Driving a carriage can be murder.
I love horses, carriages and mystery, not necessarily in that order, so I had a fantastic time combining all three in The Cart Before the Corpse.
Set in Mossy Creek, Georgia, The Cart Before the Corpse comes out from Belle Books in a couple of weeks. I hope its sequel, One Hoof in the Grave, will be published early next year. Why use carriage driving as a mystery setting? I drive, for one thing, and although there are fewer accidents driving horses than riding them, they’re generally a bunch worse and make for good stories. My local driving group, the Nashoba Carriage Association, keeps me primed with tales. Let’s face it, remembered disaster is funny so long as everybody survived. How many funny stories does your family tell about situations that were God-awful at the time?
For example, recently a lady driver was driving a team of Halflingers—gold and white draft ponies—through a dressage test at a carriage show. Adam, the inexperienced pony on the left side, spotted a dragon lurking across the ring. Dragons always lurk. You may not see them, but your horse will and act accordingly.
Trained as the jumping pony of a ten-year-old girl and only recently taught to drive, Adam decided it was prudent to abandon the arena to the dragon. He took off in the opposite direction. His harness mate Butch was forced to go along.
Horses have no idea there’s a carriage behind them, so Adam decided the fastest way out of the arena was to jump the fence surrounding it, while sensible Butch pulled hard right toward the open gate.
Carriages cannot jump. Adam, however, did.
The carriage caught halfway up the fence, Adam tumped over on his nose, certain that the dragon was one nip away, and Butch was pulled up hard on the far side of the post at the corner of the arena.
And there they hung—ponies, carriage, and driver—all making enough noise to scare any dragon this side of the Mississippi River straight back to the Rhine.
It took half a dozen men and women to calm and unharness the ponies, who incurred only a couple of scratches. The carriage was a tad bunged up, but nothing a little polish wouldn’t fix. Unfortunately the driver lost her best hat. Now, that was a tragedy.
As they were walking the two ponies back to the barn side by side, Butch, the sensible one, sucked in a deep breath and launched a cow kick straight into the fat ass of his knuckleheaded buddy.
They no longer drive as a team.
The lady tells that story every chance she gets, and I intend to use it in One Hoof in the Grave. Remember, you saw it here first.
But carriage accidents don’t make a mystery—detectives and murder do. I managed to combine my lifelong love of horses with my lifelong love of mysteries. Good thinking, no? And the Belles helped me every step of the way.
I fell in love with horses when my grandfather held me on a big bay Quarter horse when I was three. Although I spent years away from them, living in cities both in this country and Europe, my love for them never wavered. When I finally climbed back onto the saddle some twenty-five years ago, I swore that like Hello, Dolly, I’d never go away again. I now live in the country where I can see my horses any time I look out the window.
I’m hoping to ride Sailor, my dressage horse, until my age and his add up to a hundred, so we can ride a dressage test and receive our Centurion Award from the United States Dressage Federation. (None of your business how long we have to go.) Sailor is nearly eighteen hands high and half Clydesdale. When I stand beside him, I can’t see over the top of him. From the saddle, it is a long way to the ground. Soooo…
I now drive as well as ride. My mare, Zoe, is half Shire and only a tad over sixteen hands, although she’s as broad as a billiard table. She doesn’t like to canter, and neither do I, but she’ll trot to the moon and back.
If I’m forced to give up riding, driving becomes my other horse outlet. I hope that when you read The Cart Before the Corpse you’ll understand why I love both driving and mystery as much as I do. And why the book is set in Mossy Creek.
I’ve written two characters for the Mossy Creek series almost since its inception and have grown fond not only of my people, but of everyone in town. Their stories range from laugh-at-loud funny to deeply moving. Writing a short story about a character, however, is much different from writing an entire novel in which that character plays a pivotal role. I know my character Peggy Caldwell, retired English professor, cat lover, poison garden creator and avid murder mystery reader, very well.
Merideth Abbott, however, my amateur detective, was a stranger before I started Cart. She had to tell me who she was and why she acted as she did. She had to show me the ways she had to grow, the decisions she was forced to make. All I knew at the start was that she was tall.
At five feet nine, I have no idea how the world looks when you’re five foot nothing. I can always reach the book on the top shelf (well, almost always). So both Merry and Peggy are tall. And tough, if flawed. Or maybe tough because they’re flawed.
Merideth Abbot is a savvy horse show manager. She is charged with keeping drivers, horses, staff, judges, announcers, exhibitors and caterers organized. Everyone she works with thinks she’s completely together. Actually, she’s a marshmallow. Twenty years ago she caused a driving accident that crippled her mother and led to her parents’ divorce. She blames herself for the accident, the divorce, and her subsequent estrangement from her father. Merry still works around horses, but has refused to pick up a set of driving reins since the accident. She’s terrified she’ll be the cause of another disaster. She and her father, a retired professional carriage driver, are finally going to meet at his new farm in Mossy Creek, when he is killed.
And only his friend Peggy believes he was murdered.
Merry must confront her demons to save both herself and Peggy from her father’s killer.
Murder isn’t funny. Heinzie, the big Friesian driving horse, and his buddy Don Qui, a miniature donkey, are. So are the southern funeral customs Merry runs into while avoiding the killer stalking her and Peggy. I hope you’ll like Merry, Peggy, Mossy Creek, and the equines who populate it. I truly loved writing about them all.
