The cat who solved mysteries

A few months ago, I had decided to stop this monthly column because I had got bored with it after four years and, I thought, so must have the half-a-dozen or so readers of it. 

But it wasn’t just six people who read the column but a round dozen and they all said I was a fool to stop it. After some importuning, I was persuaded to resurrect it.

After some discussion with a colleague of nearly 37 years, we agreed that I should do it differently this time by doing what I used to do in the early 1980s, namely, reassess established writers. Back then, the colleague said, it was presumptuous of you, but no longer. “Age has its uses.”

So this column will be about writers who write in English. Fiction, history, economics, politics and the rest of the caboodle will all be grist for its mill. 

It will not be literary criticism. Instead, it will be modelled on a column I used to write for a media website critiquing newspaper editorials — short but not very nasty and certainly not brutish. 

The intention is merely to write 750 self-indulgent words and, in the process, leave you slightly amused and perhaps a lot wiser. So, bon aperitif, here goes.

Catwoman 

Ok, how many of you have heard of Lilian Jackson Braun? I certainly hadn’t until a few months ago.

Then a friend who has two cats presented me with four of Mrs Braun’s books. All of them were mystery stories in which two cats —Koko and Yum-Yum — are the key, if not central figures. All of them have titles that started “The Cat Who…”

I was sceptical at first and it took me a couple of months to start on the first of them. Then I got hooked and desperately wanted to find out who this lady with a triple-barrelled name — but only a single L in her first name — was. 

In the pre-Google days, this would have been a hard ask. But now Google instantly revealed that she was an established American writer — with 29 of these cat books dedicated to her “Husband who…”.

The first of them appeared in 1966 — called The Cat Who Could Read Backwards — and the last in 2008. Her last book, The Cat Who Smelled Smoke was never published. 

In between, before she died in 2011, aged 97, her books had sold a few million copies and had been on The New York Times bestseller list a few times. One of these was called The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern. I have ordered it. 

Many people have tried to figure out why she was such a hit. Many explanations have been offered which mostly centre on the cats. 

But I have a different take on it.

Excellent writing

I think people like Mrs Braun’s books because they instinctively recognise something that is done well. The other is a much subtler one.

Mrs Braun wrote very well indeed. It is gentle, no-nonsense writing, much of it in conversational form. The setting is a small American town, in behaviour rather like the villages of England but bigger. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone gossips. And just as the English have their buttered scones and seed cakes, Ms Braun has pancakes and steaks. 

In form, her stories are a grownup version of Enid Blyton’s various series — Secret Seven, Famous Five and so on. There is always a mystery, which Koko the Cat solves.  

The credit, however, goes to his human owner, a slightly goofy but detached journalist with long hair who has inherited a fortune. He lives in a huge 100-year-old house with scores of closets that the cats constantly explore.

The second, very subtle, reason is that every chapter is complete in itself, a short story almost. You can read it like that because the novel itself is a series of incidents, not unlike TV serials. 

It is an extraordinary skill and technique because it is a page-turner but not in, say, the usual style where every chapter is left hanging. I have never come across it before. 

If you have, do write a letter to this paper.'