Three Bags Full
by Leonie Swann
translated by Anthea Bell 352pp, Doubleday, £12.99
What's new, Scooby Doo? Readers of comic books and fans of children's television and literature have long been familiar with the type and the trope of the animal detective, or the animal as detective's helpmeet: the late, lamented Zoo Crew, for example; Bobo the Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog of DC Comics' Bureau of Amplified Animals; the irritatingly smug and problem-solving Babe from the books by Dick King-Smith; and of course cartoon-perennial Scooby himself.
There has, though, been a gap in the market, or the hedge, for an adult animal detective novel, a gap which the German author Leonie Swann has successfully gnawed and wriggled her way through with her debut novel Three Bags Full, an actual and proverbial left-field international bestseller in which a flock of rare-breed sheep living in a place called Glennkill in Ireland set about solving the mystery of the death of their shepherd, George, who has been found with a spade through him.
Animal tales in English literature tend towards either the whimsical or the fabular, with the work of Richard Adams, Kenneth Grahame and EB White all herded together in one stall, and Orwell's Animal Farm on its own in another. In continental European literature in general, however, and in German literature in particular, there is a long tradition of rather more macabre and surreal beastly goings-on. It is perhaps no coincidence that Swann's translator, Anthea Bell, is the translator also of ETA Hoffmann's mind-boggling classic The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1819), a book so strange that it makes The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy seem like standard chickenfeed.
The crime-fighting sheep in Three Bags Full derive their particular genius from George the shepherd having read to them every evening - mostly romantic fiction featuring red-haired women called Pamela, a genre which the sheep naturally refer to as "Pamelas", a phrase clearly worth stealing for one's own. Swann weights and freights her novel with a whole load of literary allusions, cross-references and in-jokes, which, like pets, are as delightful as they are annoying. The sheep, for example, sport names like Melmoth, Cordelia, Mopple the Whale, Zora, Rameses, and Miss Maple, "quite possibly the cleverest sheep in the whole world". The black ram is Othello and there is also a donkey called Satan.
With sheep as detectives Swann solves one of the major problems in crime fiction, which is how to avoid the stereotypical jaded, cynical, alcoholic deadbeat gumshoe with relationship problems. Swann's sheep are as sober as judges and work out the crime from first principles. Their suspects include George's estranged wife; his lover; the tormented Bible-bashing Beth; Ham the butcher; and a rival shepherd called Gabriel who only speaks to his sheep in Irish. They do not proceed via incredible deductive leaps or with the invaluable assistance of a maverick pathologist. As befits ruminants, they ruminate: "'We must find out what sort of story this is,' said Cordelia. The others looked at her curiously. 'I mean, every story is about different things,' Cordelia explained patiently. 'The Pamela novels are about passion and Pamelas. The fairy tale is about magic. The book about the diseases of the sheep is about the diseases of the sheep. The detective story was about clues. Once we know what sort of a story this is we'll know what to look out for.'"
The denouement occurs at Glennkill's Smartest Sheep competition, in a scene reminiscent of something from Father Ted. The English, according to Brecht, "have long dreaded German art (literature, painting and music) as sure to be dreadfully ponderous, slow, involved and pedestrian". Three Bags Full is ponderous, slow, involved and pedestrian, but it is also genuinely odd and affecting, and without a doubt the best sheep detective novel you're going to read this year.
· Ian Sansom's Mr Dixon Disappears (Harper Perennial) is published next month