Murder, She Barked

            A recent post here on SleuthSayers was a paean to the significance of cars in mystery writing.  I admit the connection was a bit thin, but I’m on much firmer ground with this topic, the importance of dogs. 

            When I was trying to get my first novel published, I struggled with a few key plot points, until I got an actual dog of my own, and all was solved.  I simply wrote him into the book and everything fell into place.     

            When my son was a little kid he had an imaginary friend named Eddie Van Halen. 

Samuel Beckett and what's his name

This is inscrutable, I know, but it seemed right to give my fictitious dog the same name.  Eddie became the most popular character in the books, to which I owe his inspiration, the aforementioned actual dog we named Samuel Beckett.  Sam was a Wheaton Terrier, and everyone who knew him claimed he wasn’t a real dog, but some other version of cognitive being.  One of my wife’s friends said we shouldn’t worry about leaving him home alone.

“He’s busy working on a screenplay.”

Dog people know what I mean by this.  Every once in a while, an exceptional one trots into view.  Aware, but peripherally involved.  More perceptive than their human companions, yet challenged in conveying their thoughts and feelings.  Thus they become perfect foils in crime stories.  And even if they’re just amusing side characters, or comic relief, like Myrna Loy and William Powell’s Asta, worth the price of entry.  There are so many examples in the genre of sidekick dogs, heroic dogs, villainous dogs (The Hound of the Baskervilles comes to mind), dogs solving crimes, etc., that there’s no point in mentioning any here (this is what Google is for).  We all have our favorites. 

For a writer, dogs have limitless utility.  Sam kept me company when I wrote on the front porch, on the ferry, or in the cockpit of a sailboat, at any number of household workstations and never once asked to review the work.  He defended me from intruders ringing the doorbell, squirrels, waterfowl, and other passing dogs, took me on walks when the writing seemed to stall, followed me on coffee and pee breaks, waiting patiently for me to get my ass back in the chair. 

Robert B. Parker and Pearl

I often point out that you don’t have to invent characters, you just have to hang around the Village of Southampton and talk to people.  That’s where virtually all mine were born.  This task is immensely facilitated by having a dog, especially one as handsome and engaging as the existentialist Beckett.  By the same token, his fictional counterpart Eddie Van Halen was merely a close description of Sam himself. 

Sam liked his routines, Lord knows. But he also loved to mix things up, in a way far more reminiscent of a practical joker than a habituated, monotony-loving house pet.  I’d heard him howl exactly twice, both times on a corner in Southampton as a fire truck passed by with its siren blaring. He stuck his head out the window of a moving car exactly once, for reasons we both tried to figure out.  A dog who’d shown nothing but distain for conventional chew toys, suddenly became enamored with a polyester possum and spent the greater part of Christmas morning eviscerating the poor thing. 

Sometimes, very infrequently, he’d walk up to me, look me in the eye, and issue one, loud, imperious bark.  I’d say, “What!?”  He’d bark again, and then walk away, disgusted.  I know these exchanges meant something to him, but I’ll be damned if I knew what they were.

However, I was way ahead on the deal.  I got to have a character I could switch over to whenever imaginative flagged, who was simply the transposition of my day-to-day experience, whose only compensation was a concentrated scratching around the ears, a walk into town and an occasional cigar.

Asta