Nobody’s Poodle Amazon link
Nobody’s Poodle and Somebody’s Doodle has been written in collaboration with my husband Richard Attree.
Nobody’s Poodle is inspired by my work with the dog refuges and owning a rescue dog myself.
This short noveL is a wooftastic ‘tail’ about a lovable ex-pat pooch living in Tenerife. He writes, from a canine point of view of course, about settling down in a new country, coping with the cultural differences, and learning the language (although woof-speak is universal, mas o menos, there are still some differences which need to be understood, otherwise a dog can have muchos problemas with his furry Latin amigos).
The ex-pat / travel genre has been popularised by some very successful books, but until now man’s-best-friends’ take on it has been little explored. We’re familiar with “Driving over Lemons”, but there hasn’t been a ”Bouncing over Bones”. Most of Tenerife’s ex-pat Brits know and love Joe Cawley’s “More Ketchup than Salsa”, but we’ve all been waiting for ”More Saliva than Salsa”.
Nobody’s Poodle is much more than an ex-pat diary though. It’s a gripping story, with a plot that is the mutt’s nuts.
Our intrepid hero, Gizmo (or Snr Giz as he’s known locally and on Facebook) may be more street Doodle than swanky Poodle, but he’s very much his own dog. He’s all about standing up for the underdog, and it gets him into a fair few scrapes on the mean streets of Costa del Scorcio.
He’s also something of a canine philosopher, and along the way you’ll be learning a lot about their universe …
For instance, not many people know that dogs invented the idea of sharing information via a network (their ‘SmellNet’ pre-dates our internet by several millennia), along with on-line messaging (‘SmellMail’), social networking (‘SmellBook’), and wi-fi (‘Wiffy’).
Dogs realised a long time ago that time was more like a small round thing rather than a long thin thing. More like a dog chasing it’s own tail, rather than an endless piece of string, or an infinitely long ladder, or whatever else humans think it’s like.
Gizmo explains that dogs are like Zen Buddhist monks. They live in a present tense universe, they’re dogged, and they’re stoic. They accept what life throws at them, which is just as well considering some of the smelly stuff that gets thrown his way and just misses the fan.
Full of twists and turns, with a cast of wonderful woofers, and some beautiful illustrations, it will make you laugh and it will make you cry. Quite simply it’s the dog’s danglies of a book.
Somebody’s Doodle is a fast moving, heady mix of crime, humour, romance, and a few dogs. As it races towards the climax the human protagonists search for truth and reconciliation, and begin to glimpse what we can all learn from our canine friends.
When petty criminals ‘Flash Harry’ Smith and Jack (‘The Lad’) Jones start nicking dogs they soon realise that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. Their victim, Elizabeth Parker-Smyth, is a high flying movie producer with a Grand Design of a house in Hampstead, and a designer dog to match. Their nemesis is a quirky, big-hearted pet detective, who tracks the dognappers through cyberspace and finds herself fatally embroiled in their downward spiral.
Then there are the two pairs of Star Crossed Lovers. One couple may be human and the other canine, but they share similar memories of a whirlwind romance: “We will always have Stoke Newington.”
