The Cat Who Tailed a Thief

The Cat Who Tailed a Thief is the nineteenth Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 1997. By this point in the long 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 various small valuable items start disappearing from homes around Pickax. The thefts are professional enough to suggest someone with experience and access, and the small Pickax community begins to look askance at the various newcomers and visitors who have been moving through the town. As Qwill investigates with his usual combination of journalistic curiosity and feline assistance, the case turns out to involve more than just petty theft, with connections to broader criminal activity that the small Moose County police department is not initially prepared to handle.

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 the late 1990s, the regular cast of Pickax characters had become as much a draw for longtime readers as the cats themselves. The librarians, the restaurateurs, the antique dealers, the local journalists, all of them were familiar faces in books that often felt more like visiting old friends than encountering new mysteries.

For longtime fans, The Cat Who Tailed a Thief is a comfortable entry that delivers the series’ familiar 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. Lilian Jackson Braun built her Pickax universe over the course of nearly forty years and twenty nine novels, and the late entries have the particular warmth of a writer who clearly loved the world she had created.