The Cat Who Could Read Backwards

1966, 1986 Jove Book edition
Lilian Jackson Braun
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards
Original price $2.95, bought newish for unknown (see below)
Very worn paperback with cover torn off
B-

A quarter-century ago I was working in a bookstore.  They would sometimes fail to sell items, so they would then tear off the front covers and sell them marked down.  (I can't remember if the books were available to the general public or just to staff.)  I saw a box set of the first four Cat Who's.  I'd never heard of the series, but at that point there were only five books out.  I've never been a big mystery reader, as you've probably guessed by now.  (I like the genre but it's not one I've spent much time with compared to, say, children's fantasy.)  So I think the only two reasons I bought the box set were it was about a cat, and it was cheap.

I liked the series.  I still like the series.  I own quite a bit of the series.  Yet it did jump the shark at some point.  (Braun died at 97 last year, the final book never published.)  One of the things I'm looking forward to with this blog is figuring out when exactly she put on the Fonzie water-skis. 

But this is long before that.  This is the book where we meet mustached reporter Jim Qwilleran and the clever Siamese title character, Kao K'o-Kung, AKA Koko.  It also introduces Qwilleran's friend Arch Riker, more about him later.  Most of the other characters will have short lives in the series, whether or not they're killed off.  The most interesting is Koko's first human, Mountclemens the vicious art critic.

At the beginning of the book, Jim has just moved to a new city, having survived alcoholism and a bad marriage.  He gets a job as art reporter, although he knows nothing about art.  He interviews the local artists, most of whom have a mutual hatred with Mountclemens.  And, with Koko's help, he solves the mystery, which isn't handled as well as it could be, although not as clumsily as in some of the later books.  Koko doesn't show up till almost a third of the way in, and then he has to make Qwilleran realize that he's revealing clues.  (One character observes that the cat is smarter than Jim.)

Qwilleran's romance is middling as well, with some of it happening offpage.  Zoe is neither the best nor the worst of Jim's various ladies.

What I like most about the story is seeing Braun establish the setting (all of it abandoned a few books later), particularly the '60sness of it.  I'll talk about the gap between Books 3 and 4 when we get there, but there's not any way to retcon these earlier books as being the 1980s, so I'll just assume that there's some weird rip in the time-space continuum that makes Jim horrified by mechanical pencil sharpeners and confused by a Happening.

As for that LGBT label, one of the female suspects is mannish and has a crush on her childhood friend Zoe.  I can only hope her first name was not as anvilly in '66: Butchy.  I also hope that she got over Zoe and met a nice girl named Femmy.