The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern

1967, 1986 Jove Books edition
Lilian Jackson Braun
The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern
Original price $3.50, purchase price unknown
Very worn paperback
B

In the second Cat Who, it's six months after the February and March of Could Read Backwards, and Qwilleran is "over forty-five."  He's still working at the Fluxion newspaper, but now he's been given the assignment of running a Sunday supplement on interior design, which he knows no more about than he does about modern art.  He's adopted Koko, although it was implied in the first book that Mountclemens's sister might take the cat.  Koko is eating wool, including a Danish modern chair.  (Hence the punning title).  Jim visits a "psycatrist" who advises him to get a second cat.  Conveniently, a female Siamese has been orphaned by the death of her rich human.  And so we meet Yum Yum.  (Jim renames her because the cat lady knows Gilbert & Sullivan.)  Speaking of names, one character calls Jim "Qwill" but it is not yet the common nickname it'll become later.

The mystery is again secondary to other plots, and too much of the solution is delivered to Jim (by phone calls as well as by Koko) without him figuring it out, but Jim does get a more interesting love interest, Cokey Wright, the witty young female architect.  There are more memorable supporting characters overall.  The LGBT element is subtler and impacts the plot less, but there is innuendo about the leanings of handsome, young male designers.  It's a less obviously '60s book than Read Backwards, although a couple characters are "Negroes" and a woman gets a Reno divorce.