Author Marcy McCreary: Twintuition

In this week’s instalment of “Author(ized) Accounts of the Paranormal and Unexplained,” Marcy McCreary, author of The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon and The Murder of Madison Garcia, will tell us about the mysterious connection she has with her identical twin sister …

When I tell people I have an identical twin sister, I’m bombarded with all the typical questions: can you read each other’s minds (no), did you play tricks on teachers (yes), do you have the same taste in men (no), are you best friends (yes), and my favorite . . . have you ever felt pain at the same time? And the reason this is my favorite question is because we have experienced not one, but two medical issues at the same exact time.

The first time incident occurred when we were at college. Karyn was at SUNY Albany (in upstate New York), and I was a student at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. One morning, I woke up with an excruciating sore throat, so intense that by midday I went to the emergency room. They checked me out and could find nothing wrong. No inflammation. No swelling. No redness. No explanation. I went back to my dorm and decided to call my Dad to let him know that there might be a medical bill coming his way and he said, “I already know you were in the hospital.” But then he paused and said, “Wait, is this Marcy? Your sister is in the hospital with tonsillitis.” I felt fine the next day. Obviously, it took longer for Karyn to recover.

The second incident was one that we don’t speak about often. We got pregnant around the same time. Karyn was expecting her first baby, and for me, it was number two. I was on a business trip, Karyn was working as a chef at the time. We were both in our first trimester, she at six weeks, me at eleven weeks. She called me to report some sad news just as I was about to call her with my own sad news. We both had a miscarriage that day. There is a happy outcome to this awful shared experience. A few months later we both got pregnant again. Her son was born at the end of July, and my daughter was born the first week in October. And no, we did not feel each other’s labor pains!

Author Interview

The Night Librarian: Thank you for sharing! I’ve always found the psychic connection between twins so fascinating, and I’m sure these experiences have ignited some great ideas for your writing! I’m curious: What is the wildest source of inspiration for your latest project?

Marcy: My phone rang and the screen displayed a telephone number and location, Cleveland, OH. I was curious and did a reverse lookup and got the name of the person associated with the displayed number. I plugged that name and “Cleveland” in the Facebook search box and got a hit. Unfortunately, that person’s Facebook profile was set to private, so all I could see were a few details and a couple of pictures. It wasn’t anyone I recognized. I figured I was the victim of a wrong number. But that got me thinking . . . what if someone called a detective and the detective did what I did (reverse lookup, do some sleuthing on Facebook to no avail). And what if . . . the next day that detective was called to a crime scene and the murder victim was the person who had placed the call? And that was the inspiration for the opening scene of my novel, The Murder of Madison Garcia. Detective Susan Ford gets a call from a number she doesn’t recognize, does a reverse lookup and sees the number belongs to a Madison Garcia, a name she doesn’t recognize. She checks this woman’s Facebook page and chalks it up to a wrong number. Then, Susan is called to a crime scene . . . where Madison Garcia is found stabbed to death. Why did Madison reach out to Detective Susan Ford just hours before her death? Will learning the answer lead the detective to the killer?

The Night Librarian: It’s wild how someon’es accidental butt dial led to you crafting an entire novel! Who has been the biggest influence on your writing and your writing career, (aside from this butt-dialer)?

Marcy:  My husband, Lew. He is the author of two critically-acclaimed published novels, Mount’s Mistake and The Minus Man. Both are works of literary fiction. When I was laid off from a job in 2016 (and grousing), he encouraged me to write a novel (and stop grousing), because I had mentioned it was on my bucket list. And so I did! And not only did he motivate me to write a book, he critiqued it along the way, spurring me on to punch above my weight (he would highlight a sentence or paragraph in my manuscript and write in the margin, “You can do better!”). I’m pretty sure that without his guidance, advice, and encouragement, I would never have gotten a publishing deal.

The Night Librarian: That’s wonderful to hear that you have someone close to you who’s supporting you with your dream! Can you tell us about how do you do research for your writing?

Marcy: I’m a people person, so before I hit the Internet, I try and find an actual human being who can answer my questions or provide background on a particular subject matter. I’ve reached out to detectives, lawyers, doctors, forensics specialists, even other authors who write crime fiction. When I started writing The Summer of Love and Death, I needed to understand how police were deployed and utilized at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Although there was some information on the Internet, it felt incomplete, and I suspected, not 100% accurate. Then I met an author at a writers conference who introduced me to an ex-NYPD cop (also an author!) who was one of the 300 “Peace Force” cops at the Festival. In addition to describing how law enforcement handled the crowds, kept the peace, assisted in medical emergencies, Nick Chiarkas regaled me with personal anecdotes that I have woven into the story.

The Night Librarian: Are you working on a new project right now? What can you tell us about it?

Marcy: I wanted to write a police procedural set in Boston and was hunting around for ideas when a friend of mine, who knows I’m into indie rock music, asked if I ever attended a concert at The Channel, a punk and indie rock venue in Boston. I sure did. And that got me thinking about using the ‘80s Boston music and mob scene as the backdrop for a novel (with a fictionalized version of The Channel). The next piece of inspiration came from other books I had read recently: Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series, Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of A Certain Age, and Kirstin Miller’s The Change. In these novels you have three or four main characters, an ensemble cast of protagonists who band together, yet each with their own character arc. With setting and structure in mind, I devised a plot: A cold case murder of a young police officer in 1991 is resurrected thirty years later by her dying sister, who enlists three of her colleagues, all retired detectives, to help her solve her sister’s murder . . . which is believed to be tied to the murder of a band groupie. The title is Dirty Water, inspired by The Standells’ song about Boston’s Charles River (where the groupie is found dead).

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Susan teams up with her father, retired Detective Will Ford, to find the killer, and their investigation soon threatens to uncover the García family’s secrets—an inheritance, accidental death, money laundering, extramarital affairs, and family rivalries, just to name a few—and they don’t appreciate the Fords digging into their business.

As the investigation twists and turns, the Fords discover that Madison was planning to confess to a long-kept secret, but someone brutally silenced her. Everyone she knew is a suspect. Anyone could be her killer.