"Detective Hammer Logan III woke with a start, images of the bizarre bayou murder still fresh in his mind's eye — a dame in trouble, body covered with bloody toothprints and saliva—but as sleep lifted, the grizzled detective remembered that he was a dog and the dame a coyote, so he spun on the bed three times and slept the rest of the day."
— Jacob Smith, Dallas, TX, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2016
He may be the Funny Animal, the Intellectual Animal, or maybe even the Speech-Impaired Animal, but if there's one thing that he's incredibly good at, it's solving any kind of mystery that comes his way. He can be either a Hardboiled Detective, an Inspector Oblivious, or a Defective Detective. Whether he does it on his own, or with a friend, or with a group of humans, expect him to help solve the case with ease. This character may or may not work in a World of Funny Animals. Very often, these characters are dogs of some description.
Compare Animal Superheroes.
Examples:
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Advertising
- McGruff The Crime Dog has that whole Columbo thing going for him.
- An Australian ad for blood donors had a bloodhound acting in much the same way. Due to the shortage of blood donors (voluntary in that country), said bloodhound had to be a detective to find one.
Anime & Manga
- Animal Detectives Kiruminzoo: The main protagonists use devices named "Kirumin", which makes them able to transform into animals. They use them to get clues a normal human couldn't get, as well as communicating with animals and understanding their feelings.
- Billy Bat: The main character writes a comic book about a detective Bat.
- Sherlock Hound is an Anthropomorphic Animal Adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, where almost all the characters are canines. For example, James Moriarty is depicted as a wolf.
Asian Animation
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Little Detective: Weslie the Funny Animal goat becomes a Kid Detective and solves mysteries.
Comic Books
- Batman: In the few stories that he narrates himself, Batman's dog Ace the Bat-Hound was shown to be an expert detective.
- Blacksad is about a feline Private Detective who gets involved in Film Noir-like stories.
- Fish Police is a comic book series about Inspector Gill, a fish private inspector who investigates a mystery about an addictive drug called "Hairballs".
- Grandville: Detective-Inspector Archie LeBrock, the badger lead character, and his sidekick Roderick Ratzi.
- Joey Fly: Joey Fly and Sammy Stingtail, a housefly and scorpion respectively.
- Rex the Wonder Dog from DC Comics has issues where he demonstrates his capabilities as a detective. He's even best friends with Detective Chimp, although they rarely if ever work on cases together.
Comic Strips
- Slylock Fox is a puzzle strip featuring a fox who solves crimes while dressed as Sherlock Holmes. Most of the other characters are anthropomorphic animals, too.
Films — Animation
- The Great Mouse Detective (pictured above) is an adaptation of the Basil of Baker Street books, with Basil and his assistant, David Q. Dawson, being the Mouse World's equivalents of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. In this movie, Basil and Dr. Dawson solve a mystery involving a kidnapped toymaker, and a crime lord who wants to assassinate the queen and replace her with a robotic replica.
- Zootopia: Judy Hopps is very methodical in trying to uncover clues and potential leads on the missing animals case.
Films — Live-Action
- Oh! Heavenly Dog: Chevy Chase plays a private eye who is sent back to Earth as a dog on order to solve his own murder.
- Muppets Most Wanted: Sam the Eagle is a CIA agent on the trail of a stolen painting.
- Pokémon Detective Pikachu: The movie features a yellow Electric-type Pokémon who solves crimes. The little guy even comes with his own deerstalker cap.
Literature
- Anonymous Rex, a Velociraptor in disguise as human, is a Hardboiled Detective. (But the book is set In a World… where there are dinosaurs living among us, so he's not unique.)
- Azoth Express: Volfram Volkov is a lycanthrope and the Amateur Sleuth leading the investigation on the titular train.
- Basil of Baker Street: The titular hero is a Mouse World version of Sherlock Holmes. This book series was later adapted into the 1986 animated film The Great Mouse Detective.
- Bug Muldoon And The Garden Of Fear: Bug Muldoon is a beetle private eye who takes jobs from insect clients in the garden where he lives.
- The Cat Who... Series: Left ambiguously open — Koko gives clues that in hindsight point directly at the criminal, although it is never made clear whether the clues are coincidental.
- Chet and Bernie is about private detective Bernie Little, narrated by his dog Chet.
- Chet Gecko: The titular character is a Big Eater lizard Private Detective whose activities are limited to his elementary school, where the students and staff are all Funny Animals.
- City of Devils: The LAPD and local Sheriff's Departments are entirely staffed by werewolves.
- Detective Dinosaur: The titular character is a Clueless Detective assisted by his pterosaur Hyper-Competent Sidekick and Da Chief, a Tyrannosaurus rex.
- Felidae features, as you might guess from the title, a cat detective who solves cat crimes.
- Freddy the Pig: One of the titular pig's hobbies is running a detective agency.
- Joe Grey Mysteries features a pair of cats with the unique ability to speak and think like humans. After finding out "whodunnit", they phone in anonymous tips to the local police force.
- The No 2 Feline Detective Agency: Hettie Bagshott and her sidekick Tilly.
- Old Toffers Book Of Consequential Dogs, an authorised sequel to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, has a poem about "Dobson, the Dog Detective", the opposite number to the criminal cat Macavity.
- Private I Guana features an iguana detective who tries to find a missing Hollywood Chameleon for a client.
- Sam the Cat: Detective: Sam is a calculating cat who is good at sniffing out clues about animal and human criminals and has an information network from other cats.
- Shady Hollow: Vera Vixen is a fox and Intrepid Reporter who often seems more effective at solving crimes than the titular small town's police bears.
- Sherlock Chick: The hero is a chick who was born with detective gear and a deerstalker hat. In his adventures, he solves cases for the other farm animals.
- Tailchaser's Song is a Mature Animal Story about an older kitten named Tailchaser and his Tagalong Kid Pouncequick going on a quest to find out why cats in their clan (and neighboring clans) are disappearing.
- Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann is a murder mystery that gets solved by a flock of sheep.
- Wizard: Catseye Gomez is a thaumagene tomcat addicted to old hard-boiled detective archetypes, who plays a key role in investigating murder cases in two of the novels.
Live-Action TV
- Inspector Rex: Rex the German Shepherd is a skillful dog who works with a team of Austrian homicide detectives and has been helpful to solving many crimes.
- Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp is an Affectionate Parody of James Bond films made with real monkeys.
- In Llan-ar-goll-en, Prys ar Frys is accompanied by Ceri, a dog - or rather, a "Dog-tective" - in solving mysteries. Both are opposite in personalities - Prys ar Frys is much clumsier than his dog companion Ceri, who is an Intellectual Animal.
- Wishbone: Wishbone the Jack Russel terrier plays the roles of Sherlock Holmes in "The Slobbery Hound" (based on The Hound of the Baskervilles) and "A Dogged Exposé" (based on "A Scandal in Bohemia"), and C. Auguste Dupin in "The Pawloined Paper" (based on "The Purloined Letter").
Puppet Shows
- The Muppet Show: Episode 103 has a Sherlock Holmes spoof starring Rowlf the Dog as the Great Detective.
- Muppets Tonight: In episode 206, there's a sketch in which Sherlock Holmes is a whale.
- Sesame Street: Colambo is an ovine Columbo parody.
Radio
- Big Finish Doctor Who: The Doctor's companion Frobisher is an alien called a Whifferdill that can change shape. His favorite shape, and the one he adopts in his day job as a detective, is penguin.
Tabletop Games
- Crimestrikers is set on a World of Funny Animals called Creaturia. The titular heroes are an elite team of crimefighters who are the local equivalents to the Interpol Special Agent.
- Spud Dog Detective stars a dog on the case to solve the mystery of who killed his master.
Video Games
- Barnyard Sherlock Hooves features a cow and a rat trying to determine what became of their missing friends.
- BROK the InvestiGator is a 2022 French video game about Brok, an alligator who works as a private investigator, working to solve a conspiracy mystery after the death of his wife.
- Detective Pikachu and Detective Pikachu Returns stars an electric rodent who solves crime.
- Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime has the titular Investi-Gator, an anthropomorphic alligator and Clueless Detective.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: Pennington the detective penguin. Though at the end of the chapter, he reveals he's not a real detective, he just likes to pretend.
- In Sticky Business, two of your regular customers are anthropomorphic raccoon and a frog who are detectives.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Team Chaotix, consisting of Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleon, and Charmy the Bee, where all three members are collectively part of the "Chaotix Detective Agency" since Sonic Heroes. In Heroes, they track down and eventually find Dr. Eggman was kidnapped by Metal Sonic, and he had enlisted their help in order to save him. The detectives apparently struggle to make ends meet, as games past Heroes is any indication, with one of Vector's favorite things is also money. Both the Archie and IDW series sees the team taking on a variety of cases and solving mysteries, though much like their game incarnations, struggle to keep the lights on.
- In Tavern Talk, Melli's an anthropomorphic kitten who's an aspiring detective.
Webcomics
- El Goonish Shive: The cat-like Writer's Block plays a detective during the "Detective Block" storyline.
Web Videos
- Cream Heroes: "Don't Trust Kitties" has Lulu turn detective to uncover who raided the kitchen at night and made a mess with the trat box to get a reward. After interviewing witnesses (Momo and Chuchu) he learns the suspect has 'long, white fur.' Lulu fingers Coco and captures him. However, this turns out to be a frame up. The suspect with the long, white fur was Lala and Lulu was her accomplice. As such Lulu not only got away with his crime but was actually rewarded for it.
Western Animation
- Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Chip the chipmunk does most of the detective work for the group.
- Danger Mouse: Danger Mouse is a secret agent but he still does yeoman's detective work.
- Darkwing Duck: Darkwing, like his inspiration Batman, is a Badass Normal Animal Superhero who also does detective work from time to time.
- Droopy: Droopy and his son Dripple star in several cartoons in Tom & Jerry Kids and eventually their own spin-off series Droopy, Master Detective in which they play the roles of 1940's style private detectives.
- Fish Police: They're fish, and they're police.
- Gravity Falls had a Show Within a Show called Duck-Tective, which is about a duck (a highly intelligent, but otherwise ordinary, duck) in a deerstalker hat solving mysteries.
- Hong Kong Phooey: Subverted with the main character, who may be "number one super guy", but the mysteries that he encounters are actually solved by his cat, Spot.
- Jabberjaw featured the eponymous shark who helped his human friends, Biff, Shelly, Bubbles and Clamhead, solve mysteries in a futuristic underwater world.
- A Miss Mallard Mystery features the titular duck and her nephew Willard investigating various cases around the world.
- King Leonardo and His Short Subjects: The Hunter is a dog private detective who works for Irish-American police chief Flim Flanigan.
- Looney Tunes: Daffy Duck has portrayed a detective in several short cartoons, such as Duck Twacy in The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, Sgt Joe Monday in Rocket Squad, Dorlock Homes in Deduce, You Say!, Boston Quackie in Boston Quackie, and China Jones in China Jones. In Daffy Duck's Quackbusters, Daffy and Porky Pig formed a ghost-busting agency called "Quackbusters".
- Snooper and Blabber: The titular duo is a cat-and-mouse detective team.
- The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, although it's mostly accidental. The bickering among Sylvester, Tweety and often Hector causes clues to appear in front of Granny, who then solves the mysteries herself.
- Work It Out Wombats! has a Show Within a Show example. "Sammy Makes a Day" reveals that The Mystery Files of Detective Rufferton is Sammy's favorite book series.
