The cart and the horse…

I never could decipher the adage “Don’t put the cart before the horse” to my satisfaction. That frustration was partial motivation for writing “The Case of the Carriageless Horse,” Detective Castilblanco’s first case as a homicide detective—the story appears in the collection World Enough and Crime. The conundrum: Why would anyone want a horse if s/he didn’t already own a cart? Maybe the implication is that a horse has a lot more uses than just dragging a cart around? That’s true, but it begs...