Ovine Sleuths

Few detectives are as unusual as those in this novel. They work as a team but their leader is most definitely the black sheep of the group. To be precise, a black Hebridean four-horned ram called Othello.

The flock of sheep in the Irish pasture is uneasy and anxious due to the following situation:

The shepherd was lying in the green Irish grass beside the hay barn [..] He didn’t move. A single crow had settled on his woolly Norwegian sweater and was studying his internal arrangements with professional interest.

What happened to their shepherd George, who used to read to them each day, bring them hay and concentrated food as needed, and lived among them in his caravan (RV, for Americans)? Almost immediately there are hints that things may not have been quite as wholesome as all that. After some discussion about whether George had indeed been a good shepherd

they agreed that a good shepherd was one who never docked the lambs’ tails; didn’t keep a sheepdog; provided good fodder and plenty of it, particularly bread and sugar, but healthy things too like green stuff; [..] and who clothed himself entirely in the products of his own flock, for instance an all-in-one suit made of spun sheep’s wool, which would look really good, almost as if he were a sheep himself.

Sadly, George fails on at least 2 of those counts. Regardless, the flock decide to solve his murder. Apart from Othello, the team includes Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glenkill and perhaps even the world; Zora, a Blackface sheep with a good head for heights, and Mopple the Whale, a Merino ‘meat breed’ ram who is their ‘memory sheep’ (once he has seen something he never forgets it).

One might expect a novel about a flock of sheep to be simply charming, and indeed it is, but at the same time it is darker than expected. The butcher comes to see the body (“Even the scent of him was enough to make any sheep go weak at the knees”) and threatens Lily, the young woman who used to visit George, who appears to be estranged from his wife Kate. Othello’s past is full of animal cruelty in a circus and a dogfighting ring. The village men used to call George the Goblin King, and he might have been involved in the drug trade with some rather unsavory associates. Even the sheep are not always kind or gentle: there is a “winter lamb”, born out of season, who is largely shunned by the others.

The novel is full of passages that make one chuckle out loud.

“Grass,” said Zora. “[..] They were looking for grass.”

That seemed to the sheep too sensible. Humans didn’t normally have such reasonable aims.

The inner monologues are completely in character, as you see above.

[The man]’s heart was beating like a sheep’s when it has to swallow its calcium tablet.

Mopple grazed past them again, beaming with contentment, living proof of the fact that earthly happiness existed and could be obtained by very simple means.

Sir Ritchfield, their lead ram, had made a new rule. “No sheep may leave the flock,” he said to anyone who would listen, “unless that sheep comes back again.”

I was surprised to discover that this novel is translated from German; it seems so completely an English novel that the translator has clearly done a very good job.

This is not the kind of novel where all the threads are tied up neatly at the end. The winter lamb remains on the fringes of the flock, alone, and with its backstory never fully explained. There are hints of magic, which might be ovine myths or misunderstood reality. The cause of George’s death is discovered, but there are aspects of it which remain unclear to this reader.

But the team is remarkable. Figuring out the mystery is largely

a question of woolpower, like everything in a sheep’s life.

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