This crime thriller takes a few uncommon approaches, firstly telling the story by way of two alternating viewpoints: these of a precocious and strong-willed, roller-blading, 14-year-old woman looking for her misplaced canine, and a hard-drinking, middle-aged shamus with hypertension and a dislike for precocious teenagers. Secondly – you might need guessed – it doesn’t take itself too critically.
Dick Lochte affords a Preface to arrange these rudiments – that two concerned events have penned separate first-person accounts of the occasions round a collection of brutal murders in California in summer season 1982. Ordinarily these manuscripts would have resulted in two competing volumes, he says, however then provides that publishing could be as shocking and lethal because the business of homicide.
The two texts, “Dog Days” by the woman, Serendipity Renn Dahlquist, and “Die Like a Dog” by the gumshoe, Leo G. Bloodworth, had been with separate publishing homes however immediately grew to become owned by the identical firm because of an sudden merger. The end result, Lochte continues, was that they had been mixed into one quantity, with pointless repetition deleted.
The authors had been displeased, Dahlquist calling the end result “excessive and repressive editorial meddling”, and Bloodworth blasting a “first-class hatchet job”. And right here’s the rub, Lochte sums up: “Regardless, both were eager to see their maiden efforts in print, and finally they came to understand that first novelists should never expect to find things going entirely their way.”
“Sleeping Dog” was Lochte’s first guide, in 1985, so plainly, studying between the traces, his fictitious Preface was probably a artful method of getting a little bit of a dig on the expense of publishers generally, presumably drawing upon some disheartening expertise of his personal – reminiscent of rejection slips? – when nonetheless an unpublished creator.
Ultimately, it appears to be a case of him having the proverbial final giggle, although, as a result of if accolades imply something, it’s of observe that “Sleeping Dog” went on to change into extremely acclaimed. It was nominated for the Edgar, Shamus and Anthony Awards and took home the Nero Wolfe Award, all offered for thriller writing. The New York Times named it a “Notable Book of the Year”, and it was chosen by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association of America in 2000 as one of many 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century.
And Lochte later wrote “Laughing Dog” (1988), Lucky Dog and Other Tales of Mystery” (2000), “Rappin’ Dog” (2014), “Diamond Dog” (2014), “Mad Dog” (2017) and “Devil Dog” (2017). A case of each canine having its day, ultimately?
The comedy-noir thriller “Sleeping Dog”, then, launched the studying public to the quirky Los Angeles writing/sleuthing crew of Bloodworth and Dahlquist, the hard-drinking veteran non-public investigator changing into a reluctant semi-mentor to the intense woman looking for her kidnapped canine Groucho, to not point out looking for her absentee and footloose mom, Faith.
The two odd-couple narrators are drawn right into a story of a number of homicide, and their hunt for the pooch and the Mum leads them throughout a lot of California with its exotic-sounding locales, cities with names reminiscent of Zamora, Copa de Oro and Colusa. Serendipity is sensible effectively past her fourteen and three-quarters years, and as neither of her mother and father is within the image, she lives in L.A. along with her grandmother, a well-known day-time tv cleaning soap opera star. Groucho, a bull terrier, is her treasured companion, a present from her late father 13 years earlier. The canine is the dearest factor she possesses and the final hyperlink to Dad earlier than he went off to fulfill his destiny within the seemingly mindless Vietnam War.
Serendipity is devastated when she returns home one afternoon to search out the entrance door standing open and Groucho gone. She seeks police assist however to no avail. “Well, honey, we got eighty-seven murders on the books, sixty-eight muggings and rapes, upwards of one hundred and thirty b-and-e’s,” she is advised. “So I wanna be straight with you. Unless your dog happens to bite some traffic cop on the butt, he’s gonna stay missing.”
Rather, a detective refers her to non-public investigator Leo “the Bloodhound” Bloodworth, who has a little bit of a fame for locating something – males, ladies, children on dope who don’t need to be discovered. So Serendipity straps on her skates and heads over to his workplace in Downtown L.A.
But he has zero tolerance for teenagers and even much less curiosity to find Groucho. “Well, Miss Dahlquist. I sort of specialize in missing humans. Bail jumpers. Skip artists. The odd runaway. I can put myself into their skins, try to figure out where they’re headed. Dogs, I just don’t know.”
When the woman refuses to take no for a solution, Bloodworth’s workplace mate, one other P.I., Roy Kaspar, affords to assist. He takes a retainer, drives the woman home and appears over the scene. He guarantees to report again in three days however doesn’t, and when Serendipity tracks down Bloodworth in a sleazy bar, they go searching for Kaspar, solely to search out him snuffed, garroted.
It seems that the homicide and the disappearance of Groucho are almost definitely associated. Serendipity and Bloodworth wind up joined on the hip, on the highway and as much as their necks in hassle with a very vicious bunch, one of many largest, and most brutal, organised crime households within the Mexican Mafia. Welcome to the darkish underworld of sunny California, with Mum combined up with some lowlife within the nasty undercover “sport” of canine combating.
“Sleeping Dog” is an extended guide, simply shy of 350 pages. The plot will get harder to observe because the stiffs and subterfuges mount up. There are beatings, kidnapping and extortion however the aforementioned quotes point out the sunshine contact. There are neat turns of phrase – as Serendipity tells Bloodworth: “I guess you’ve spent a good deal of your life on the hunt, accompanied only by your metal steed, traveling vast landscapes on a seemingly everlasting crusade.” He replies: “I don’t know as I’d put it exactly it that way, kid. But I do spend a lot of time on the road.”
And humour. While they’re on the highway, she tells him he’s forgotten his seat belt. “I don’t use a seat belt, kid. Danger is my business.”
Lochte, is a local of New Orleans, Louisiana, and now lives in Southern California. This is a guide with an American slant: the night smog of the Valley and the traffic-clogged L.A. freeways. Chevys and Lincolns and Pontiacs. Silver Lake and Gramercy Place and Beverly Hills.
Plus the cultural references are enjoyable: “… locked tighter than Gene Autrey’s pants.” Humphrey Bogart and “In a Lonely Place”, the Marx Brothers, Cab Calloway and “Minnie the Moocher”, bandleader Xavier Cugat, “Two pale-skinned guys with dark sunglasses and loud sport shirts were trying to pass for Robert de Niro… ” “He [a writer-director-producer] makes me mourn for Harry Cohen.” “[Take a pill] And wind up like Bela Lugosi?”
Serendipity and Bloodworth is probably not Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson or Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin however they’re intriguing and amusing characters. The dialogue between them is wise and Lochte’s dual-narrative is a intelligent conceit, all including as much as an entertainingly bloody romp.
