Can you imagine a dog as a master criminal? An assassin, a burglar, a schemer-in-chief? No, nor can I. As a killer, oh yes, as hunter of fox, dog of war, slavering bloodhound. But … sly? Unthinkable.
Since the beginnings of detective fiction (which I’m going to place ambiguously around 1800, but that’s another story) animals have figured extensively in tales of murder and mystery. And mostly they’ve been the animals that work most closely with humans: dogs and horses. We generally find them doing a lot of the legwork: Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog Toby is the apotheosis of this tradition. Watson describes him as an ‘ugly long haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait’ – but with the best nose in the business. Obviously, he’s on the side of law and order. The Victorians (or at least the sort who wrote best-selling stories) practically worshipped dogs for their ideal qualities of loyalty, courage, simplicity, and generally knowing their place: they didn’t want the vote or anything inconvenient like that. It’s no coincidence that the medieval Welsh legend of Gelert had such a revival in this era. It’s a tale that appear the world over: the story of the faithful hound wrongly slain by his master, who thinks the dog has attacked his baby when in fact he has defended it from a wolf. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the first murder mystery – one in which the human protagonist leaps to a tragically wrong conclusion. No Victorian would make the same mistake: they knew there was nothing so trustworthy as a dog.
Much more unusual is Josephine Tey’s horse Timber in her novel Brat Farrar – precisely because its character does not conform to this type. In fact, to call this horse unreliable is quite the understatement, and the result is uncanny and effective for this very reason: it subverts all our expectations of how a normally dependable animal should behave. I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers but really, Timber is one of the greatest animals in all of crime fiction.
For unpleasant reasons tangled up in empire and exoticisation, the writers of the nineteenth century in particular preferred to cast more outlandish animals (from a European perspective) in the role of villain. Edgar Allen Poe’s orangutan heads the field, while Conan Doyle weighs in with a whole menagerie, from a lion (or is it?) to a lion’s mane, via baboon, cheetah, snake and mongoose. Today, Leonora Nattrass is the great champion of unlikely animals in her tales of murder, giving us a rhinoceros, a bear cub, a parrot and, most memorably, a sapient hog. But once again, her main protagonist Laurence Jago spends much more time with his most faithful companion – his dog.
Dogs dogs dogs. There’s Agatha Christie’s Dumb Witness –huge letdown, the dog does almost nothing. On the other hand, a canine actually narrates Vee Walker’s recent French-set short story Nice Dog, and solves the mystery to boot: you can hear his tale brought beautifully to life by Paterson Joseph on BBC Sounds. I defy anyone to listen without a broad smile on their face. Besides the aforementioned Toby, we find two of all literature’s most celebrated dogs in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – the one that didn’t bark in the nighttime, and its nightmare opposite, the Hound of the Baskervilles. Which is where my new novel Helle’s Hound comes in. On one level it’s a deeply irreverent homage, even a rewrite, of Conan Doyle’s Gothic masterpiece. I’ve swapped the rugged marshes of windswept Victorian Dartmoor for the petty politics and fancy restaurants of twenty-first-century Bloomsbury, but all the plot essentials are there, including one very large, very hungry hound: Mortimer, an Irish wolfhound.
But I wanted to do something new with the story. And I kept coming back to those Victorian truisms: that dogs – especially big, brave dogs – are intrinsically and entirely faithful, reliable, a source of friendship and security. The thing is, they sort of are. I return you to paragraph one: dogs can’t be master criminals. But what if there were a way to take those very qualities of dependability, and somehow subvert them? Wouldn’t that be both an interesting challenge, and a deeply disquieting moral for a story? I really, really can’t say any more about where my line of thinking went – except that I promise it’s very much worth your while to find out. You may never look at a dog in quite the same way again.
A dead art historian. Cold War skulduggery. A reluctant Danish sleuth. And an extremely hungry dog. Dame Charlotte Lazerton - eminent art historian and mentor of Danish academic Torben Helle - is dead. And to make things worse, she was found partially eaten by her Irish wolfhound, Mortimer. While the police believe that she died of natural causes, Torben becomes convinced that Charlotte was murdered, although as usual no one pays any attention to him. That is, until he gains the confidence of a policeman who has watched too many Nordic Noir television shows and is ready to listen to any Scandinavian in a fetching woolly jumper. Aided by his old friend Leyla, Torben soon realises that there are plenty of people who might have wanted Dame Charlotte dead, from her competitors for a prestigious academic presidency to old enemies from her time in intelligence during the Cold War. One thing is for sure: Torben Helle is woefully unqualified to catch a killer, and the killer knows it...
More information about the author can be found on his website. He can also be found on X oskarcoxjensen
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