Reader reviews of The Three-Headed Dog

womanblur2leiterReviewers of The Three-Headed Dog have been showing they get it: The detective-narrator is a woman with a complicated and conflicted interior life. It’s about how migrants sneak across borders and how they get along. These are lives usually mentioned, if at all, under law-and-order headlines: people-smuggling, the underworld, human trafficking, crime. Or desperation, exploitation, abuse. It’s noir – maybe some kind of ‘crossover’.

I published this novel myself on Amazon. Many people still think bricks-and-mortar publishing houses filled with employees are necessary to prove books are real and good. My own history with these houses goes back to the 1970s, and I don’t agree. There is snobbism about self-publishing and prejudices against ebooks: I don’t have those; I’m pleased to be in charge.

What interests me are conversations with folks who read the book, whether they loved it or not. A few of them have left reviews on the book’s Amazon and Goodreads pages.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.38.48Hillerman, Mankell and Block: I could hardly be more pleased about the detective comparisons. But for a reader to compare Félix’s haunted interior life to Elena Ferrante really takes the cake. The detective’s ethical sense, how to weigh up conflicts, is for me an important element of noir, however terse. The private eye, unlike the cop, gets to decide what to do with being tied to laws or a strict code of behaviour (doing things ‘by the book’.)

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.29.59Interesting to see the world I write about as impenetrable and confirms it was right to write about it. I like dives, too. This is an excerpt from a longer review.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.43.23There is a mention of the word trafficking in the book, by a character who is neither stupid nor bad but simply parrots stereotypes presented in the media. The book is about people-smuggling or undocumented migrants.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.46.24This review and others like it mean a lot to me because it comes from someone open to learning about underground lives that exist at the edge of most people’s vision. Overhearing phone conversations on the bus or in the corner shop, most people find out something about undocumented migrants, but, given media disinterest or silence, never find out more.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.47.36When I read the comparison with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow – also known as Smilla’s Sense of Snow – I was happy. It’s one of very few novels I know in which imperialism plays a big part. Smilla is a half-Greenlander in Denmark, not an undocumented migrant, but as aware of two different worlds as anyone could possibly be. A book that couldn’t have been written by anyone else: What a compliment.

susiedogScreen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.39.24Gripping is a great tribute, and a few others have said the Dog is a page-turner (funny when swishing on a screen). They mean the reader is hooked on the story and wants to know what comes next. That’s not easy to achieve!

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Yes, there’ll be more. Working on it now. It starts in Spain and travels to England via Calais.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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