I’m in the mood for light reads this week. What could be lighter than amateur sleuths solving murders with the help of cats and dogs? I’ve picked a novel published eighty-five years ago by a prolific American Golden Age Mystery writer. It’s the earliest example of pets in crime that I’m aware of (Please let me know if you’re aware of an earlier one). It’s set in California and involves two sisters and a cat called Samantha. The other book is from this century, is set in an English village and involves a vicar, a cat called Maurice and a dog called Bouncer.
I’m hoping for some entertaining escapism and maybe some sunshine to read it in.
“The Cat Saw Murder“ (1939) by Dolores Hitchens
‘The Cat Saw Murder‘ is the first book in a thirteen-book series of Rachel Murdock mysteries with cats in the title that ran from 1939 to 1956. I’m intrigued, partly because this is such an early example of an amateur sleuth with a cat, partly because it must be a very long-lived cat if it’s around twelve books and seventeen years later and partly because, in the first book, Rachel Murdock is already seventy years old.
This will be my first Dolores Hitchens book (although I have her h1958 standalone novel, ‘Fools Gold’ which Jean Luc Goddard made into the movie ‘Bande à Part’ in 1964, on my TBR shelves). She was one of the most prolific American women writers of Golden Age Mysteries and I’m hoping this will give me a view of what her writing was like at the start of her career, which had only started a year earlier.
Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death in 1973. She also wrote as D. B. Olsen, a version of her first married name, and under the pseudonyms Dolan Birkleyand Noel Burke.
She is the author of forty-four books as Dolores Hitchens, half of which were standalone novels. She’s best known for ‘Fools’ Gold‘ (1958) and ‘The Watcher‘ (1959).
“A Load Of Old Bones” (2007) by Suzette A. Hill
So, this was a cover (and a title) that I just couldn’t ignore. When I visited Suzette A Hill’s website and found out that, having taught English Literature throughout her working life, she only got around to writing fiction in her retirement at the age of sixty-four, I was intrigued. What sold me on the book was Suzette Hill’s description of her novels. She says:
“The books are ‘retro’ in that they are set in the 1950s, and although dealing with crime are basically light-hearted. Their main concern is the characters and how they react to the situations (often embarrassing) in which they find themselves. There is not much hard violence, but plenty of absurdity!”
That’s exactly what I’m in the mood for at the moment.
Suzette A. Hill was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, in 1941. She is a graduate of Nottingham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne Universities. Hill taught English literature all her professional life. At age sixty-four and retired, she tried her hand at a short story – just to see what writing fiction felt like, and to her surprise a quintet of humorous novels (Reverend Francis Oughterard series) was the result.
Mike Finn's Fiction 