Marcy McCreary
The Murder of Madison Garcia
DOSSIER: With an undergrad from George Washington University in American literature and political science, followed by an executive career in marketing … you should be really good at selling books about D.C. scandal, right? But you avoided writing political thrillers in exchange for a detective series with your Ford Family Mystery books. How did you dodge the draw of writing a beltway nail-biter and selling it for millions?
MCCREARY: After a stint working as an intern for a U.S. Senator, I soured (rather quickly, I might add) on the notion of a career centered around politics. I finished out my degree and thought: what can I do with a degree in political science and American literature? And then it hit me . . . I have no freaking idea! I moved to Boston (following a boyfriend who later became my first husband) and took temp jobs wherever I could get them — brokerage firms, architectural firms, law firms, a tennis club. I thought about going to film school, culinary school, broadcasting school, perhaps getting an MFA in something. Clearly, I was adrift. Eventually, I landed an entry-level marketing communications position (writing ad copy!) at a magazine publishing company, hence setting in motion the trajectory of my career in marketing and sales.
All was good until I got laid off from a job in 2016. I complained incessantly about being bored, so my husband (who is an author of critically-acclaimed literary novels) told me I should write a book. His instigation was not completely out of left field, as I am a voracious reader of mystery and suspense novels and mentioned on more than one occasion that I thought I could write a book if I set my mind to it. Not one to back down from a challenge, I spent that summer and fall writing THE DEEPER YOU DIG (which isn’t exactly a mystery, but more like a family-secrets-and-lies story). When I went back to work at the start of 2017, all I could think about was writing another book, this time, a traditional mystery, with red herrings and clues and twists. I was noodling around with some ideas, but then I came across an article in the Boston Globe about a woman who had worked at a Catskills resort and disappeared one day only to be found four decades later in a memory care facility in Lowell, MA. Because she had dementia, she was unable to tell the detectives who found her what had happened to her in those intervening years. I just couldn’t stop thinking about that story. What in the heck happened to her? THE DISAPPEARANCE OF TRUDY SOLOMON (and The Ford Family Mystery Series) was the tale born from that seed.
DOSSIER: Having spent much of your summers as a kid in the Catskills with your dad in the entertainment industry there—and the popularity of the movie Dirty Dancing from that region—do you look back at those days and remember yourself as a modern day Baby or more of her sister Lisa instead? Most importantly, did you learn how to Tango and do “the jump?”
MCCREARY: Actually, I was the Penny Johnson character (just the dancing part of her story). My dad was the Patrick Swayze character, Johnny Castle. He was (and still is!) a fabulous ballroom dancer and taught the old Jewish ladies (and a few men) how to Samba, Tango, Foxtrot, Lindy Hop, and yes, even “do the Hustle.” And, of course, he needed a partner to teach the classes. So guess who he enlisted to help? Yup, my twin sister, Karyn, and I were pulled off the tennis court or out of the game room to teach two-left-footed yentas how to dance. I didn’t see myself as Baby or Lisa because they were the guests — and it was way cooler to hang out with the staff (those staff rooms and the camaraderie among the staff were portrayed accurately in the movie).
When we were teenagers, my sister and I would sneak off the grounds at night and participate in local disco dancing competitions around the area. Karyn’s dance partner was a very good-looking lifeguard (she had a mad crush on him, so maybe she was more like Baby) and the two of them usually took first place. My dad claimed, years later, that he knew we were sneaking off because he had spies (bellhops and waiters) keeping an eye on us.
As for “that jump” . . . the movie came out in 1987 and I was in my twenties by then, living in Boston, and never got the opportunity to try it! Damn, now I can’t get that song out of my head! And here’s a bit of trivia for you: I read somewhere that the song “I’ve Had The Time of My Life” is the third most popular song played at funerals in the UK.
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Cabin in the Catskills/ silence/what’s left of the boardwalk at Paragon Park at Nantasket Beach?)
MCCREARY: I have a perfectly lovely office in my house — a writer’s dream actually — with a Mission-style walnut desk, comfy chair, built-in bookcases crammed with books, and an incredible view of the Weir River Estuary. But here’s the weird thing . . . I never write in there! I prefer to park myself on a fairly uncomfortable barstool at my kitchen island with my laptop resting on the cold granite, surrounded by appliances. I’m not sure why I gravitated to this spot . . . perhaps it’s because sunlight spills in from all sides of the room (it’s one of those open concept kitchen/dining room/living room setups). But it’s more likely the ocean view: the window above my kitchen sink looks out onto Nantasket Beach.
And in that “write what you know” dictum, I couldn’t resist incorporating that beach and this town into THE DISAPPEARANCE OF TRUDY SOLOMON. In one scene, Detective Susan Ford takes a roadtrip with her dad, retired detective Will Ford, to Hull, Massachusetts to interview a relative of Trudy’s. While there, Susan reflects upon the similarities of living in a beach community with that of living in the Catskills, and describes it like this: “Beach towns were like the Catskills—bipolar. Lonely and depressing during the winter. Raucous and lively during the summer. The people who lived in these places year-round either tolerated, ignored, or welcomed the ebb and flow of tourists and seasonal homeowners.” This might explain why I ended up living here and what endears me to this place.
DOSSIER: The idea for a story about a woman who disappeared and was found forty years later in an Alzheimer’s facility came from a real life story. Since you were able to fill in the details of those forty years with whatever you wanted, how did you decide which way to go (given the fact that you could have made her life into anything under the sun)?
MCCREARY: I had no idea which way this would go when I sat down to write the novel. I’m a pantser. I made it up as I went along. However, the creation of a father-daughter detective team was conceived before I put pen to paper (well, fingers to keyboard). I thought it would be cool if there was a connection between the original detective on the case and the detective who found this woman decades later. Because of the Catskills setting and my dad’s job as the Activities Director at one of these storied Borscht Belt hotels, I quickly conceptualized the father-daughter pairing. I played the “what if” game I think many authors do. What if . . . the detective who finds Trudy Solomon is the daughter of the original detective on the case? What if . . . she enlists his help to find out what happened to the missing woman? What if . . . she learns something damning about her own family in the course of this investigation? And so it went.
DOSSIER: Many Dossier readers are writers in the early stages of their career. Others are well established like James Patterson and Stephen King, who, I’m given to understand, never miss one single Dossier release. So, with your first book (THE DEEPER YOU DIG) being self-published, versus your Ford Family Mysteries that came out through CamCat Books, what have you learned about each process you can share with someone who wants to see their book out there?
MCCREARY: When I wrote THE DEEPER YOU DIG, I did not set out to be a published author (see answer to Q1 above!). It was a personal challenge to see if I could write a compelling 80,000-word story. Funny you should mention Stephen King, as it was his book, ON WRITING, that helped guide me in the process. That book and my husband (who just happens to share a birthday with Mr. King, 9/21/47) were instrumental in getting my first novel over the finish line. But I think the problem with THE DEEPER YOU DIG was that it didn’t fit squarely in a marketing genre — it had elements of both young adult (YA) and women’s fiction because the story followed the lives of three female characters, and the main protagonist was seventeen, while the other two were adults. I shopped it around to agents, and was told “age it up” or “age it down.” I could have revised it, but by then I was fully employed again, and just couldn’t find the time to edit it. Fast forward to the fall of 2018 . . . I decided to retire from the 9-to-5 and write full time. When Covid hit, my lovely daughters convinced me to self-publish THE DEEPER YOU DIG, so this way I’d have a book out there in the world if I succumbed to the virus! Aren’t they thoughtful? I heeded their advice (because I always do). It got some nice reviews (from people I don’t even know!) and I’m proud of accomplishing what I set out to do with that book.
For my second novel, I wanted to write a story that fit squarely into a specific genre/category and try to get a traditional publishing deal. Because I am an avid mystery reader (and a fan of police procedurals), I felt I had a keen understanding of structure, pacing, plot beats, and tropes (and ideas about how to reimagine the tropes) and went to town. In the fall of 2000, I started querying (and the rejections started pouring in). Although I was getting a few requests for partials and fulls, I decided to participate in Twitter PitMad (a now-defunct online event where you tried to get an agent’s or editor’s attention with a 280-characters log line). An editor from CamCat Books was intrigued by my tweet, and the rest, as they say, is history. And here’s the crazy part . . . I did not sell this as a series. In fact, I had no intention of creating a series. But the review from Publishers Weekly changed that. The opening line of the review read, “An enticing series launch…” and then went on to say, “Detective Susan Ford is a strong protagonist who can easily carry a series.” So, I decided to go back to the Catskills with my father-daughter detective team. THE MURDER OF MADISON GARCIA came out in March 2023, and THE SUMMER OF LOVE AND DEATH will be be released on August 13, 2024.
Website: Marcy McCreary | Amazon author page
Jeff Circle 