‘In the distance a dog barks.’ When I read that sentence recently, in Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo, it gave me pause for thought. Hadn’t I encountered variations on that phrase countless times before?
My leisure reading tends towards undemanding thrillers, with high body counts and maverick crime-fighters unmasking unlikely serial killers. Which is possibly why the phrase seemed familiar – some hapless character in these novels is always setting off alone into the forest or down some mean street, usually in a swirling mist or at the dead of night, when somewhere in the distance, a dog barks. It never ends well.
Once you notice distant barking dogs you realise they are everywhere. ‘Somewhere on the island a dog barked’ appears in Alibi by Joseph Kanon, while ‘A dog barked way off in the distance’ is in the Cornell Woolrich short story ‘You’ll Never See Me Again’. Scandi crime writer Henning Mankell weighed in with: ‘The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance’ (The Eye of the Leopard).
Meanwhile in William Boyd’s Restless, the heroine is alone in New Mexico, warily approaching a cabin. ‘She looked up at the stars and felt the desert air chill her skin’, we are told. Then, right on cue: ‘Somewhere a dog barked.’
In most cases it seems to be a shorthand way of creating atmosphere while also hinting at a peril lurking out there in the unknown. An owl hooting or a wolf howling might denote that our lone character is venturing into the wilds, but dogs are domesticated and the presence of a canine ‘somewhere in the distance’ indicates that there are humans out there too – and humans provide the greatest menace of all in stories of this kind. Oh, and we never get to meet the dog – it’s just a sound effect. The dog barks and the story moves on.
Thinking I had made an original discovery I did a little online research and found this wasn’t the case at all – others have beaten me to it, most notably the American novelist and essayist Rosecrans Baldwin. He wrote in 2010: ‘Novelists can’t resist including a dog barking in the distance. I’ve seen it happen across the spectrum – Jackie Collins, William Faulkner and Chuck Palahniuk.’
So it’s not just a throwaway line in thrillers, then, but a genuine literary trope. Baldwin’s essay prompted an enthusiastic response from readers who put forward examples of canines barking in the distance from works by writers as eminent as Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs and Virginia Woolf. Others cited Ulysses and Madame Bovary.
It is a practice that shows no sign of dying out; indeed, it seems that nowadays having an invisible dog barking somewhere in your novel has become less a cliché than a knowing literary in-joke. T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done (2011) even has an amusing variation: ‘Somewhere, a seal was barking.’
It has reached the stage where I can no longer read a novel without expecting a distant dog to start sounding off. And from now on, neither will you.
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