Disco Dead--Marcia Talley

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It is always a huge treat for me to host Marcia Talley, one of my oldest and dearest friends in the mystery world, and a new Hannah Ives novel is always a cause for celebration. Here's a snippet from just one of the glowing reviews for Disco Dead, her 19th Hannah Ives mystery:

“...As good as the puzzles in this series are, most readers probably don’t come to the Ives books for the mysteries—they come for the characters. Hannah is a perfectly drawn lead, a part-time crime solver who must juggle friends, family, and serious medical issues, along with all manner of everyday concerns. She may be an amateur sleuth, but she lives very much in the real world ... Some long-running series have their ups and downs, but the Ives series has been remarkably consistent.”— David Pitt for Booklist

Sitting down with a new Hannah is like sitting down with a friend you've missed for a cup of tea (or in our case, a glass of wine!) but you don't have to know Marcia, or to have read the previous books, to be instantly drawn in. 

Here's Marcia to tell you more!

Disco Dead (a tip of the hat here to Elaine Viets for the perfect title!) was supposed to be my pandemic novel, the one where Hannah, confined to her home by the Covid lockdown, becomes an armchair detective working on a cold case via the Internet with a small group of volunteers.  My agent and my publisher had other ideas, however. “Nobody wants to re-live the pandemic, Marcia … they want to escape it.”

Sigh.

The cold case idea had grabbed me, though, as had the idea of Hannah using the skills she’d developed over the past several novels as a genealogical researcher to solve a case. Like I did, Hannah started by researching her family tree and got sucked, big time, down the genealogical rabbit hole. In Disco Dead, she gets to dive even deeper.

It all begins innocently enough.

Perhaps I should let Hannah explain.  Here’s the conversation she has with her daughter in the parking lot outside Trader Joe’s:

Emily locked her car and insisted on escorting me to mine. As we crossed the parking lot, shopping cart clattering along the tarmac, she said, ‘So, what are you doing?’

‘You’ll mock.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘I’m visiting cemeteries. Taking pictures of headstones.’

Emily frowned. ‘That’s seriously creepy, Mom.’

‘You wouldn’t believe how many people on GenTree are looking for photos of their ancestors’ headstones,’ I informed her. ‘I’ve gotten requests from as far away as Thailand.’

‘How . . .?’ Emily began, but I anticipated her question.

‘A while back, I signed up with FindAGrave.com.’ I slotted the shopping cart between my Volvo and a pickup truck, dug my iPhone out of my handbag and tapped the FindAGrave app. ‘Requests are sorted by zip code. You can choose to claim them or not. Look,’ I said, turning the screen in her direction. ‘Here’s the list of requests for the 21037 zip code I’m working with today.’

Emily shielded her eyes from the noonday sun and squinted at the tiny screen. ‘St Luke’s Cemetery I know, but where’s Bayview?’

‘Just off Central Avenue, down in Mayo.’

‘Honestly,’ Emily said after a moment. ‘Couldn’t you have a hobby like normal mothers. Scrapbooking? Candle making? You like to garden. Why don’t you take up bonsai?’

‘I knit,’ I protested.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Don’t sell it short,’ I said. ‘I stroll around outside, get sun, fresh air and exercise. It’s quiet, nobody to bother you and nobody to talk to but dead people.’

Emily raised both hands, palms out. ‘And everybody always says I march to a different drummer.’

 ‘The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ I said, matching her cliché for cliché. ‘Wanna see how it works?’

When Emily nodded, I drew her attention to the app again, swiped a couple of screens forward. ‘I locate the headstone, take a picture and upload it to the database while I’m standing right there in the cemetery. It’s a slick piece of software.’

Emily studied the photo on my screen – a 1943 headstone for a woman who had lived to be 102 before ‘falling asleep in the arms of Jesus’ – then surprised me by laughing out loud. ‘It’s still weird, Mom.’

‘My good deeds for the day,’ I said.

Emily helped load groceries into the Volvo, then turned to go. ‘St Luke’s. Isn’t that where that famous general is buried?’

‘James Taylor Johnson,’ I said as I opened the driver’s side door and slid onto the seat. ‘Yes. Old Bloody Jim.’

‘Well, say hello to the good general for me, will you?’

‘Of course. But he won’t be saying much. He’s been dead for one hundred and sixty years.’

Usually on these expeditions, as Hannah says, there’s no one to talk to but the dead, until the day she encounters Isabel “Izzy” Randall laying flowers on the grave of Amy Madison, a St John’s College senior who died in 1978.  As a former investigative reporter for WBNF-TV in Baltimore, Izzy covered the case.  “Her murder was never solved,” Izzy tells Hannah, “and I can’t get it out of my mind.” It’s been more than forty years since Amy’s body was found floating in the Magothy River north of Annapolis, but Izzy never fails to bring flowers to Amy on her birthday.

Sitting at opposite ends of a memorial bench in the churchyard, Izzy fills Hannah in on the long-cold case. Amy had last been seen alive dancing with a young man at Doot’s, an Annapolis disco bar popular with college students and the under thirties crowd.  After a year-long investigation and few leads, the case went cold. “Nobody seems to care about Amy any more,” Izzy laments.

Following their initial meeting, a friendship develops between the two women which leads to Hannah being invited to join Silent Sleuths, where her online research skills compliment the background and experience of the other members of this small, but passionate group of “citizen detectives” who tackle unsolved “orphan” cases like Amy’s. Jack Shelton, a former Annapolis homicide detective, knows how to get his hands on police files, and Mark Wallis, a Navy chaplain, has a masters degree in criminal psychology.  It isn’t long before the Sleuths begin to suspect that Amy’s murder may have been the work of a serial killer.  Izzy’s intense personal interest in Amy’s case trumps the golden rule of armchair investigators:  never go “real life” by contacting victims’ families or any suspects. Naturally, Hannah  . . .

But that would be telling!

In spite of the serious subject matter, I enjoyed writing Disco Dead.  I’ve lived in Annapolis since 1971, so it was fun revisiting those early years when Annapolis was a little sleepier and less yuppified than it is today. Doot’s Bar is a product of my imagination, but other Annapolis restaurants, shops and institutions will be recognized by anyone familiar with the town.

I particularly enjoyed selecting appropriate titles for the chapters of Disco Dead, each being a popular disco song.  Dancing Queen, Mama Mia, Staying Alive were no-brainers, but there’s also this stroll down memory lane: Take a Chance on Me (ABBA), Where Do We Go From Here (The Trammps), I’m So Excited (The Pointer Sisters), Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel (Tavares) and Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life (Indeep), and several dozen others. Maybe you’ll start discoing and singing along! 

Marcia Talley is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of DISCO DEAD and eighteen previous novels featuring Maryland sleuth, Hannah Ives. She is editor/author of two collaborative serial novels, NAKED CAME THE PHOENIX and I’D KILL FOR THAT. Her short stories appear in more than a dozen collections.

Marcia is past-president of Sisters in Crime, Inc. and currently serves as president of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. She divides her time between Annapolis, MD and a quaint, Loyalist-style cottage on Elbow Cay in the Bahamas.

www.marciatalley.com

Twitter: marciatalleybks

DEBS: ABBA! Those songs instantly take me back to living in Scotland, where they always seemed to be playing on the radio. Now I think I need to rewatch Mama Mia... REDS and readers, who's a disco fan?