It was a most unusual drawing. It was a portrait, apparently of a dog, drawn by a street artist in Algiers. It was supposed to be a brief portrait of the person who was sitting for the artist - in this case, a caricature of Doctor Hugh Challoner, who had encountered the artist, Aubrey Highton, while on vacation in Algiers. What made the portrait so unusual was that the image of the dog appeared to be laughing. At the artist? At Dr. Challoner? It's hard to be sure.
And Dr. Challoner – who appeared to be both angry and more than a little upset by the strange portrait – nevertheless agrees to help Highton find a job as a commercial artist back home in England. It isn’t long before Dr. Challoner is home in the town of Sturton Lacy, and Highton is living in a hotel very close to the doctor’s office.
And the next time we shall hear about Dr. Challoner, he is dead, his strangled body found in his own office in Sturton Lacy. When the body is found, police quickly find what appears to be a copy of that unusual caricature.
Is there a connection here? You'll find out in The Laughing Dog, a 1948 mystery by Francis Vivian. It's the subject of my audio review this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review (at no cost) by clicking here.
“Francis Vivian” was the pen name used by a British journalist named Arthur Ernest Ashley. As Vivian he wrote some 18 mysteries, about half of which featured Detective Inspector Gordon Knollis as the primary investigator of the mystery. In The Laughing Dog, Inspector Knollis is sent by Scotland Yard to look into the peculiar murder of Doctor Challoner. There are several points of interest: first, there would seem to be only a small number of people who could have committed the murder – yet among those people, it would appear that none could have had anything like an adequate motive for murder. It is in the course of Knollis's investigation that they discover the caricature of the laughing dog, found in a diary kept by Doctor Challoner. But if this is a clue…a clue against whom? The Laughing Dog provides us with a well-told tale, with some nice twists along the way to a solution. I do think that you’ll enjoy it.
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