The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare - Lilian Jackson Braun

    1988; 249 pages.  Book 7 (out of 29) in “The Cat Who” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Small Town and Rural Fiction; Cozy Mystery; Cat Fiction.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

 

    Welcome to Pickax City!  One hundred or so miles north of Minneapolis, and out in the middle of frozen nowhere.  Smack dab in wonderful Moose County.

 

    They have a saying up here and it’s certainly true: "Country folks is different and Moose County folks is more different.”

 

    Changes are coming to Moose County.  Senior Goodwinter, the owner and publisher of the local newspaper, The Pickax Picayune, still uses a printing press from the early 20^th century.  It’s inefficient but he likes it.  He’s getting old, though, and the locals are wondering if his son and publishing heir apparent, Junior Goodwinter, will modernize things.

 

    Some locals would love that, and some of them wouldn’t.  In any event, it would cost considerable money to upgrade the printing press.  And it’s a well-known secret (is that an oxymoron?) that The Pickax Picayune has been losing money for many years now.

 

    Hey, that newcomer Jim Qwilleran is rich.  Maybe we can talk him into funding the upgrade.  And he likes to talk to his cats, Koko and Yum Yum.  So perhaps we can convince them to suggest it to Qwill.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare is the fourth book I’ve read by this author.  My previous one was in 2019 and is reviewed here.  Amazon lists this as a “Small Town & Rural Fiction” novel, and I’m gradually coming around to seeing their logic in listing Lilian Jackson books in this genre.

 

    Amazon also puts this series in their “Amateur Sleuths” genre, but it’s not a spoiler to say our protagonist, Jim Qwilleran does absolutely no sleuthing here.  There are several deaths along the way, the circumstances of which Qwill occasionally muses upon, but he never does any investigating.

 

    That doesn’t mean the storyline is boring, though.  In addition to those fatalities and the uncertain future of The Pickax Picayune, the following plot threads arise: a.) who is the quiet out-of-towner masquerading as a historian?  b.) what is the purpose of Senior’s frequent trips to Minneapolis?  c.) who is Hixie covering up for?  d.) Will Qwill’s housekeeper, Mrs. Cobb, leave his employ for love?  e.) What’s in the metal box?, and perhaps most importantly,  f.) Why does Koko insist on repeatedly pushing books by Shakespeare off the shelves in Qwill’s library?

 

    The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare was published in 1988, and I chuckled a couple of times at the “signs of the times” that pop up.  Everybody carries a portable radio with them, to search for a book at the library, you make use of the card catalogue, cassettes are the most popular way to listen to music at home, and a portable tape recorder is essential when interviewing someone.  I enjoyed the usual smattering of French phrases, and both Qwill and I were leery of the pork liver cupcakes.

 

    The ending is so-so.  One of the fatalities is way too convenient, and the others are “solved” by someone simply explaining what happened, which means things don't build to an exciting conclusion.  Several plot threads remain dangling at the end.  Still, if you’re reading this book for its “coziness”, you’ll be content with how it wraps up.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 1,735 ratings and 224 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.96/5 based on 9,355 ratings and 374 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Propinquity (n.) : the state of being close to someone or something; proximity.

 

Excerpts...

    “Where are the cats?” Polly asked.

     “Shut up in the kitchen.  Koko has been pulling books off the shelf.  He thinks he’s a librarian.  Yum Yum, on the other hand, is just a cat who chases her tail and steals paper clips and hides things under the rug.  Every time my foot comes down on a bump in the rug, I wince.  Is it my wristwatch?  Or a mouse?  Or my reading glasses?  Or a crumpled envelope from the wastebasket?”

    “What titles has Koko recommended?”

    “He’s on a Shakespeare kick.”  (pg. 43)

 

    “I understand you’re president of the Old Timers Club,” he said.

    “Yes, I’m eighty-two.  The youngest member is automatically appointed president.”

    “I suspect you lied about your age.”

    Her pleased expression acknowledged the compliment.  “I intend to live to be a hundred and three.  I think a hundred and four would be excessive, don’t you?  Exercise is the secret, and breathing the most important factor.  Do you know how to breathe, Mr. Qwilleran?”

    “I’ve been doing my best for fifty years.”  (pg. 112)

 

“Do you still have the cat that’s smarter than you are?”  (pg. 16)

    The quibbles are minor.  I counted eight cusswords in the entire book, seven hells and one damn.  Most of those came courtesy of one of the secondary characters, so I presume Lilian Jackson Braun used them to simply as part of his character development.  There were a couple of typos: of/or and rest room/restroom, but that’s actually pretty clean.

 

    The rest of my ticky-tacky issues have already been mentioned.  The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare is not a cozy mystery tale, let alone a murder-mystery.  OTOH, if you heed Amazon’s advice and read this as a “Small Town Fiction” novel, it is rather entertaining.

 

    6 Stars.  I have at least one more book from this series on my TBR shelf, namely, The Cat Who Sniffed Glue.  I’m willing to bet a very small amount of money that, despite its title, it in no way involves drug use.

The Cat Who Played Brahms - Lilian Jackson Braun

   1987; 245 pages.  Book #5 (out of 29) in “The Cat Who” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Cozy Mystery; Cat Fiction.  Laurels: Nominated for the 1988 Anthony Award for “Best Paperback Original” (the winner was Robert Crais’s “The Monkey’s Raincoat”) .  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

    The hustle and bustle of city life is getting reporter Jim Qwilleran down.  So it’s quite timely that a distant acquaintance, Aunt Fanny has a cabin up in the sticks that she’d be happy to let him stay at for the summer.  Heck, even Jim’s two cats, Koko and Yum Yum, might enjoy the change in scenery.  It’s a perfect time for him to begin writing his novel.

    Being up in the mountains, close to the Canadian border, and away from where he works is not a problem.  His job for the Daily Fluxion is to write restaurant reviews, so if the place he’s going, some Podunk place called Mooseville, has any eating establishments, maybe Qwill can justify this as an extended and relaxing business trip.

    However, what if you find that the chirping crickets and other things that go bump in the night keep you awake in your cabin, Qwill?  What if there are some deep dark secrets that sleepy little Mooseville is anxious to keep hidden, so the tourists don’t get scared away?  Well, not to worry, the locals probably have ways to keep a clueless reporter from getting suspicious about anything.

    But Koko and Yum Yum might not be so easily fooled.

What’s To Like...

    If you’re in the mood for a cozy mystery, The Cat Who Played Brahms is tailor-made for you.  There are three deaths in the book, all of which occur offstage, with only one of those bodies being “seen” by our protagonists.  There are lots of people in Mooseville (and nearby Pickax) who act like they’re hiding something, so there’s no shortage of suspects.

    It’s fun to watch city-bred Jim Qwilleran try to adjust to life in a small, sleepy rural town.  In theory, he should have lots of time to work on his book, but Lilian Jackson Braun keeps the pacing brisk enough to where somehow he never quite gets around to starting on it.

    There aren’t a lot of settings – just the city where Qwill works for the Fluxion, and the great outdoors around Mooseville and Pickax.  There’s a huge lake by Qwill’s cabin, and it is mentioned that its far shore  is Canada.  But beyond that, it’s never made clear exactly what state this series is set in, just somewhere in the Midwest.

    The first murder, if indeed it is one, takes place on page 75.  In case you’re wondering, neither cat actually plays any Brahms on a musical instrument, but Koko keeps hitting the button on a tape player at the cabin, which has a cassette with a Brahms concerto (Opus 102) on it.  I’d never heard of this piece, so I looked it up on YouTube.  I don’t recognize it as anything well-known, but I love classical music, and anything by Brahms will appeal to me.

    There are a couple of mild cusswords, and the aforementioned corpse being discovered by our trio of heroes.  Qwill and Rosemary might eventually fall in love, but here it’s only a figment of their collective imaginations.  All in all, this is a very "cozy" cozy.

    The ending is okay, but don’t think you’re going to solve the case before Qwill and the cats do.  This is the third book I’ve read in this series, and I get the impression that its main allure is seeing how the cats are going to solve each mystery.  The feisty felines do not disappoint here

Kewlest New Word ...

    Halfhear (v.) : to hear something imperfectly or incompletely.  Yeah, that’s obvious, but I don’t recall seeing "halfhear" as an actual word before.

Excerpts...

    “Tell me all about Aunt Fanny after you meet her.”

    “She calls herself Francesca now.  She doesn’t like to be called Aunt Fanny.  She says it makes her feel like an old woman.”

    “How old is she?”

    “She’ll be ninety next month.”  (pg. 15)

    Koko was pacing restlessly from the porch to the kitchen to the guest room and back to the porch.

    “He’s disturbed,” Qwilleran explained, “by his instinctive savagery in attacking the burglar.  Koko is a civilized cat, and yet he’s haunted by an ancestral memory of days gone by and places far away, where his breed lurked on the walls of palaces and temples and sprang down on intruders to tear them to ribbons.”

    “Oh, Qwill,” Rosemary laughed.  “He smells the turkey in the oven, that’s all.”  (pg. 193)

“They say elephants can hear the footsteps of mice.”

“I hope you’re not implying that I have large ears.”  (pg. 90)

   Since it was nominated for a literary award, The Cat Who Played Brahms is apparently considered to be one of the better books in this series.  I enjoyed reading it, but I didn’t find it to be a well-constructed mystery novel.

    My main beef is with the story threads.  There are a slew of them, the majority of which never get tied up, despite Lilian Jackson Braun devoting the entire last chapter to doing just that.  Specifically:

    Why are the Mooseville police so gung-ho about setting up roadblocks?

    Why are the names of the crew of the Minnie K not given?

    Why do several places in Mooseville stink so much?

    What’s with the buried garbage pail?

    Was Aunt Fanny’s death an accident or a murder?

    What’s with those UFO’s?

    What’s with the dead-rabbit?

    Does everyone in Mooseville drive a blue pickup truck?

    This is a spoiler-free blog, so I’ll refrain from giving more details, but of those eight threads, ANAICT, only three get resolved.  But maybe I should think of them as red herrings.  And perhaps I should dwell more on how the cats are gonna catch the bad guys.

    5½ Stars.  Add 2 stars if you used to like the TV cozy-mystery show, Murder, She Wrote.  This series will probably charm the daylights out of you.

The Cat Who Brought Down The House - Lilian Jackson Braun

   2003; 246 pages.  Book #25 (out of 30) in “The Cat Who” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Cozy Mystery; Cat Fiction.  Overall Rating : 3½*/10.

    Thelma Thackeray is coming back to Pickax, way up there in Moose County, close to the Canadian border.  After a 55-year career in Hollywood, the 82-year-old spinster says she’s “returning home to die.”  But she adds, “but not right away.  First I want to have some fun.”

    Well, the backwoods folks of Moose County are sure glad a celebrity’s coming to live with them, even if nobody can quite recall what movies she starred in.  It’s already hinted that she’ll bring an upgrade in culture to Pickax.  Art shows, a cat pageant, private film showings (of the classics), and what have you.

    But she’s also bringing a lot of money and a lot of jewels with her.  Let’s just hope that doesn’t encourage someone to commit a crime involving the newest Pickax resident.

What’s To Like...

    There are several plot threads in The Cat Who Brought Down The House.  The old opera house is being sold, and no one knows to whom or for what purpose.  Cultural events are the new norm now.  And of course, everyone wants to meet and kiss up to the new celebrity, Thelma.

    There are also several “crime mystery” threads, but those are less clearly defined.  There’s a report of a birds-napping, although the alleged victim denies it.  Someone got murdered in Bixby, but that’s 90 miles away.  And now there are even some whispers about Thelma’s twin brother, Thurston, who died while hiking many years ago, and whether that was an accident as was concluded at the time.

    The 246 pages are divided into 22 chapters, so there’s always a convenient place to stop for the night.  I found TCWBDTH to be a fast and easy read, although since this was my second book from the series, I was expecting that.

    There’s a modicum of French (“a bientot”), and foreign language snippets are always a plus for me.  Koko has developed a death howl since I read the other “The Cat Who” book from this series, which was a much earlier installment.  It is an interesting plot device, although I found it somewhat unbelievable.  The title is explained on page 218, but frankly, it isn’t a minor detail.

    There are a number of “sidebars” (for lack of a better term) sprinkled throughout the book.  Some of them are Qwilleran’s weekly newspaper column.  Others seemed just to be anecdotal topics made up by the author.  Milo the Potato Farmer, How Pleasant Street Got Its Name, The Incredible Moose Country Blueberries, etc.  In short, this book oozed “cutesy wutesy-ness”, and if that’s what you read Lilian Jackson Braun’s stories for, you will not be disappointed.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Cairngorm (n.) : another term for smoky quartz.

Others : Etagere (n.).

Excerpts...

    “We compared notes and personal feelings and came to the conclusion that libraries aren’t as much fun as they used to be, twenty years ago.  Libraries, we said, used to be all about books!  And people who read!  Now it’s all about audios and videos and computers and people in a hurry.  What used to be serenely open floor space is now cluttered with everything except books.  Even the volunteers find it less attractive work, and stop reporting on schedule.”  (pg. 161)

    ”This is a funny title,” she said when Qwilleran came down the ramp.  She was looking at How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler.  “If you can read a book on how-to-read-a-book,” she said, “why do you need to read this book?”

    “Some day I’ll lend it to you, and you’ll find out.”  (pg. 196)

 “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.”  (pg. 106)

    Alas, there are some serious problems with The Cat Who Brought Down The House.  You get introduced to a slew of Pickaxians, but most of them are of no importance to the story.  I'm guessing they are recurring characters in the series, but to be frank, I didn’t care about them.

    The ending is just downright terrible, insanely contrived, and with nary a plot twist in sight.  The author seemed more interested in giving you her cute asides than in developing a storyline.

    And last and worst, the crime-mystery aspect is virtually stillborn.  Qwilleran never really does any investigating (neither do his cats), yet magically he unravels all three of the aforementioned cases, including the cold case of Thelma's brother’s death, merely by thinking about them in his spare time.

    Bottom line: Unless you’re hopelessly addicted to this series, this book is really a waste of time.

    3½ Stars.  Add 2 stars if you read this series for the small-town folksiness, and don’t give a hoot about whatever crimes are committed.  At least you’ll get something positive out of the book.