Flo McCahon, 77, started writing cozy mysteries under the name Mille Mack before she retired. Since then, the Perry Hall author has published four more books and is working on another series. Photo courtesy of Flo McCahon

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Flo McCahon’s childhood obsession started with Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden.

Hoping to write a mystery novel one day, McCahon kept a journal in which she captured her thoughts, developed characters and started ideas for murder plots.

“Gratefully,” she writes on her website, Dark and Stormy Night Mysteries, “no one found these journals with my murder plots and jumped to a wrong conclusion of what I was planning.”

Now 77, McCahon published her fifth mystery novel, Take a Book for Murder, last September. It’s part of a series of mysteries solved by amateur sleuths the Faradays, a married couple in the vein of Nick and Nora Charles. A soft launch of the new book included appearances at book clubs, book festivals and senior centers in Maryland.

McCahon, who lives in Perry Hall, describes her books as cozy mysteries, a popular genre among those age 55 and older. They contain bloodless crimes, no violence and no car chases, she explains.

Her books are good beach day or rainy-day reads solely for “the enjoyment of putting the puzzle pieces together,” she said in an interview with the Beacon. “An amateur detective — keep in mind, the reader is also an amateur — gets to solve the crime.”

Inspired by her mother

McCahon writes under the pseudonym Millie Mack to honor her mother, Millie, a former librarian.

“I thought it was a good way to honor her — not to mention Millie Mack is easier to remember than my real name,” she said.

Growing up in Philadelphia and later Maryland, McCahon found that neighborhood children had trouble pronouncing her family’s last name. “So my mother used to say, ‘Oh, just call me Mrs. Mack.’”

Her mother was “the one that got me interested in mysteries,” McCahon said.

“From the time I was a little girl until my mother passed away, we would watch mystery movies together and challenge each other to figure out the solution,” she remembered.

When she was too young to read, McCahon’s mother would read mystery stories to her. After watching a Sherlock Holmes movie together when McCahon was five or six years old, her mother would pull out a Sherlock Holmes book and read it to her.

“Even until late in life, before she passed away, we would watch a particular movie on TV — she came to live with me in her later years — and the game would be the two of us, trying to figure out who did it,” McCahon said.

“Sometimes she would read the end of the book to see who did it and then go back to read the book to see if the author had, in fact, played fair, and led you to that conclusion.”

Although her mother passed away before her first book was published, she lives on through McCahon’s pseudonym and storytelling, McCahon said.

From marketing to mysteries

Despite her early “training,” McCahon didn’t start writing until she was in her late 50s. She graduated from American University in 1975 with a master’s degree in business and a concentration in marketing and public relations.

Later, McCahon became marketing director of Citibank’s Mid-Atlantic area, writing marketing copy. When they offered her a job at its New York headquarters, she decided to resign and take some time off.

“I didn’t want to go [to New York], so I had a very nice [severance] package — and during that time I wrote the first book in my series, which was called Take a Dive for Murder.”

Later, McCahon worked for T. Rowe Price. Eventually, she became marketing director at Erickson Retirement Communities, her last job before she retired.

That’s when she had time to write the second book in her mystery series. And the books kept coming.

“The next thing I know, there was a book three,” McCahon said.

Currently, McCahon is working on her sixth book in the series starring Carrie and Charles Faraday. The two detectives first met when Carrie dated Charles’ brother in college. Decades later, when the brother died suspiciously, she got together with Charles to investigate.

New characters

Now McCahon is writing a second series of mystery books set in an Irish pub and restaurant. She hopes they’ll be out by this fall or early next year.

In addition to writing, McCahon is conference chair for the Maryland Writers Association. She also takes classes at the Community College of Baltimore County, including courses on antiques. Subsequently, antiques will be a theme in her upcoming book.

On her internationally read mystery blog (darkandstormynightmysteries.com), McCahon writes about the characters in famous mystery books and publishes related crossword and word-search puzzles with titles of mystery novels and television shows.

Although it’s hard to choose between all the mystery writers she loves, her favorite is Agatha Christie, author of 66 novels.

“She follows the rules of good mystery writing and offers the reader complex plots,” McCahon said. “As a result, if I reread one of her works, I always spot something I missed the first time.”