The Cat Who Moved a Mountain

The Cat Who Moved a Mountain is the thirteenth Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 1992. By this point in the long running series the formula was firmly established and was most of the appeal. James Qwilleran, the heavily mustached former crime reporter who has settled in Pickax in Moose County, somewhere four hundred miles north of everywhere, gets pulled into another local mystery alongside his two Siamese cats Koko and Yum Yum.

In this entry Qwill takes a break from his usual Pickax routine to visit the Potato Mountains, a small mountainous community whose tourist industry has been built around the region’s particular geography and the various recreational activities that the mountains support. The sudden change of setting from the lakeside Pickax community of the rest of the series gives the novel its distinctive flavor, with the mountain culture, the particular dangers of the landscape, and the small isolated community that Qwill encounters during his visit providing a different kind of cozy mystery setting from the more familiar Moose County entries.

The central case develops when Qwill, characteristically, ends up investigating a death that the local authorities have decided to treat as natural causes. The mountain setting introduces complications that the standard Pickax cases do not have, with the geography itself becoming part of the mystery and the slow recognition that someone in the small mountain community has been actively concealing what actually happened driving the case toward its eventual resolution. Koko and Yum Yum accompany Qwill on the trip and the cats’ presence in the unfamiliar environment gives Braun room to develop their characters in ways that the established Pickax setting did not always allow.

Braun’s plotting is gentle by mystery standards. Violence happens off the page. Suspects are usually pleasant people with reasons to be uncomfortable rather than dangerous criminals with motives to kill. The pleasure of a Cat Who book is the slow accumulation of detail, the warm sense of place, and the quiet humor of Qwill’s observations on whatever situation he has been pulled into. The mountain setting in this entry gives Braun room to indulge her affection for regional detail while still delivering the central murder mystery that the genre requires.

For longtime fans of the Cat Who series, The Cat Who Moved a Mountain is one of the more interesting middle period entries because of its setting change. The book gives readers a glimpse of how the formula could work outside the established Pickax world while still delivering the cozy mystery pleasures that the wider series is built around. For new readers, starting with The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is the better entry point.