Father/Daughter Detective Teams

I’ve always loved “buddy” detective stories featuring a main sleuth and his or her sidekick, especially if the relationship is akin to oil and water (at odds all the time) or oil and vinegar (a good shake and they are well-blended). The point of my tortured metaphor is that the juxtaposition of two main characters who share a similar goal (i.e., solving a murder), but approach the task in different ways (i.e., contemplative vs. intuitive) tends to make a story richer and its characters more compelling. When expertly crafted, it also makes for a fun reading (or watching) experience. Who doesn’t love witty banter between two main characters who don’t see eye to eye? When I had set out to write a mystery novel, I knew I wanted to use this buddy-detective trope. But, I have to back up a bit to explain how I dreamed up a father/daughter detective team residing in the Catskills Mountains of New York. For that, I give you a flashback . . .     

I spent my summers (1965-1982) in the Catskills resort area, affectionately dubbed the “Borscht Belt” because the hotels and bungalow colonies catered primarily to Jewish families. If you are not familiar with the area, I highly recommend the movie Dirty Dancing, the TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the documentary Welcome to the Kutsher’s: The Last Hotel Resort. My dad was the tummler (activities director) and nightclub emcee at The Hotel Brickman and the Kutsher’s Hotel (yes, he’s in the documentary). 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. And like the song associated with Dirty Dancing, yes, “I had the time of my life.” These days, the area is experiencing a resurgence as an arts and cultural tourist destination. And on the site of one of those big old hotels (Concord Hotel) now stands a gambling mecca (Resorts World Casino). The Catskills is a setting with its own story arc—and I was drawn to the possibilities of how I could use the setting as a backdrop to my stories. 

Four years ago, I read an article in the Boston Globe about a woman named Flora Stevens who worked as a waitress at the Concord Hotel and mysteriously disappeared from the area in the mid-70s. She was found forty years later in an Alzheimer’s facility in Massachusetts through the fluke of a social security number search by a detective. She was unable to tell the detective what had happened to her in the intervening years. That was my eureka moment. I was intrigued by the idea of fictionalizing this woman’s story—filling in the forty-year gap between disappearing and being found. This odd story was essentially the seed for the premise of my first mystery novel set in the Catskills, The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon. With the yawning forty-year time span, I saw potential in pairing the original detective on the case with a younger detective. Then came my second eureka moment. As I mentioned in my flashback above, my dad played a pivotal role in my coming-of-age summers at The Hotel Brickman. That’s when it hit me . . . a father/daughter detective team! Not wanting to copy someone else’s idea, I tried to recall other examples of father/daughter detective teams. Barnaby Jones (if you’re of my generation) and Veronica Mars (if you’re of my daughters’ generation) came to mind. Michael Connelly introduced his teenage daughter, Maddie, into his Bosch books in his ninth novel, Lost Light—she eventually became a rookie cop (not his partner) in his latest novel, Desert Star. The notion of leaning in on the dynamic of a shared past and intimate history appealed to me, and the fact that it wasn’t a hackneyed trope pretty much sealed the deal. 

I wanted my father/daughter duo to be compatible, but with different styles and approaches to solving a crime. Detective Susan Ford is a by-the-book detective—contemplative, following the evidence where it leads. Retired Detective Will Ford is a by-the gut detective—relying on his “Spidey” sense, intuition, and experience. In this setup, it was essential that their ribbing and repartee were familial and authentic. But like in every father/daughter relationship (or any family relationship for that matter), there are periods of tension. Because The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon is set in both the past (1978) and present (2018), I use this past/present dichotomy to surface Detective Susan Ford’s buried coming-of-age woes, namely her angst-ridden childhood memories that simmer just below the surface, hinting at a complicated relationship with her father. The year Trudy Solomon disappeared—1978—was a terrible year for Susan. Her parents divorced, her grandfather died, her best friend drifted away, her mother sought solace in a bottle of vodka. Pairing Susan with her father on this cold case forces both of them to discover things they never knew about each other. With so much relationship grist for the mill, including a contentious relationship with her mother, I knew I had plenty of fodder for a series.

For the second novel of the series, I wanted to change up the dynamic among the family members. In The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon, Susan willingly accepts her father’s help to solve the case while resisting a reconciliation with her mother. However, in The Murder of Madison Garcia, her father’s assistance is unwelcome (essentially because he has ties to the murder victim’s family) and her relationship with her mother is on even footing. Shifting alliances is fairly common in dysfunctional families and having this play out during a murder investigation gives each character a chance for self-exploration about one’s role and obligation within a family.

I’m currently writing the third book in the series, The Summer of Love and Death, and once again, I shake up the family dynamic, raising the stakes in a way that tests the strength of their family ties.

About The Murder of Madison Garcia by Marcy McCreary:

Detective Susan Ford notices a missed call on her phone from a number she doesn’t recognize, and when Madison Garcia, a woman with past ties to the town of Monticello, New York, is found stabbed to death the next morning, Susan realizes that Madison was the one who had called her. But why?

Susan teams up with her father, retired Detective Will Ford, to find the killer, and their investigation soon threatens to uncover Madison’s family 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.