Off duty, on the sandstone, with the whole beat downwind. Twelve days of work start and end here.
The patch
The patch is the whole of Bondi, taken one day and one doorway at a time. When Dot is called away she hands Blue over — to the dog-walker, to the library, to the surf club, to the ballet studio — and each short is one of those days from the far end of the lead.
It is a Bondi rendered as layers of smell rather than a street map: a building that smells of forty years, antiseptic gone soft underneath and sea-damp through everything; the rate at which a person's scent thins as she walks to the tram stop, two houses to a ribbon, three to a thread. Same suburb as every other book on the shelf. Entirely different instrument.
The set
- The Wagging Tail — a converted vet's rooms, six boarding kennels down one corridor, and a wolfhound asleep in the best patch of sun.
- The library — quiet, warm, wooden, and a whippet already holding the only chair worth having.
- The surf club — rope, wax, salt and men who move fast without warning; the loudest place in the shorts and the easiest to read.
- The ballet school — rosin, floor polish and a red setter with no discipline whatsoever. Blue does not approve and cannot look away.
- The Pavilion — tea urn, ballroom, corridors, and more people in one building than a dog can hold in his head at once.
- The Easter Show — the year's hardest day of work: animals, food, sawdust, crowds, and one thread of wrong somewhere in all of it.
- The tram — iron, brake dust and a floor that hums. A dog on a tram learns the whole route runs past everybody he knows.
The surf-club day, from the only sensible vantage. Blue does not swim if he can supervise instead.
The cast
No roster sheet for this one yet — the shorts borrow their casts from the series they visit, and those have their own. In brief:
- Blue — an Australian Terrier, about five, James's pup and now Dot's. War-trained, off lead, and quietly the most competent soul on the beach. Perfume is a lie. Powder is a person who wants to be clean without being wet.
- Dot Campbell — the owner, and mostly away. Every short begins with her hand leaving his head and the second ring of a brass bell.
- The hosts — Kit and Hector at the dog-walking rooms, Connie and Hal at the library, Siobhan and Rory at the studio, Dru and Argus on the headland — each of them somebody else's protagonist, seen here from about knee height.
- The dogs — the real cast. A cocker spaniel who has been telling someone something for three days and has not been heard is, in these stories, the whole plot.
Every short begins on a threshold that is not his, working out what the building is before deciding anything about the people in it.
The rhythm
Third person, close on Blue, about nine thousand words a time. No murder and no body: the trouble is a person in difficulty somewhere off the page, and Blue gets to it first because he can smell it and nobody else can. There is no closed circle, no interrogation and no police — just a dog who knows, cannot say, and works out what to do instead. Fair play is kept by giving the reader every scent he catches.
The question the series asks
What does a good dog do when he knows something and has no words?
Reading order
Twelve standalone shorts — dip in anywhere. They were written as a tour, so reading them in order walks you through the whole of Bondi, and the last one goes home. These are free to the mailing list rather than sold.
- Blue at the Wagging Tail — start here. Six kennels, one spaniel, and a smell three days deep.
- Blue and the Librarian
- Blue at the Surf Club
- Blue and the Ballet School
- Blue at the Pavilion
- Blue and the Codebreaker
- Blue and the Christmas Hamper
- Blue at the Easter Show
- Blue and the Tram
- Blue Nudges a Romance
- Blue Saves the Carnival
- Blue Comes Home — the last one, and the only one that is.