The Cat Who Went into the Closet

The Cat Who Went into the Closet is the fifteenth Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 1993. By this point in the 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, Qwill agrees to housesit at the elaborate Victorian mansion of Junior Goodwinter while Junior and his wife are out of town. The mansion is full of strange architectural quirks, including a mysterious closet that Koko keeps disappearing into. The death of one of Pickax’s prominent older citizens around the same time gives Qwill another case to work, and the two threads weave together as the novel develops. 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 small town life. Braun built her Pickax universe over the course of nearly thirty novels, and longtime readers came to know the recurring cast of librarians, restaurateurs, antique dealers, and local eccentrics as well as the cats themselves. The Victorian mansion setting in this novel gives Braun room to play with the gothic conventions she clearly enjoyed, with hidden passages, family secrets, and the kind of architectural mystery that her readers would associate with classic English country house fiction.

For longtime Cat Who fans, this is one of the stronger entries in the long series. 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.