A Dog About Town

Posted on Jan 8, 2008
By Julia Szabo

by J.F. Englert

Bantam, 271 pages, $6.99

Available on Amazon.com

It's elementary: The mystery genre known as the "cozy" is dominated by cats, whether they're incidental characters, feline detectives, or - in the case of Rita Mae Brown and her partner in crime, Sneaky Pie Brown - co-authors. Exhibit A: the most recent cat cozy, Cries and Whiskers by Clea Simon.

Dogs are hardly clueless, so dog lovers would agree it's high time for more canines in the cozy canon. How refreshing, then, that J.F. Englert gives a dog a mystery bone of his own. Not just any dog, but a cultured urban hound: a black lab named Randolph with a keen analytical mind and a taste for poetry (he's versed in Dante, Shakespeare, and Auden).

Sounds like someone you've encountered before? It's no accident that Randolph appears on the book's cover sporting a smoking jacket and puffing a pipe; he's a canine Sherlock Holmes, and he knows it. The fictional sleuth immortalized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, subject of a new biography, is often compared favorably to a dog; Englert's Randolph is the missing link in the evolution of the inspector hound, transplanted to present-day New York City.

Of course, being a brilliant detective trapped in a dog's body, Randolph must depend on a sidekick of lesser intelligence: a neurotic human named Harry who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The dog must keep Harry on a short leash as he becomes involved with some occultists, one of whom turns out to be a killer. Fortunately, in addition to his other Holmesian traits, Randolph has a nose for crime as well as a sixth sense for people's emotional states.

Snickering in recognition of spot-on details involving dog-run politics and overindulged pets (Randolph is chronically overweight thanks to a lamentable diet of Chinese takeout), readers will willingly suspend belief when Randolph communicates with Harry ... by arranging the letters of Alpha-Bits cereal with his nose.