The Cat Who Talked Turkey

The Cat Who Talked Turkey is the twenty sixth Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 2004. 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 mystery turns on a discovery made on Qwill’s own property. A body is found in the woods on the back acreage of his orchard, and the connections to several apparently unrelated incidents in the wider Pickax community begin to surface as he investigates. The wild turkeys that have become regular visitors to Qwill’s property give the novel its title and provide the occasion for some of the gentle humor about country living that Braun’s late entries excel at. The mystery is the kind of carefully constructed cozy puzzle her readers enjoy without being especially difficult to solve.

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 twenty six the regular cast of Pickax characters had become as much a draw for longtime readers as the cats themselves.

Lilian Jackson Braun was in her late eighties when this book came out, and the late entries in the series have a slight melancholy quality that the earlier volumes did not have. The Pickax world she had built across nearly forty years had become a kind of refuge for her readers, a place where the worst things were manageable and the cats always solved the case in time. For long time fans, this book delivers exactly that. For new readers, starting with The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is the better entry point.