4/5/19

Stray Dog Strut: "Mystery At the Dog Pound" (1942) by Robert W. Cochran

Robert W. Cochran appears to have been an obscure, little-known pulp writer who seems to have exclusively penned short stories for numerous periodicals, such as Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, G-Men Detective and 10 Story Mystery Magazine, but that's all the internet could tell me – making him one of the more obscurer names discussed on this blog. I'm not sure from who, or where, I heard of Cochran, but had jotted down the title of one of his short stories as a possible item of interest. My hunch was not entirely wrong.

"Mystery At the Dog Pound" was published in the May, 1942, issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine and has not been reprinted since.

The story takes place in Clarkesville, "a town of only eight thousand," which is less than a month removed from an important election and the incumbent sheriff, Tom Russell, is gloomily trying "to device some method" to succeed himself as county sheriff – only to be disrupted by a telephone call. Charlotte Trent is on the other end of the line and tells Russell that her husband, Jonathan Trent, took her Great Dane to the pound "to have it destroyed." And she wants Russell to save her dog.

So, together with the narrator of the story, Ray, they go down to the pound, but when they arrive the gas-chamber has already done its work. However, when they peer through the small glass panel of the metal door, what they see is not the foot of a dog, but that of a man. One of the most prominent citizens of Clarkesville, Jonathan Trent, has been gassed to death. Everything seems to point to murder.

"Mystery At the Dog Pound" has a solid premise and an original setting, which has to my knowledge never been used before or since, but lacked detection and proper clueing. This could have easily sunk the whole story. However, I really liked the explanation as to how Jonathan Trent, instead of his dog, ended up behind the metal door of the gas-chamber and died – a well-done play on the blinkin' cussedness of things. A competent plotter could have spun gold out of this wonderful idea, but has sadly gone to waste in Cochran's hands.

That being said, I think "Mystery At the Dog Pound" is still worth a read, if only for having an original thought, but don't expect anything more from the end product than a curiosity excavated from the bottom of a long-forgotten trunk in the dusty attic of the genre. You can read this short story in the issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine on the Internet Archive.

Sorry for the short review, but this all that can be said about the story and I'll be back with a regular review before too long. So stay tuned.

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