CARLA TROY WHERE ARE YOU? I have a mystery on my hands and I need you to solve it!
Like many little girls I had an alter ego in girl-mystery series. Nancy Drew was probably the most famous, but she just didn’t fit with me. She was too preppy and proper and her dad was a Judge. Besides she had her own car. Come to think of it, I was probably the bargain basement version of Nancy.
. So what’s an eight-year-old to do? . Enter the Carla Troy Mystery Series. Authored, and produced by 8-year-old Tamara Herron. I decided to try my hand at creating my own heroin, , one I could relate to on a hot summer days when the other kids were out playing while my aversion to sweat had me lounging on the chaise with a popsicle in one hand and a book in the other.
When I say I wrote the novel, I hand wrote it on yellow lined paper in pencil in case I needed to make a change, I also designed my own cover and for this I used colored pencils, not crayons, a step up for the more sophisticated reader,
They were paperback size and I folded an 8’1/2 x 11 piece of paper into half and when staples didn’t work snitched a hole punch from my Dad’s office and tied it together with ribbon I found, I tried paste on one. Not my best effort.
I was an author- publisher and my mind swirled with where Carla would go. My creative juices were flowing.. Our first novel found her packing her bags as a new graduate of nursing school. She was off to a mission hospital in Shanghai having been hired by a handsome doctor. At that point in my small little world I knew there three choices for woman in her career – nurse, teacher, secretary and if you were Catholic – nun. I couldn’t decide between nurse and nun so I put the two together although with the appearance of the mysterious new doctor, being a nun was looking less and less like my calling.
Carla could do all the things I couldn’t —-science and math for instance. She could pack her bag and leave for parts unknown while I wouldn’t venture overnight for Brownie camps. Carla went into the jungle and didn’t get eaten up by bugs. She went on ships and didn’t throw up. She went on planes. And didn’t[t take Dramamine. Each night at dinner I regaled my mom and Dad with Carla’s latest adventure. Next thing I knew, they were making suggestions with Carla’s next book.
I studied other mysteries to see if I could get the formula. There was always a good guy or girl or a bad guy or girl. But sometimes the good guy turned out to be the bad guy. There were always clues, I thought three was the right number. One at the beginning. Maybe, at the scene of the crime. One in the middle to change who you thought did it. And, I saved the best clue for last.
I thought of Carla today when I wrote the video lottery story. I’m going to make it a three-part series so that I delve into it further because it looks like there are some intriguing questions.
Who knows? Since 1993, the video lottery/gaming story in West Virginia has been so full of twists and turns that that it would make a good mystery…..I can see it……”.Carla Troy goes to the legislature.”