The Last Carousel | horse puzzle

In The last carouselthe Trois-Rivières novelist Guillaume Morrissette has constructed a detective mystery in the heart of a stable – a kind of informal closed-doors among the horses.

Laila Maalouf
The Press

We spoke to the author of this 10^e novel whose pieces fit together like a puzzle where we have fun looking for the culprit.

A former equestrian competition champion is found dead in one of the boxes of a stable in Varennes. Who killed him ? Here is the starting point of Last carousela classic mystery novel (a “whodunit”), built with an Excel file in support.

“It’s the Cartesian side of the artist guy”, underlines with humor the one who teaches financial mathematics at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières for 19 years – while writing thrillers for the last 10 years.

“I like puzzles, but I had never dared to do them. Then when I started to write The last carousel, I realized that this was the formula that was going to be adapted to this novel. »

The equestrian world, Guillaume Morrissette discovered it alongside his wife, who owns a horse. “One evening, on my way back from the stable, I said to myself: OK, I’m killing someone in the stable and I’m going to investigate. And then I said to myself that the investigator had to be a city dweller who doesn’t like animals at all. It became by definition Antoine Déry. This same Sûreté du Québec sergeant who made his first appearance in his novels in 2020, with When I talk to the dead. Who “does not find his happiness anywhere and who says everything he thinks not badly all the time”…

He forms with his colleague Emma Teasdale an effective duo of investigators who exchange replies like a ball between two athletes. During the two days that the investigation lasts – and the novel -, they try to reconstruct the last day of the victim by questioning all the people who could have crossed his path.

In the mysteries of a microsociety

Over the course of the interrogations, which all take place in the stable, the investigators discover a singular and rather closed environment. “It’s a sect here,” the author even says to the victim’s spouse, in the novel.

Guillaume Morrissette himself had a lot of time to observe this ecosystem made up of people from all walks of life and of all ages – from which he did not hesitate to draw inspiration to create his characters… or borrow a few horse names from them. .

“It’s a micro-society. These are really people who are passionate about their horses; they spend thousands of dollars for their animal which they treat with small onions. And they would be ready to defend the life of their horse,” he says.

The novelist also gave himself a malicious pleasure in making several humorous winks, in particular by rethinking the scenes of training which he witnessed.

“I had a lot of fun writing it. I never stopped having fun writing all my novels, he adds. I blew up my friends’ house, my mother’s retirement home… I blasted an old high school bully by changing his name and making him die. »

Himself a great reader of detective literature – from Henning Mankell to Marie-Ève ​​Bourassa, whose Red Light trilogy he adored – he insists on the importance of the “entertainment” factor in crime fiction. “I sometimes stop books because I’m not entertained,” he admits frankly.

And if he admits having more difficulty writing very dark detective novels, it is because he is “a happy guy by nature”.

This pleasure, Guillaume Morrissette was preparing to share it with other authors aboard the literary caravan, which is touring 45 cities in Quebec, until October 30, to meet readers.

And since he’s on sabbatical from his course load, he can fully devote himself to his writing-related projects these days – which makes him very happy. He already has a thriller in the process of being written, he tells us, even if he can’t tell us much more about it yet… See you next year.

The last carousel

Guillaume Morrissette

Saint John Editor

416 pages