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Criticism

Three Bags Full’s Faithful Flock

How a German novel about Irish sheep (detectives) inspired a legion of devotees around the world.

Morgan Leigh Davies

Morgan Leigh Davies

— 16 min read
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Image of three sheep, depicted as if you are lying on the ground and they are peering down at you, backdropped by a blue sky and clouds.
The Sheep Detectives will introduce many cinema-goers to the Glennkill flock this weekend, but the novel on which it’s based, Three Bags Full, has inspired cult-like admiration for decades. Image courtesy Sony Pictures UK.

The new movie The Sheep Detectives—a movie about sheep, who are detectives—has elicited the bewildered responses you’d expect to a premise that seems, well, fake. “i’m choosing to believe this is a 30 rock bit,” reporter Marisa Kabas posted on Bluesky. Other users expressed dubious enthusiasm or straight-up incredulity: “The Sheep Detectives looks dumb and I really want to watch it.” “It’s just unhinged enough that it’ll probably be iconic.” “When I saw the commercial for The Sheep Detectives last night I wasn't sure it was real or if I was drunk, but it seems like it’s real?”

Reading these posts, I shook my head knowingly: I, too, had once been a member of the uninitiated. I first encountered Three Bags Full[1], the book upon which The Sheep Detectives is based, on Bluesky in 2023, when I saw New York Times columnist and academic Tressie McMillan Cottom post gushingly about it. I deeply respect Cottom’s opinion, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a mystery novel narrated by sheep.

  1. Fansplaining is part of the Bookshop.org affiliate program and receives a portion of the sale if you buy through this link. ↩︎

Soon, though, Cottom was only one of many Bluesky posters reading and discussing the book as part of an informal Bluesky book club. This phenomenon began thanks to a suggestion made by Cait, a public defender and mystery aficionado, who suggested the book to Cottom and poet and cultural critic Saeed Jones. “There is a strange, lovely little book called Three Bags Full about a flock of sheep who try to solve their shepherd’s murder,” she wrote. “The way I just sat up!!!” Jones replied.

I didn’t join in on the fun, but for the next couple years, I felt like I encountered Three Bags Full everywhere. I saw references to it on Bluesky, where it kept being mentioned even after the book club was over. Announcements about the movie adaptation were in the news, too. The book even infiltrated my podcast feed: Christopher Hermelin, host of the podcast So Many Damn Books, gushed about it repeatedly and ultimately interviewed author Leonie Swann when the English translation of the sequel, Big Bad Wool, was released last year. (While Swann lives in England, she writes in her native German.)

Okay, fine, I thought. I had heard glowing reports about the book from enough people with great taste that I decided I had to give it a chance. But I’ll admit that I remained skeptical. I am an avid reader of mystery novels, but I am also a snob, and the idea of a sheep-driven mystery novel remained bizarre to me. Wasn’t there a series of mysteries narrated by a cat? I had vague memories of encountering these books with my grandmother at a church rummage sale and dismissing them around age 13. But I decided to expand my horizons and read the sheep book.

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