Marcy McCreary's Blog
December 3, 2021
FACT + FICTION: WHEN INSPIRATION FOR YOUR MYSTERY NOVEL COMES FROM REAL-LIFE EXPERIENCES AND TRUE CRIME
Sometimes life points you toward an unexpected treasure. Something you might wave off because you don’t yet recognize its potential. . . but if you’re patient and curious, its value will assert itself.
I’m a wide-ranging consumer of online media, including the Boston Globe. Luckily, on August 17, 2017, I just happened to be scanning its online edition when I came across an article about a waitress who worked at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills and mysteriously disappeared from the area in the mid-seventies. The Boston Globe article reported that detectives had recently discovered a buried decades-old skeleton in the vicinity of the area from which the waitress had vanished. There was thus reason to speculate that she had met with foul play.
An old record from the time of her disappearance listed the woman’s Social Security number. One of the detectives discovered that someone using that number was receiving care in an Alzheimer’s facility in Lowell, Massachusetts. The missing woman, presumed dead, was very much alive.
That Social Security number belonged to Flora Stevens, who was indeed the missing woman, her identity confirmed from an old employee ID card. Because she now suffered from dementia, she was unable to give detectives a clear account of what had happened to her in the intervening years.
Normally, I would read an article like this, think such a strange story, and move on to something else. But I found I couldn’t easily let go of the fate of this woman. Her story began to tug at me in resonant ways.
I spent my summers (1965-1982) in the Catskills resort area. My dad was the tummler (activities director) and nightclub emcee at The Hotel Brickman in South Fallsburg, NY. I lived through three eras of the Borscht Belt: its glory days in the 1960s, its waning days in the 1970s, and its demise through the 1980s—which happened in slow motion, right before my eyes. I’ve always wanted to write a story in this setting, but the question was always… what story/what era… A coming of age? A romance? A hotel “locked-room” whodunnit? A memoir?
This article was my eureka moment. I was intrigued by the story of Flora Stevens and, at the same time, liberated by the unresolvable mystery of it. The gaps were mine to fill. I foresaw creating a narrative that spanned the forty years between a young waitress disappearing and a mature woman with dementia being found. I changed the name of the real Flora Stevens to the imaginary Trudy Solomon. I started building out the plot.
When I began to outline the story, Trudy Solomon was the protagonist. But it felt too much like a memoir and I wasn’t happy with the arc of the story, which put Trudy at the center of everything. Instead, I began to think of her as the book’s MacGuffin—essential to the arc, but also incidental to key elements of the plot. Instead of making Trudy the main character, I created a police detective named Susan Ford, who—with her retired detective father, Will Ford—interview people who have had contact with Trudy over the decades. Each of these “witnesses” adds important detail and dimension to the story of Trudy Solomon.
I also wanted the book to be fun and intriguing. For example, turning it into a mystery allowed me to describe the disturbing circumstances of Trudy’s disappearance, while also incorporating into the plot the skeletal remains that were at first thought to be Trudy’s. This gave the plot further complexity. Were the cases connected?
As this was a cold case, I was intrigued by the idea of pairing the original detective on the case with a new detective. And better yet, what if they were father and daughter? I’ve always loved “buddy” detective stories, but it’s very rare to find a father/daughter (or even a mother/daughter) team. Barnaby Jones (if you’re of my generation) and Veronica Mars (if you’re of my daughters’ generation) are two rare examples. Adding that layer of a familial connection to the pairing was an aha! moment for me—introducing the dynamic of a shared past and intimate history that isn’t usual in a detective team.
And this dynamic also served another purpose, allowing me to set the story in both the past and present and explore how Susan’s coming-of-age woes would influence the way she came at this case. The year Trudy disappeared—1978—was a terrible year for Susan. Her parents divorced, her grandfather died, her best friend drifted away.
Pairing Susan with her father on this case allowed me to dig deep into their relationship and have them uncover things they didn’t know about each other. They come at the case with different motivations. Will thinks there’s a chance he can solve a case that baffled and frustrated him 40 years ago. For her part, Susan is not exactly thrilled to face reliving an unhappy time in her life. But her ambivalence gives way to intrigue, as she begins to learn more about Trudy. It seemed plausible to think that she could help a woman who has lost the thread of her life begin to regain some clarity about it.
*
The description of the fictional Cuttman Hotel mirrors that of the Hotel Brickman, where I spent my formative summers. The actual owners and their families were nothing like the fictional Roths (in fact, I’m still friendly with the daughter of one of the owners). Many of the experiences I give the owners’ children in the novel are ones I personally experienced—especially their aristocratic air of superiority and privilege. My sisters and I watched the guests come and go every week, but we were mainstays, treated well by the owners and staff. And we were somewhat revered by the teenagers who replaced other teenagers week after week all summer long. If I wanted to play tennis, a court was made available to me. If I wanted a bite to eat, I would wander into the kitchen between meals. If I wanted to party at night, I would sneak away with a bellhop or waiter to a local bar.
When I thought about the timeframe of my novel, I decided I would write what I knew, and I knew the late seventies. I was a teenager then, and so I made Susan Ford a teenager at that time, growing up with the fictional Roth family’s entitled offspring.
This authorial mingling of the factual personal with the imagined fictional allowed me to discover one of the joys of novel writing: to create a synthesis of real settings and events with pure inventions. Many of the places I reference in the novel are real: Lefty’s Restaurant, Woodbourne Correctional Prison, Sullivan County Community College, Ciao Bello restaurant, the surrounding and nearby towns of South Fallsburg, Hurleyville, Liberty, Woodbourne, Middletown, and Ellenville. Susan’s and Will’s investigation into Trudy’s life since disappearing takes them to places as far-flung as Mill Basin, in Brooklyn (where I grew up); Waltham, MA (where I once lived); and Hull, MA, (where I live now), along with trips to Florida to beard the fictional Roth family in their post-Catskills habitats.
Other places and venues are purely fictional, or at least fictionalized. Again, this notion of intermingling factual settings lived in by people drawn from my imagination allowed me to stretch and bend the narrative to build plotted fiction out of non-fiction.
I’m a wide-ranging consumer of online media, including the Boston Globe. Luckily, on August 17, 2017, I just happened to be scanning its online edition when I came across an article about a waitress who worked at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills and mysteriously disappeared from the area in the mid-seventies. The Boston Globe article reported that detectives had recently discovered a buried decades-old skeleton in the vicinity of the area from which the waitress had vanished. There was thus reason to speculate that she had met with foul play.
An old record from the time of her disappearance listed the woman’s Social Security number. One of the detectives discovered that someone using that number was receiving care in an Alzheimer’s facility in Lowell, Massachusetts. The missing woman, presumed dead, was very much alive.
That Social Security number belonged to Flora Stevens, who was indeed the missing woman, her identity confirmed from an old employee ID card. Because she now suffered from dementia, she was unable to give detectives a clear account of what had happened to her in the intervening years.
Normally, I would read an article like this, think such a strange story, and move on to something else. But I found I couldn’t easily let go of the fate of this woman. Her story began to tug at me in resonant ways.
I spent my summers (1965-1982) in the Catskills resort area. My dad was the tummler (activities director) and nightclub emcee at The Hotel Brickman in South Fallsburg, NY. I lived through three eras of the Borscht Belt: its glory days in the 1960s, its waning days in the 1970s, and its demise through the 1980s—which happened in slow motion, right before my eyes. I’ve always wanted to write a story in this setting, but the question was always… what story/what era… A coming of age? A romance? A hotel “locked-room” whodunnit? A memoir?
This article was my eureka moment. I was intrigued by the story of Flora Stevens and, at the same time, liberated by the unresolvable mystery of it. The gaps were mine to fill. I foresaw creating a narrative that spanned the forty years between a young waitress disappearing and a mature woman with dementia being found. I changed the name of the real Flora Stevens to the imaginary Trudy Solomon. I started building out the plot.
When I began to outline the story, Trudy Solomon was the protagonist. But it felt too much like a memoir and I wasn’t happy with the arc of the story, which put Trudy at the center of everything. Instead, I began to think of her as the book’s MacGuffin—essential to the arc, but also incidental to key elements of the plot. Instead of making Trudy the main character, I created a police detective named Susan Ford, who—with her retired detective father, Will Ford—interview people who have had contact with Trudy over the decades. Each of these “witnesses” adds important detail and dimension to the story of Trudy Solomon.
I also wanted the book to be fun and intriguing. For example, turning it into a mystery allowed me to describe the disturbing circumstances of Trudy’s disappearance, while also incorporating into the plot the skeletal remains that were at first thought to be Trudy’s. This gave the plot further complexity. Were the cases connected?
As this was a cold case, I was intrigued by the idea of pairing the original detective on the case with a new detective. And better yet, what if they were father and daughter? I’ve always loved “buddy” detective stories, but it’s very rare to find a father/daughter (or even a mother/daughter) team. Barnaby Jones (if you’re of my generation) and Veronica Mars (if you’re of my daughters’ generation) are two rare examples. Adding that layer of a familial connection to the pairing was an aha! moment for me—introducing the dynamic of a shared past and intimate history that isn’t usual in a detective team.
And this dynamic also served another purpose, allowing me to set the story in both the past and present and explore how Susan’s coming-of-age woes would influence the way she came at this case. The year Trudy disappeared—1978—was a terrible year for Susan. Her parents divorced, her grandfather died, her best friend drifted away.
Pairing Susan with her father on this case allowed me to dig deep into their relationship and have them uncover things they didn’t know about each other. They come at the case with different motivations. Will thinks there’s a chance he can solve a case that baffled and frustrated him 40 years ago. For her part, Susan is not exactly thrilled to face reliving an unhappy time in her life. But her ambivalence gives way to intrigue, as she begins to learn more about Trudy. It seemed plausible to think that she could help a woman who has lost the thread of her life begin to regain some clarity about it.
*
The description of the fictional Cuttman Hotel mirrors that of the Hotel Brickman, where I spent my formative summers. The actual owners and their families were nothing like the fictional Roths (in fact, I’m still friendly with the daughter of one of the owners). Many of the experiences I give the owners’ children in the novel are ones I personally experienced—especially their aristocratic air of superiority and privilege. My sisters and I watched the guests come and go every week, but we were mainstays, treated well by the owners and staff. And we were somewhat revered by the teenagers who replaced other teenagers week after week all summer long. If I wanted to play tennis, a court was made available to me. If I wanted a bite to eat, I would wander into the kitchen between meals. If I wanted to party at night, I would sneak away with a bellhop or waiter to a local bar.
When I thought about the timeframe of my novel, I decided I would write what I knew, and I knew the late seventies. I was a teenager then, and so I made Susan Ford a teenager at that time, growing up with the fictional Roth family’s entitled offspring.
This authorial mingling of the factual personal with the imagined fictional allowed me to discover one of the joys of novel writing: to create a synthesis of real settings and events with pure inventions. Many of the places I reference in the novel are real: Lefty’s Restaurant, Woodbourne Correctional Prison, Sullivan County Community College, Ciao Bello restaurant, the surrounding and nearby towns of South Fallsburg, Hurleyville, Liberty, Woodbourne, Middletown, and Ellenville. Susan’s and Will’s investigation into Trudy’s life since disappearing takes them to places as far-flung as Mill Basin, in Brooklyn (where I grew up); Waltham, MA (where I once lived); and Hull, MA, (where I live now), along with trips to Florida to beard the fictional Roth family in their post-Catskills habitats.
Other places and venues are purely fictional, or at least fictionalized. Again, this notion of intermingling factual settings lived in by people drawn from my imagination allowed me to stretch and bend the narrative to build plotted fiction out of non-fiction.
