The Mystery of the Cat Mystery

Mid-pandemic, I was speaking with a semi-stranger at a playground where our children were playing semi-together. Her son, maybe six or seven years old, could effortlessly hitch himself up to the top of the park’s lampposts. On seeing her son some thirty feet in the air, the woman shrugged and said that it was unfortunate that his father encouraged him. This was in Montreal, where more than the usual number of people become circus acrobats, often in what one might call high-art circus groups. I love watching acrobats. An acrobat, like a cat, does things that seem like they might lead to death but don’t. One of my dogs, then a puppy, was with me at the park and the woman told me that she and her son’s father, though they were separated and disagreed on much, had together chosen the age at which they would give their son a puppy, so that he could have this constant companion even as he had to go back and forth between two homes. That age was ten. The idea was that the dog would not die before the boy went to college, or joined the circus. I wish I’d thought to recommend to her to get a cat instead, because cats can be expected to live seventeen years, or maybe forever. Also, the kid’s name was Felix.

We had impulsively got our cat in 2020—if putting one’s name down on a waiting list for a very hypoallergenic cat not yet born can be termed impulsive. Once we had her, I understood how imagining such a creature with a dashing cap and boots, as per the fairy tale “Puss in Boots,” might seem normal; our cat is adventurous and masterly, and she can scale any bookshelf, balance on a doorframe, outwrestle her two dog sisters, and lap water silently. In the Charles Perrault version of “The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots,” from 1697, a poor miller has died, dividing his modest possessions among his three sons. The oldest brother gets the mill, the middle a donkey, and the youngest a cat. The youngest is not pleased with his share. I can eat the cat and use the fur, he complains, but then what?

The cat overhears this. He grasps that his survival depends on becoming valuable to his new master. Through a series of ingenious lies, he enables his master to marry a princess and obtain a fortune. Like all of Perrault’s fairy tales, “Puss in Boots” ends with a summarizing moral: a large inheritance is great, but wits and hard work are greater. The reader, however, knows full well that the son has done no work of note; nor has he shown any wits. The stated moral is obviously untrue! But, of course, the reader is supposed to see themselves not in the human but in the cat. Then the moral makes sense. For the boot-wearing cat, the world is not fair, and he is not the primary beneficiary of his wits and hard work, but his hard work and wits do at least keep him from being skinned and eaten.

In the animated movie “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” which my daughter persuaded me to watch with her, Puss is stalked by death, incarnated in the form of a scythe-carrying wolf. The movie’s setup is that Puss—legendary, celebrated, voiced by Antonio Banderas—has died eight times; he has only one life left. Will he have to change his ways now that death is truly existential? He abandons his fame, his swashbuckling, and his dignity, and moves in with a crazy cat lady who protects and feeds innumerable cats.

The most moving character is a cheerful abandoned small dog, Perrito, who disguises himself as a cat, so that he can stay at the crazy cat lady’s home. Perrito tells Puss his backstory, which he describes as very funny—he was put in a sock, along with a rock, and thrown into a river by his family. He says that the joke is on them, though, since he still wears the sock as a sweater. Perrito’s story was going to be a dog story—the dog dies—until he found his way into living the life of a cat.

But there are also cat stories that reveal themselves to be dog stories. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, author of more than a dozen novels, wrote a slim memoir, “All My Cats,” about the half-feral cats that he and his wife fed at their country retreat. In the course of the book, the cats have kittens, naturally. Hrabal, who loves the cats, becomes so deranged by his sense of responsibility and by the intensity of his emotions that in a mad fever of impulse he murders a sack full of kittens. Like Macbeth awakening to the reality of his unholy deed, he sees in the small kitten bodies the horrors of his century. It’s a magnificent, morally searching book—but on the internal shelf of the mind I would place it amid the canine collection.

I said that I find murder the least interesting kind of crime on which to center a detective novel. Why does most everybody feel otherwise? Is it that imaginary murders safely sate murderous impulses, and that such impulses are experienced by many? Or are murders a way to look at the whistling wolf of death himself from the perspective of a problem that can be solved? When I was about ten years old, our home was robbed a few times; the thief took only the cash he found in wallets. When the police came by, I remember being confused that they didn’t pay us back, as would be fair, and I similarly retain a childish expectation that solving a murder mystery will restore life—as would be fair. “The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal” is in the middle of the “Cat Who . . .” series, which I have read in no deliberate order. In it, Qwill, KoKo, and Yum Yum are living in the town of Pickax, population about three thousand. Having inherited an enormous amount of money and an estate, Qwill and his cats live in a fancy renovated barn on the property, and they throw a party for the local theatre group, which has put on, with surprising success, the tragedy of King Henry VIII. Shortly after the party disperses, the play’s director is shot in the back of the head. Later, a second person is found dead, hanged by the neck from an overhead beam in the barn.

Shouldn’t everyone flee when Qwill (or Poirot or another detective of choice) shows up to a party or seaside resort, or moves into the neighborhood? The number of murders that these guys happen upon is absurd—unless the murders are understood as stand-ins for all death. In real life, murders are rare; people dying in other ways is not. If the murders in murder mysteries are, for emotional purposes, just “ordinary” death in disguise, then the body count starts to feel more reasonable. Muriel Spark, in her novel “Memento Mori,” captures this sentiment precisely: a group of elderly people begin receiving anonymous phone calls in which the speaker says, “Remember you must die.” And, in the course of the novel, the characters do, in fact, die, one after another, but mostly from the ailments of old age. Murder mysteries do such a good job of appearing to be about exceptional crimes, about violations of the norm. By avoiding death’s inevitability, they make a contour drawing of it. But, in identifying a killer, they solve only the screen mystery; the real mystery, that of mortality, remains.