st-Century Winery. Gross has authored, co-authored, or ghostwritten an additional eight books, including Ms. Cahill for Congress, and Surviving a Stalker: Everything You Need to Know to Keep Yourself Safe.

Gross also functions as a writing coach and an editor, helping other people to write their nonfiction books and novels, several of which have gone on to become bestsellers. Then she helps them self-publish their books through Incubation Press, a subsidiary of One Stop Writing Shop.