Spencer Quinn. Up on the Woof Top. Forge, 2023.

After some patient waiting, we finally got a chance to read the latest Chet and Bernie mystery from a local library. Any readers of our blog should note by now that we are fans. Up on the Woof Top does not disappoint.

Readers can probably tell by the title that this mystery is set at Christmastime. Bernie Little, the detective, and Chet, our canine narrator, happen to attend a book signing by Dame Ariadne Castle. Miss Castle may be based on Donna Andrews or David Rosenfelt with some Dame Agatha Christie. She has made a successful career writing Christmas mysteries. In fact, her latest one is number 99 in the series. As can be told from her title, she is British, but she spends about half the year in the United States at a ranch in the Colorado Rockies that is a kind of Santa’s village she calls Kringle Ranch. She has a number of lodges or chalets there and keeps it decorated for Christmas year-round. She also has nine reindeer on the premises.

Chet makes an impression on her at the book signing, so when one of her reindeer is missing, she contacts the Little Detective Agency for help. Like other writers who have become institutions, she has a staff who also live on the premises including Chaz LeWitte and Georgette Eliot. If Georgette’s name sounds suspiciously like a certain nineteenth-century English author, I suspect that is no coincidence. The lodge Chet and Bernie stay in at the ranch is called the Cratchit House. There are other characters named Wordsworth, Missy Havisham, Sikes, and Pelgotty (Peggotty?), and some of the action takes place on Mt. Murdstone.

They arrive at Kringle Ranch in something like the fifth Porsche that Bernie has owned (we lost track, they keep crashing). Not only is the reindeer gone, but soon Chaz is missing as well. Chet and Bernie, thanks in part to Chet’s nose, do find Chaz—unconscious at the bottom of a cliff known as Devil’s Purse. As Bernie does some more sleuthing, we learn that some thirty or forty years ago Miss Castle’s fiancé was murdered and his body discovered at the same location.

The story gets interesting and complicated. Miss Castle is also having a struggle with writer’s block. She usually cranks out three or four novels a year, now she is stuck. She thinks it might because of the missing reindeer. Chet and Bernie will indeed crack the cases of both Chaz and the deer as told by Chet’s usual hilarious narrative style. Oh, and it looks like Bernie is getting serious about his latest girlfriend, Weatherly.

I have one quibble with this novel. I am beginning to see a pattern among the perpetrators in some of the recent Chet and Bernie stories. Mr. Quinn seems to have fallen into a kind of Hollywood stereotyping trap. As soon as I first read about one of the people in the story, I said to myself, if Quinn is following that stereotype I have noted in his recent books, this person is going to be the criminal. Sadly, I was right. Sad, not because it was too easy for Bernie to solve—it wasn’t—but because of the Hollywood typing convention. Next time, surprise us!