The Cat Who Went Up the Creek

The Cat Who Went Up the Creek is the twenty fourth Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 2002. By this point in the series, the routine is familiar to long time readers and is 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 book Qwill is staying at the Nutcracker Inn, a country lodge along the Black Creek, and the discovery of a body in the woods nearby starts the slow unspooling of a local mystery involving a missing logger, an unfriendly innkeeper, and a community that knows more than it is willing to say. 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 was eighty nine years old when this book came out, and there is a slight melancholy quality to the late entries in the series that earlier volumes did not have. The Pickax world she had been building since 1966 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. Either way, the Cat Who series remains one of the great cozy mystery franchises in American fiction.