SHAGGY DOG STORY

by Steven Steinbock

Last week I threatened to bore you with some Shabby Dog history. I’ve done some research. You asked for it. Read on.

When I was a kid, the older brother of a neighbor kid told a bunch of us a joke. It was a long story about a boy and his pet moth. The main character discovered that his moth could consume huge amounts of garbage. So he entered his pet moth in a local garbage eating competition. The moth won, and went on to a regional garbage-eating race. The moth won again. Boy and moth went on to the national competition, and the moth won again. Throughout the storytelling, my friend’s older brother padded the story with graphic details about the great effort the moth went through, the suffering he endured while consuming many times his weight in trash, and how tall the heaps of garbage rose. In the end, the moth won again, and was it so much pain, it began to cry. It cried and it cried. It wept so hard that everyone in the stadium felt sorry for the moth. It wept so hard. . . what? You’ve never seen a moth bawl?

At the end of the story, we kids were rolling on the floor. The next day we went to the brother and said, “Tell us again. Tell us about the garbage eating moth.” Each time he told the story, the details would get more involved. The moth had a name, and siblings, and a whole personal history. We knew the color of the moth’s hairs, and the texture of its eyes. We knew the patterns of its wings. We could almost smell the contents of each pile of garbage. The competitions took the boy and his moth to bigger and greater contest, all the way to the Intergalactic Moth Olympics on Jupiter. And always the story would end with the same stupid pun. And we’d still laugh our butts off.

My friend’s brother called it a “Shaggy Dog Story,” which was odd because there was no dog in the story. Why not call it a shaggy moth story?

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997) defines a Shaggy Dog Story as a “long drawn-out anecdote with an absurd or anticlimactic ending.” Sometimes they feature dogs. Sometimes talking dogs. Sometimes the dog in the story is shaggy. A number of classic Shaggy Dog stories lead up to the disappointing punchline:

He’s not so shaggy.

It’s not certain where or how the term “Shaggy Dog Story” originated. One source credits an article in the May, 1937 issue of Esquire as containing the first printed reference to the phenomenon. In it, the author suggests a method for measuring sanity:

One of the more sporting ways of finding out which ones are not [sane] is to try shaggy-dog stories on them.

I don’t claim to understand that. I don’t have access to the entire piece, so I don’t know the context. But I’d like to step back a few decades.

In the early 1900s, journalist and dog-breeder Albert Payson Terhune wrote a series of short stories about a collie named “Lad” that appeared in Red Book, Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly and others. These stories were collected in the 1919 book Lad: a Dog and in the 1922 sequel Further Adventures of Lad. I haven’t read them. They were popular, and spawned a 1962 film. Despite the similarity of name, breed, and heroic nature of the dog, it isn’t clear whether Terhune’s canine creation inspired Eric Knight’s famous fictional collie, “Lassie.” But that’s another Shaggy Dog story.

In 1926, the November 6th issue of The Manitoba Free Press featured a story by Terhune titled: “The Strangest Dog Story I Know.” The story, which Terhune claimed to be true, is that of a shaggy collie, guilty of killing sheep, who punished by being shot in the head three times, clubbed, bound in wire, and buried. Three days later that same shaggy dog, complete with grave dirt, bullet holes, and binding wire, showed up on the man’s porch very much alive.

The story isn’t funny. It doesn’t have a punchline – at least not one with any punch. But the story certainly is tedious. I put my money on this being the daddy of all Shaggy Dog Stories.

FREDRIC BROWN: A SHAGGY INTRODUCTION

Few readers today are familiar with Fredric Brown. He’s a favorite of mine, though. He wrote hundreds of crime, mystery, and science fiction stories for the pulps, as well as authoring five science fiction novels and around two dozen mystery novels. His most famous books are The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947) and The Screaming Mimi (1949), but I love him for the 1950 novel Night of the Jabberwock. (Indirectly, I credit that book as the inspiration of the title of my weekly Criminal Brief column).

1944 was a prolific year for Brown. The fifteen short stories he saw published that year included “The Arena” (the basis for the 1967 “Star Trek” episode of the same name), as well as the two stories that Brown cannibalized into Night of the Jabberwock (“The Jabberwocky Murders” and “The Gibbering Night”). That same year, the September issue of Detective Tales contained a crime story by Brown called “To Slay a Man About a Dog.” In it, the lead character, encountering a prank that would later turn deadly, discusses Shaggy Dog stories with a blonde. That story was later republished as “The Shaggy Dog Murders.”

More about Brown in some future installment of Bandersnatches.

THE JURY BOX

The May issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine shipped out this week to subscribers. In another week or so you’ll be able to find it in better bookstores. On the cover is a painted illustration showing Howard Haycraft as a train conducter, with John Dickson Carr, Allen Hubin, Anthony Boucher, and Jon L. Breen as passengers. Inside the magazine, editor Janet Hutchings discusses the importance of the review column in EQMM and provides a nice bio of Jon Breen, who has served as foreman of “The Jury Box” (EQMM’s review column) for thirty of the past thirty-five years. Jon is a frequent visitor to Criminal Brief and is an accomplished novelist and more importantly, short story writer.

Jon is semi-retiring from “The Jury Box,” and I will be stepping into the foreman’s seat beginning next month. It will require a lot of reading on my part. It will be a challenge for me to measure up to Jon, for the quality and concision of his reviews as well as his insane output (twelve books reviewed in each column!) But I’ll do my best. I plan to continue my weekly column here at Criminal Brief. I’m sure you’ll let me know (gently) if my quality starts to suffer.

Be sure to regularly visit the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine website to keep up to date on the stories and events associated with that magazine.