Creating Characters: Meet Arabella Carpenter

Of all my characters (and there are quite a few), Glass Dolphin antiques shop owner Arabella Carpenter is probably my favorite. Feisty and flawed, she’s a loyal friend who still loves her ex-husband, Levon Larroquette (even if she refuses to admit it). But what I really like about her is her motto: Authenticity Matters. Because, well, it does. Anyway, I like Arabella so much that when I began writing the Marketville Mystery series, I found a way to give her a small role as Calamity (Callie) Barnstable’s oldest friend. But who, or what was the inspiration behind her?

I was taking a creative writing course, around 2010, maybe a year or so later, and the assignment was to write a mystery with the words “blue” and “dolphin.” I started writing a story about an antiques shop called the Blue Dolphin, and for no reason I can remember, the name Arabella popped into my head. I don’t think I’d ever heard the name before (although I have since…it’s sort of like when you drive a white Honda Civic..all of a sudden, all the cars you see are white Honda Civics). The Carpenter? I was listening to the radio and Close to You,  an old song by The Carpenters came on. Arabella Carpenter, I thought. That has a nice ring to it. [Sidebar: I changed the name of the shop to the Glass Dolphin after I found out there was a real life Blue Dolphin antiques shop in Maine.]

Here’s a scene from The Hanged Man’s Noose, book 1 in the Glass Dolphin Mystery series:

Arabella surveyed the stack of unopened boxes. The thought of unpacking years of inventory might have been daunting to some, but not to her. She was determined to savor every moment.

She’d been dreaming about owning an antiques shop for ten years, first with Levon, and then without him. No one could take it away now.

But Levon had taught her well, Arabella realized with a trace of nostalgia. She remembered the days when they’d go picking together: estate sales, yard sales, auctions. Levon had an eye for finding a bargain in the rough. It was unfortunate his idea of picking things up went beyond antiques. For him, everything in life came down to the thrill of the hunt.

But he had taken her on as an apprentice when she had nowhere to go and no one to go to, and for that she would be forever grateful. Under Levon’s tutelage, Arabella learned to love antiques for the history they told, the stories they shared. Take clocks. She could pinpoint the region a clock was made simply because of the primary and secondary woods selected. The same held true for antique furniture. No cheap “Made in China” knockoffs back in the nineteenth century. Craftsmen took pride in their work, unlike today’s shoddy built-in obsolescence.

It was close to four o’clock before Arabella stopped, exhausted and hungry. She admired her wall of clocks. The styles were a nice assortment: regulators and banjos, schoolhouse and steeples, gingerbreads, and ogees. Tomorrow morning she’d hang up the vintage posters, the oil paintings and watercolors, the maps and mosaics, before the movers arrived with the furniture. Everything was going to be perfect.

She sat down on top of a stack of flattened boxes and began to cry.

And now, my favorite line of Arabella’s (so far) in response to a developer’s proposal and the standing ovation he receives from the townsfolk:

“Honestly, there are more horses’ asses than horses in this town,” Arabella shouted over the applause. “How can you people buy what that man is selling?”

Seriously, what’s not to love?

About the series:

A small town named after a nineteenth-century traitor. A feisty antiques shop owner with a passion for authenticity. A freelance journalist with a penchant for the truth. Join amateur sleuths Arabella Carpenter and Emily Garland in the not-so-sleepy village of Lount’s Landing, where secrets, subterfuge, and real estate wranglings sometimes lead to murder.

READERS: Do you enjoy it when characters (like Arabella Carpenter) make an appearance in another series by the same author? If so, name an example. Three of my faves are Michael Connelly, John Sandford and Tana French, who excel at this.

The Glass Dolphin Mystery series is available as a box set or by individual title in trade paperback and e-book. Individual titles are also available in audiobook and large print, trade paperback, and e-book.

www.books2read.com/Glass-THMN

www.books2.read.com/GlassDolphin