In literary circles, insofar as such still exist, for reasons I have never been able to grasp, I’ve often encountered disdain for “series” fiction of the kind particularly common in crime fiction and, to a lesser degree, science fiction. Of course, if you write a lot of books — one a year, perhaps, or thereabouts — over a stretch of time, featuring mostly the same principal character(s), often in the same setting, it’s easy to fall into bad habits. But that’s also true for writers of many different varieties. Several high-profile names spring immediately to mind. Between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s, one of the best American writers of the second half of the 20th century, Ross Macdonald, wrote 18 novels narrated by private eye Lew Archer. All of them are good, repaying a reader’s attention even on second, third, or fifth readings. P.D. James’s hand did not lose its cunning between 1962, when she introduced her Scotland Yard detective, Adam Dalgliesh, and 2008, when the last of her 14 Dalgliesh novels was published.
Sometimes, I’ll acknowledge, I grow weary after following a series for years. When Alexander McCall Smith began writing about the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, my wife, Wendy, and I were both fans — we enjoyed the audiobook versions as well. Alas, around the 10th novel in the sequence, we dropped out. But plenty of readers have stayed for the long haul — the 25th book in the series, The Great Hippopotamus Hotel, is coming in October.
Among current contenders, one of my favorites is the Chet & Bernie series, written by Spencer Quinn. When Dog on It, the first book in the sequence, was published in 2009, I learned that the author’s name was a pseudonym for Peter Abrahams, who had written many novels under his own name and was among my favorite contemporary writers. His tales of crime and suspense, often animated by dark humor, were exceedingly wide-ranging. I never knew where his restless intelligence was going to take him next. And speaking of dark humor, if you are a lifelong baseball fan, as I am, you should know that Abrahams’s The Fan is, in my judgment, one of the 10 best baseball novels ever.
Wendy and I are not in the least anti-dog , but we’ve always been cat people , and had I not known that “Quinn” was Abrahams, I would never have picked up the book. As it happened, I was enchanted. I read the first couple of pages aloud to Wendy that night, and she loved Chet’s voice too: Chet, a dog, is the narrator. He and Bernie Little together make up the Little Detective Agency, based in Arizona .
Their latest adventure, recounted in A Farewell to Arfs, is their 15th, but it betrays no sense, such as I have sometimes experienced when reading a book in a long-running series, that the author is making a mighty effort to maintain his own interest in the story. On the contrary: The contagious zest that animated the very first book in the series, immediately drawing me in, continues unabated here. Part of the appeal, from the outset, is the way these books do several things at once. The premise of a story narrated by a dog is funny, though some people find it annoyingly “cute” and simply can’t get into the books. That’s fine! Let a thousand flowers bloom. Some fellow fiction readers to whom I’ve praised the series have asked me, eyebrows raised, “A talking dog?” No, I have duly explained. Chet is emphatically not a talking dog. He is rather a narrating dog, something entirely different.
Let’s go back for a moment to Macdonald’s novels. They are narrated in the first person by Lew Archer, the private eye, a selection of whose many “cases” make up the substance of those 18 novels I mentioned. We don’t typically think about what that means, so familiar is the convention of the first-person narrator. He’s not “talking” to us. He’s not writing an account of the case of The Zebra-Striped Hearse, say, in the manner of a memoir — a device used in some novels, especially older ones. But when Quinn has Chet, the dog, telling the story of the case at hand, we are prompted to think about this narrative convention. You could say, to borrow a term from the great Viktor Shklovsky, leader of the gang known as “the Russian Formalists,” that Quinn defamiliarizes the role of the narrator. And this is both funny, something every devoted reader of the Chet & Bernie series relishes, but also noteworthy for that subset of Quinn’s readers who are particularly interested in the art of fiction.
Here's Chet’s narrating voice in the very first paragraph of A Farewell to Arfs, which I’m quoting in its entirety: “Who wouldn’t love my job? You see new things every day! Here, for example, we had a perp clinging to a branch high up in a cottonwood tree. That wasn’t the new part. Please don’t get ahead of me — although that’s unlikely to happen, your foot speed and mine being ... very different, let’s leave it at that with no hurt feelings.”
Even from this very brief excerpt, you can pick up a lot about Chet as the narrator. He’s cheerful, for starters. That doesn’t mean he is always happy, of course — that would soon pall — but he’s upbeat by nature. We, meaning readers who enjoy his voice, who stick with his narratives feeling no sense of strain, admire his spirit; laugh, not harshly, at his foibles and misunderstandings, not the least of which are verbal; and are genuinely touched by his friendship with Bernie, who is a deeply appealing character in his own right.
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All is not sweetness and light here, though. On the contrary, Chet and Bernie inhabit the same old world you and I know firsthand. But whereas many highly praised crime novels are self-consciously “dark,” and, hence, ultimately boring, to me at least, A Farewell to Arfs, the very title of which dares you to condescend to it, and the rest of the books in the series give us light and darkness intermingled. At the heart of this latest book is AI's ability to wreak harm, a threat about which Quinn is all too persuasive, in case we were inclined to pooh-pooh such concerns: persuasive, but never preachy.
So check out this latest offering in the series. If you enjoy it, as I hope you will, spread the word, not least among your fiction-reading friends and acquaintances who are also dog lovers. Meanwhile, you can go back to the first book and start to catch up. You may find yourself reading the whole lot before the next book appears.
John Wilson is senior editor of the Marginalia Review of Books.
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