Episode 2 - The Cat Who Could Read Backward (the book that started it all!)

 Greetings Friends!

Our first Episode is live and can be found on most of your favorite streaming platforms!

Fair warning, there are spoilers ahead (for a 50+ year old book, but if you don't want to know - read it first and then venture ahead!)


All caught up?  Great!!

In our first episode, Luke and I talk about The Cat Who Could Read Backwards - the very first book in this series.  The Qwill we meet here is a very different Qwill than we'll meet in the last book, but Koko is his same gastronomically inclined, possibly psychic self.  

We see murder committed for jealousy and possessiveness.  We get a glimpse into the fine art scene and newsrooms of the 1960s, and of course sexism for days!!

Considering that LJB worked on a newspaper for 40 years, I can only imagine what she encountered through the years, and I find it interesting that her writing perspective is that of a man in his mid-40s who perpetrates a lot of what she probably dealt with on a daily basis - (The "that's just how it was" feeling, the inevitable “Girl” reporter comments, a photographer recites some woman’s chest waist hip measurements at the Press Club bar, the butch lesbian literally named Butchy…) Women aren’t really given much agency here - they are dismissed, considered fragile and in need of protection, or loud and abrasive and to be avoided at all cost.  Or somewhat pitied in the case of Butchy. She’s also obsessed with who they were before they married - and tends to marry money to money. A lot of the names she mentions will come back in these early books, which helps create the world of a major city where a few wealthy patrons basically support everything (Names to remember - the Pennimans and the Duxburys)

As a side note - Qwill is annoyed when he first walks in to the news room by the presence of (GASP!) an electric pencil sharpener!!! It's a totally different world from now - newspapers had multiple editions per day, the unions were strong and there was a sense of camaraderie among journalists and newspaper workers in their various clubs and coffee shops that is sadly missing in our time of online 24-hour news cycles.

Qwill here smokes a pipe, which is a bit more thoughtful than a plain cigarette - the cleaning and the tamping of the tobacco, the puffing and so on.  LJB is clearly familiar with pipes and their rituals and she enjoys the time it giver Qwill to think about things 

My other Thoughts: 

How does one smooth a mustache with ones’ knuckles?


Regarding the mystery - it is admittedly hard to predict who the killer is if they don’t actually appear until the very last scene. It's a very clear break with the Agatha Christie style of presenting all the suspects and having a pretty good sense that the most unlikely person in the group probably did it. She also, at least in the beginning, never does her mysteries the same way twice!

One thing she does always do (at least thus far) is that the title is represented somewhere in the story:

Koko does actually read a newspaper headline backwards!


It’s a solid set up for a series - nosy man, psychic cat, and the reporter’s privilege to be welcomed almost anywhere (at least back in the 60s.)


To join the fun - here's the link to this episode!

https://thecatwhopodcast.podbean.com/e/episode-02-the-cat-who-read-backwards/

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