PS Cottier

The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin has attracted some thoughtful and positive reviews.

Firstly at Compulsive Reader, where Magdalena Ball wrote the first review of the book. She calls it ‘quirky and strangely haunting’. Secondly, at The Australian. This one is behind a paywall, but the reviewer, Jack Marx, uses phrases like ‘so unusually brilliant’ and states that ‘There is not a bad chapter in The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, and a delight of some sort – usually many – on every page.’ It’s enough to make an author blush! Seriously.

In other news, a poem I entered in The Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing was commended, which is great. I am working on a short manuscript about dogs, and the poem was about sniffer dogs. You can read the winners here. And here is my poem. And a dog.

Ardent nose

We sniff our way through violence,
the dropped hat or jeans removed, 
splatters on grass, the blood-crumbs, 
we call them among ourselves.
Some of us disinter computers containing
hidden quests for poisonous feasts. 
Here a soupçon of arsenic, there
a sprinkle of fentanyl, adding spice,
designed to remove a troublesome life.
Recipes rarely handed down.

Others detect stashes of drugs, 
or cash converted from same,
secreted behind hasty plaster walls.
Our indications cause such a havoc
of mattocks, a stucco snowstorm.
We are taken outside, in case we eat 
those attractive disentombed baggies
neatly counted into incriminating piles,
photographed and fussed over.

We’d rather be out after truffles,
chase sticks and toys, roll in dung,
but we sense delight when we unearth
what your dodgy senses cannot catch.
Your poor excuses for olfaction
are unable to detect screams of scent
slapping the face of the air.
My friend, the springer spaniel,
trained from a floppy ball of pup,
all long hair, tongue and wag, 
tastes the cadaver air, helps reveal
the buried answer to a search —
for don’t all dogs love bones?

Long before your Poirots or Bosches,
your Holmes after that fog-bound hound,
we sleuths found what you could not find,
found the worst of humankind.

We barked, or sat, and simply waited
for you to finally catch us up.

PS Cottier

Note: The word sleuth derives from slough dog or sleuth-hound, a bloodhound once found in Scotland.