The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt

domestic sanctum, the place of safety, where all good people live? The house.
    The Road Hill murder initiated what Wilkie Collins called “a detective fever” in England and elsewhere. The Moonstone (1868) was full of facts gleaned from the Road Hill case, though Collins watered down his story, substituting a jewel thief for a murderer. People became enthralled with the pure puzzles of murder cases, perhaps because they proved to be so close to home, and all the fictional cases that followed (Marple, Holmes, and the others) had Road Hill as their point of departure. Whicher himself gave birth to the laconic, ordinary-seeming detective—Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, Chandler’s Marlowe—whom no one notices until it is too late.
    Still, the most lasting legacy of the case was the house. It constituted a world of close relationships in which anything could happen, especially something terrible, in close quarters. See the country house in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and the governess and the impassive children imprisoned within. See it there at dusk, looming on a hill, its windows blazing, the great front door shut tight. Black clouds settle over the fields behind the gabled roof of the silent house.
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    Y OU ASK ABOUT the dog? “Asta!” Myrna Loy’s sexy-patrician voice admonishing the famous terrier of Nick and Nora Charles. Movie audiences first met Asta when he was stretching his leash taut, dragging Mrs. Charles into a chichi bar, where Mr. Charles, William Powell, was setting up a row of dry martinis. The dog appeared in subsequent Thin Man movies, generally playing more cute than heroic, though he barked to protect the Charles’s baby in one of the films. Few detectives have dogs. Philo Vance, a breeder of Scottish terriers, owned a Scotty named MacTavish in The Kennel Murder Case, in which another dog is instrumental in identifying the killer. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser has a German shorthaired pointer named Pearl. In fact, he owned a string of Pearls, along with a miniature bull terrier named Rosie. James Garner played a college cop in a movie about Dobermans trained as murderers— They Also Kill Their Masters. The dog is the chief suspect in a book by Clea Simon called Dogs Don’t Lie, described as a “pet noir.” Watson had a dog, unmemorably. So did Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, but he never would have kept him as a pet. And in the story “Silver Blaze” there was the mystery of the dog that did not bark. Toby is a dog employed by Sherlock Holmes, belonging to a Mr. Sherman, introduced in The Sign of Four and described by Watson as an “ugly long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait.” Holmes said he would “rather have Toby’s help than that of the whole detective force in London,” which, as every Baker Street Irregular knows, isn’t much of a compliment.
    As a boy detective, I had the family Maltese, Ami (pronouned aah-mee ), and named for amyloidosis, a disease that attacks the heart or the spleen, on which my father was doing research. The dog died before my career in detection gained full throttle. When the kids were small, Ginny and I acquired Chloe, a frenetic cairn who was so wound up, she would race back and forth nonstop on the shelf behind the backseat of the car when we took her with us on drives. It was safer to keep her in the car than let her stay at home, where she snacked on the legs of the piano. Since Chloe was a purebred, the American Kennel Club sent a form, asking us to register her more formal name. I filled out “Chlorox Bleachman,” which the AKC rejected. Her successor, Hector, a Westie, whom we got for our youngest son, John, in the 1990s, had a name that leaned toward detection, but he was more attuned to biting the hands that fed him.
    Edward Arnold played a blind detective in Eyes in