The Cat Who Sniffed Glue

The Cat Who Sniffed Glue is the eighth Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 1988. 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 turns on the apparent suicide of a respected local banker, which the wider Pickax community has accepted at face value but which Qwill begins to suspect was actually murder. Koko’s particular interest in sniffing glue, which gives the novel its title and which has nothing directly to do with the contemporary slang sense of the phrase, turns out to be a clue to what actually happened, and the slow unfolding of the case follows Qwill’s usual methods of journalistic curiosity combined with feline assistance.

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 eight, 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 late 1980s 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.

For longtime fans, The Cat Who Sniffed Glue 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.