Running Dog was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1978 and is DeLillo’s most overtly thriller-like novel — a chase narrative involving a journalist named Moll Robbins who is investigating a corrupt senator, Glen Selvy (a former intelligence operative), and the various factions pursuing a rumored erotic film shot in Hitler’s bunker during the final days of the Third Reich.
The Novel
The premise sounds like genre fiction — and DeLillo deliberately works with genre conventions, using the thriller’s momentum while subverting its satisfactions. The film everyone is chasing is the novel’s MacGuffin, its absent center: an object of desire that everyone believes will reveal something fundamental about power and perversion but which, when finally found, reveals something far stranger and more unsettling than pornography.
Moll Robbins is investigating Senator Lloyd Percival for Running Dog magazine (a publication modeled on underground journals of the 1970s). Percival is connected to Radial Matrix, an organization that trades in erotica and intelligence — the novel proposes that these are essentially the same thing, that information and sexual imagery are both forms of power expressed through images.
Glen Selvy is DeLillo’s most physically realized character — a man trained in violence whose body has become a weapon. His sections move with the efficiency of action cinema while DeLillo’s prose notes the distance between physical mastery and psychological coherence.
The bunker film, when finally viewed, turns out to show something unexpected — not Hitler’s debauchery but something far more human and disturbing. The revelation undercuts every expectation the pursuit has generated.
Themes
Running Dog extends DeLillo’s engagement with images, power, and paranoia. The novel proposes that in post-Watergate America, truth itself has become a form of pornography — something hidden, desired, pursued, and ultimately disappointing when revealed. The intelligence community, the media, the sex trade, and the art world are presented as overlapping systems of image-production and image-consumption.
The Hitler bunker film functions as a metaphor for historical truth: something everyone believes must be shocking, revelatory, transformative — but which, when accessed, refuses to confirm our expectations about evil’s appearance. DeLillo’s Hitler is not a monster but something more troubling: a figure recognizably, boringly human.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1978. First printings are identified by:
- Knopf imprint and Borzoi Books colophon
- “First Edition” stated on copyright page
- Number line including “1”
- Cloth binding with dust jacket
Collecting Running Dog
First edition (Knopf, 1978): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $75–$200. Another early DeLillo with a modest first printing.
Signed copies bring $200–$600.
Running Dog is collected primarily by DeLillo completists and by collectors interested in the “paranoid thriller” tradition that connects Pynchon, DeLillo, and later writers like James Ellroy and Rachel Kushner. It is the least critically celebrated of DeLillo’s 1970s novels but rewards rereading in the context of his larger project.