The Cat Who Said Cheese

The Cat Who Said Cheese is the eighteenth Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 1996. 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. Koko, in particular, has the unexplained gift of noticing things that turn out to be clues, and Qwill has long since stopped pretending he does not pay attention.

In this entry the case begins when an explosion at the Hotel Booze in downtown Pickax kills a guest whose identity nobody seems to know. The mysterious victim becomes the central question of the case, with Qwill’s investigation slowly turning up connections to a wider situation that the small Pickax community has been carefully not discussing. The cheese theme that gives the novel its title relates to a specific food festival that the Pickax community is hosting alongside the murder investigation, and the festival activities provide both the narrative scaffolding and the various comic moments that the series excels at.

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. By book eighteen, the regular cast of Pickax characters had developed enough that longtime readers were as invested in the supporting players as in the central mystery of any individual book.

The mid 1990s entries in the Cat Who series are some of the strongest in the long sequence. Braun was at the height of her powers as a cozy mystery writer, the Pickax world had been built out enough to feel fully realized, and the Koko mythology had been established without the formula yet feeling repetitive. The cheese festival setting in this novel gives Braun room to indulge her affection for small town community events while still delivering the central murder mystery that the genre requires.

For longtime fans, The Cat Who Said Cheese is a comfortable entry that delivers the series pleasures. For new readers, starting with The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is the better entry point, but the books work in any order with some loss of continuity context.