Growing up in the Amish area of Pennsylvania has given Encinitas resident Ron Yeakley, 71, an unusual perspective on the conflicts and paradoxes of the Amish culture.

The experience also afforded him a wealth of material from which to draw in the writing of his first self-published murder mystery, "Death Takes a Buggy Ride" ($17.95, iUniverse).

"My grandparents were tenant farmers and spoke Pennsylvania Dutch," said Yeakley, who grew up in Myerstown, Penn. "My parents spoke it, and I basically picked it up in the general store where we had a lot of Amish and Mennonite customers.

"I knew the idiom but I still had to research some of the customs." he continued. "Like rumspringa -- that means "running around" in Pennsylvania Dutch. When the Amish are 16, they are given free rein to drive cars, experiment with alcohol, drugs and sex -- well, tame sex."

Yeakley's main character is Pennsylvania State Trooper John Lapp, who left the Amish faith 15 years earlier. When an Amish man, Jacob Stoltzfus, is murdered, Lapp is called to investigate the murder, because he grew up with Stoltzfus and was once in love with the victim's widow.

Yeakley said he started the novel about four years ago when he attended the Southern California Writers Conference in San Diego and paid for an appointment with an agent, whose first question to him was, "Could this is be a series?"

So he set about outlining the novel, writing up character descriptions and pitching queries to agents. His previous experience in the arts came from working in Hollywood as a cameraman and in network promotion. He also worked in university development at the University of Southern California, where he produced a documentary on teenagers for ABC.

In the '60s, while working at Disneyland as the manager of advertising, he said, he wrote a number of screenplays, three of which were optioned but never produced, and a number of novels. One, "Sunshine Kid," was about a young boy abandoned at a truck stop during the Depression. Another, "Undertow," was a mystery about a small-town policeman.

But even for someone with Ron Yeakley's extensive writing experience, it was not an easy thing to find an agent and publisher for his recently released mystery.

"Someone suggested I self-publish it," Yeakley said. He added that he hopes it will show agents and publishers he is capable of producing a full-length piece of fiction. "I look at this as my calling card."

Contact staff writer Ruth Marvin Webster at (760) 740-3527 or rwebster@nctimes.com.