Like many people on Rhodes, Lindos chief of police Vangelis Skouras is an animal lover and at least one dog appears as a character in the books. It was probably inevitable that a dog would show up in the story at some point since my own life on Rhodes was so closely connected with one. Her name was Isabella. Izzie. And she came from a family of talented carpenters in Pefkos, a village that features strongly in Death Of A Stranger and Fishing With Fire. A sweet-natured spaniel mix she lived a long and well-travelled life moving with me from Rhodes to America and then to England.
We moved far from her place of birth over the course of her life, but our primary language of communication remained the Greek she had learned as a pup. ‘Ela’ and ‘katse kato’ (‘come’ and ‘sit’) were the words anyone ever looking after her in my absence needed to know. And she never lost her love of the smell of souvlaki grilling over charcoal!
Izzie’s usually calm and affectionate presence was the inspiration for a canine character although her proclivity for chasing goats was not. After a couple of heart-stopping incidents I learned to keep her very close whenever we were anywhere goats might suddenly appear. It seems a peculiar characteristic of goats that they will pop up suddenly apparently from nowhere, cresting the brow of a hill or rounding a bend along the shoreline. They crop up in the books occasionally too.
A dog’s life on Rhodes can be a perilous one. There is the risk of getting shot accidentally by hunters or deliberately by (understandably) aggrieved farmers protecting their herds from canine worrying. And there is a too present risk of poisoning in places where those who don’t share the love of animals lay bait for the island’s significant stray cat population. I was lucky that Izzie did not come to grief and died at the venerable age of sixteen, her ashes scattered around the roots of a fig tree in my London garden.