Quite a number of years ago, I tried a couple of Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who… series of mysteries. I was skeptical going in. I don’t like cutesy-poo animal-centered novels especially if they’re supposed to be mysteries. I don’t like supernatural stuff in my mysteries. I suspected both would be in the Braun books.
I was pleasingly wrong. Braun obviously had respect for cats and didn’t saddle them with a bunch of sappy anthropomorphizing. I don’t remember how many I read or which ones, probably three, before losing track of them and going on to other things. I enjoyed them but didn’t remember much about them. I remembered the main guy spelled his name funny, and was an Old School newspaper man down on his luck, who pretty much accidentally ended up with these two Siamese cats (who hadn’t met each other before he adopted them). The male, Koko, was the one who did quite catlike things that turned out to provide clues to the whodunnits; Yum Yum, the female, provided affection and quite catlike mischief. Any single “clue” that Koko offered could be interpreted as just what cats do, and Qwilleran just interpreting them to fit the mystery. Or, one can believe Koko knows exactly what’s what at every step, it’s up to the reader. I can go with that.
As for the protagonist, Jim Qwilleran, he is quite a likable guy. Bit of a male chauvinist, as men of that generation were, bit of a curmudgeon, as middle-aged single men tend to be. But very very smart - he’d had a globe-trotting journalist’s life and even a NYT best selling non-fiction book in the years before his unfortunate downfall. We first meet him as he’s just getting his foot on the lowest rungs of the newspaper ladder again, recovering from a rotten divorce and too many subsequent years spent at the bottom of the bottle. He’s not crazy about his job but it is with a newspaper and it’s a start back up the ladder. His first assignment leads him, eventually, to Koko. And that changes everything.
You can read the books, or listen to the audiobooks for yourself. I’ve been listening and re-listening to them for several iterations now. I started wondering to myself what the draw was. I mean, since 2016 and 2020, I have mostly been re-reading my favorite books. It’s a comfort thing I guess. But what makes *these* books so enjoyable in the first place? There are several qualities I didn’t pick up on the first couple of times I read them.
One is Qwilleran himself. For one thing, he is SO the person whose shoes we’d love to be in - inheriting by complete chance millions of dollars and hundreds of acres of land in the north central US, complete with not just a mansion in a small town but also a log cabin on a lake not far from that? (In later books the millions have become billions - when you get up to that many zeros it’s almost hard NOT to accrue that much - it cannot be spent fast enough. Or something. How would I know?) But it is great fun fantasizing about what one would do … and Qwilleran does not let us down: he does good with those bucks and I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read the books. He’s a truly good person, with a pinch of old fashioned sexism just giving him some spice. Despite that he’s good to the women in his life, too. And almost everyone else as well. He’s got a good heart - we knew that early on when, down and out and practically broke as he was, he still adopted those two cats who were in desperate need of a home. He’s got my vote!
Dollying back out to a larger look at the setting of the books, it’s never precisely located, just way north of everywhere with the winters to prove it. A population of mostly descendants of European settlers who came over and toughed it out, and some made their fortunes in mining and lumber while other families farmed, and still do. The Pickaxe County culture is rich and deep, funny, sometimes baffling, sometimes infuriating, with just the right amount of dialect to give it color.
Braun is really good at delving into different rabbit holes - local history through monster blizzards and fires in the early days; niche pastimes like dogsledding, sailing, collecting rare art or gems, the fascinating world of serious old-time train hobbyists, architecture, home furnishings, printing presses — the Scottish clan system and how proud Scottish Americans are of their heritage (will Qwill ever wear a kilt? Read the books and find out!) He’s a real booster of the area, always learning new things that city folks don’t know about small town life.
The theme of friendship is strong in the books as well. His best friend since kindergarten, Arch Riker, became a newspaper editor and stayed in the field while Qwill was wandering in the hell of alcoholism, but they found each other again when Qwill’s first job after getting sober turned out to be at a paper where Arch worked. Eventually, Arch follows Qwill to Pickaxe and takes over the newspaper replacing the old one that burns down (it’s a lot more interesting sequence of events than that). Though Qwill’s a billionaire, at heart he’s still a reporter so he writes a weekly column and odd articles for the paper. He and Arch are great fun to read about.
Every secondary character is three-dimensional and human. Polly Duncan is the woman in his life and both eschew getting married for being independent and it works for them, though Polly, Qwill thinks, is too jealous - a mote in her eye that he sees somehow despite the huge log of the same wood that dwells in his eye. Polly’s the head librarian in the town library and very erudite, calm and collected, practical and able to handle Qwill’s outsized personality.
It’s also the characters that keep me rereading these books. Where does she come up with all those unique, quirky, memorable individuals?
And the mysteries are engaging. Caveat: I am not a mystery reader who tries to figure out the culprit before the book's detective does. i just read along and enjoy the ride. So I can't really tell you if these are intricate enough, original enough, to satisfy that kind of reader. I enjoy them, that's all I can vouch for. And if you like them, the good news is, there are 29 of them! Plus at least one short story collection. Might be more, I'm not sure.
Well, I’ve blathered on enough. I hope enough to convince you to pick up a Lilian Jackson Braun The Cat Who… book and give them a try. I’d advise starting with the first one though it’s not vitally necessary - but the world grows and expands and deepens with each book so it’s worth it to take them in order. The audiobooks are available free on You Tube at this URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc-Qc80Fg3Pt-8F3ynQpRC_YoCOBlhlXc and they are very well done.
