The Cat Saw Murder: A Rachel Murdock Mystery (An American Mystery Classic)

I didn’t care for the scattered narrative style of the beginning of the story, but once Lily Sticklemann gets murdered, things look up. Lily had invited her Aunt Rachael to visit her in the beach house where she’s staying to advise Lily about some trouble she’s in.Lily is a big woman, unintelligent, greedy about food, and foolish about men. Miss Rachael finds her an embarrassment, but family loyalty takes her to the seaside to help. She brings along a cat named Samantha, who is too attached to Miss Rachael to be left behind. Samantha is an heiress. Rachael’s sister left the cat a fortune. Samantha’s wealth is pivotal in the plot. So are her eccentric habits...Miss Rachael has been a devotee of crime movies, and consequently knows a lot about sleuthing. Her cleverness and daring are what make this vintage mystery ((1939) so much fun. Happily Detective Mayhew recognizes her value, and they become allies. Mayhew is a big man and has the inconvenient habit of destroying any wobbly chair he sits on. He also inconveniently falls in love with one of his many suspects. This is fun.Miss Rachael is 70 years old, but nothing like Miss Marple. She does hide her brains behind fluffy wool and dithering. She is obviously sharp and surprisingly venturesome, though always a lady.I guessed the murderer much sooner than I should have, but it didn’t matter, since the investigation was so entertaining.Joyce Carol Oates, who is currently far more well-known than the obscure Dolores Hitchens, wrote the introduction to this excellent edition of The Cat Saw Murder. Oates attempts to elucidate the peculiar charm of Golden Age mysteries.Hitchens wrote scores of crime novels, twelve of them featuring the charming, indomitable Miss Rachael. I wish more of them were in print.

It’s nice to have the cat as a character but not a sleuth. Well crafted with fine character development and setting.

Very unusual protagonist. I loved this book.

For several years, the British Library has been republishing classic British crime and mystery stories, under the general editorship of crime writer Martin Edwards. On this side of the Atlantic, a similar program has been underway under the title of American Mystery Classics and published by the reigning dean of the American mystery genre, Otto Penzler.One of those classic mysteries is “The Cat Saw Murder” by Delores Hitchens (1907-1973). First published in 1939, when Hitchens was using the pen name of D.B. Olson, the novel is one of the earliest mystery series involving cats (today its own sub-genre). This new edition of the story, published this year, includes an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.Seventy-year-old Rachel Murdock is called by her niece, Lila, who’s vaguely seeking help. Lila has gotten herself into some kind of trouble but won’t be specific. Miss Rachel decides to visit Lila, who is staying at an apartment house in a California seaside resort town. Lila even arranges for Miss Rachel, as she’s known, to have her own set of rooms. And the elderly lady brings the family black cat, Samantha, with her. The cat has the distinction of being the heiress of one of Miss Rachel’s sisters.Miss Rachel, a fan of mystery books and movies, is slightly thrilled to visit her niece. That is, until she’s drugged and the niece murdered in a particularly gruesome way with an ax. Detective Inspector Stephen Mayhew arrives to investigate, and, once she recovers, Miss Rachel finds herself something of a consultant to the inspector. And almost all of the suspects seem perfectly capable of ruthlessly wielding an ax.The story contains elements of the locked room mystery, and the standard bumbling-detective- aided-by-someone-like-Miss-Marple story. Generally, Mayhew and Miss Rachel arrive at major clues and developments at the same time. And Miss Rachel, despite her age, is still athletic enough to do some attic crawling and even breaking and entering.A native of Texas, Hitchens lived much of her life in California. She wrote poetry in college but embarked upon a nursing and teaching career before she became a full-time writer. She wrote numerous mysteries, both standalone stories and in series. The Miss Rachel cat series has 12 books, and Inspector Mayhew is featured in two books apart from Miss Rachel.“The Cat Saw Murder” is a well-written story, even with a couple of late plot developments to bring the story to a close. T times, it seems almost like a contemporary mystery story. Miss Rachel is clearly a self-sufficient woman with a first-rate mind, and she will solve the mystery before the police inspector.

This mystery, originally published in 1939, was the first in what was apparently a successful series of mysteries by Dolores Hitchens featuring a cat. I have to say that I had not previously heard of Hitchens or he cat mysteries but, judging from this one, you can see why they were popular in their day and maybe also why they are largely forgotten today.Although the mystery is decent and the resolution satisfying, the story is marred by multiple people acting in implausible ways. It's always a distraction when you're reading and thinking more than once, "There's no way on earth that she would actually do that." The suspense is killed when the person has put himself or herself into jeopardy by acting very foolishly.The book is also rather gory, particularly for those days. So a warning to anyone who read Golden Age mysteries to avoid that kind of thing.As always with Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics, the book is well produced with a dust jacket new to this edition. Joyce Carol Oates, no less, contributes the introduction, which provides background on Hitchens's career.

I loved it! Thank you Otto Penzler for bringing this classic back. I hope more of this series is reprinted. This is a must read series! I can’t wait for the next book!