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Metzger’s Dog
Thomas Perry
No Exit Press, paperback, 296 pages
ISBN 1874061173
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)

There’s a classic comedy of errors at work here. On the side of the angels, the bizarrely named Chinese Gordon and his happy band of career criminals intent on ingratiating themselves with the local Los Angeles gangster fraternity by ripping off a million dollars worth of research cocaine from the university. But a burglar’s light fingers can’t seem to rest and they flee the building with both the drugs and a package of seemingly innocuous papers belonging to one Professor Ian Donahue.

The Donahue papers are, of course, anything but benign. Secret, nasty little schemes funded by the CIA through respectable universities; plans to destabilise and debilitate so-called friendly states across the world; plans involving psychological warfare (Psywar).

For the government agents, merciless terrorists are large. And for Chinese Gordon and his cat Dr. Henry Metzger, a little blackmail is in the air – even if that blackmail happens to be directed against the ruthless security services of the most powerful nation on earth.

There’s a likeable blend of the absurd and the chillingly believable in all this. For the former there’s Chinese Gordon’s van, adapted to carry a fighter-plane cannon, and Dr. Henry Metzger himself – a feline companion far too smart for its own good. There is a smart reversal of the pet/owner equation when, on their felonious travels, our delinquent heroes pick up a gargantuan black guard dog that would happily bite your hand off and seems to respond solely – and alarmingly – to the cat’s command.

In the latter case, however, the over-clever CIA’s attempts to recover the potentially damaging documents are met, inevitably, by Chinese Gordon’s gang, turning psychological warfare techniques against their author. Even given a certain artistic licence to the ease with which it’s achieved, the idea that crippling the phone lines and blocking the main arteries into Los Angeles could paralyse a major American city seems on paper all too convincing. Conspiracy a-go-go.

The award-winning Perry neatly side-steps almost all potential hurdles along the way, inventively levering himself out of problems with a mix of ingenuity and humour. Only once in all this – a mountain-top pay-off that turns violent – does the book get bogged down, but the resolution astutely avoids cliché and at least bothers to answer the nagging question: why didn't they just photocopy the papers?

Smart, funny and just a little too credible.