Episode 17 - The Cat Who Came to Breakfast

 Episode 17 - The Cat Who Came to Breakfast

    It’s summer in Pickaxe and Polly is off to Oregon to visit her college roommate in Oregon.  As the trip involves birding, Qwill is not invited.  In the meantime, XYZ enterprises is back with a new development - Pear Island!  But the resort is not as idyllic as Don Exbridge wants the public to believe. Food poisoning, a drowning, a boat explosion and collapsed steps all point to a saboteur on the island, and it's up to Qwill and the cats to uncover the plot!

On this podcast, we have a special guest - Denver theatre actor, director and all around impresario, Bernie Cardell!

Listen to the Podcast here:

https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-gxwyc-f9dc08

Thoughts:

Qwill has another about-face - in a previous book, he was against flying to Minneapolis with the Lanspeaks for baseball and shopping, but in this book, he actually suggests it to Polly!  Maybe it’s the company - he’s suggesting going with Arch and Mildred, rather than Larry and Carol Lanspeak. Fair since Carol tried to get him to marry Melinda Goodwinter in the Cat Who Wasn’t There and Mildred has been his comfort food source since Iris’s passing. 

We get a lot of the history of Pear/Breakfast/Providence/Grand Island per Homer Tibbet, now the official Moose County Historian - but he never actually appears!

June Halliburton was being set up as the new Melinda Goodwinter - red hair, heavy perfume, and an inability to take no for an answer…With the added fun of being openly insulting. It seems like replacing Melinda turned out to be an unworkable idea and getting rid of her as the unwanted wife was probably more fun to write. 

Lori is the epitome of Do It Yourself - she cooks the breakfasts (with some local help), painted the doors like Dominos to stay on theme, and brags about making all the slipcovers herself...You win some you lose some.  Breakfasts are delicious, the theme is cute, but the slipcovers are hideous. 

There’s a great scene with a retired clergyman, Arledge Harding, who broke a rib when the Domino Inn steps collapsed - he tells about a Siamese he used to own, named Holy Terror who once upset an entire pitcher of Bloody Mary's all over a visiting bishop during one of his “Siamese Tizzies” (when his wife asks if the story is quite appropriate for company, Harding replies, “ My dear, the bishop has been entertaining the known world with the story for twenty years)

This is the first appearance of Qwill’s favorite name- Ronald Frobnitz. He uses this to justify making strange calls (is Mr. Frobnitz there?)or for himself when he doesn’t want to be recognized. 

We’ve had a few encounters with XYZ enterprises before, but this is the first time we find out exactly how bad they are - overdevelopment, shoddy construction and cutting corners on safety wherever possible.  While there are two other partners (Caspar Young and Dr. Zoller, the dentist), Don Exbridge is the face of the company, and this book reveals what an unattractive face it is. It should be noted that not only was the hotel destroyed in the storm, but also the Riker’s new, XYZ made addition to their beach house!!

LJB seems to write her “native” women very similarly - Comparing Chrysalis Beechum (Cat Who Moved a Mountain) and Harriet Beedle from this book, you get tall, strong women, with more education than most in their area, who are almost “mannish” in their appearances, and who find themselves the spokesperson for their community after the death/imprisonment of a loved one, although in Harriet’s case, she decides to retreat back to her island community instead of confiding in Qwill.  We never hear from her again.

Also, once again, she writes children strangely.  We have a four-year old who babbles unintelligibly, except to his mother and a two-year old who speaks clearly… (never mind Qwill’s crack about them having to change her name if she wants to grow up to be president.  He claims with a name like Lovey, she’ll never make it past the New Hampshire Primary)

At lunch with Elizabeth, we get a sudden dose of Qwilleran history - his name is not, as we have been told, James Mackintosh Qwilleran, but actually Merlin James Qwilleran, due to his mother reading Spenser’s The Fairy Queen while pregnant.  He changed it when he got to college. 

Sign of the times - The Domino Inn has a public phone in the main building, not in the cabins, much less in the individual rooms!  And of course, fax machines and no computers or cell-phones.

Cats will be cats - Koko shredding the June page of the calendar (which turns out to be prophetic). Qwill actually has to throw water on a catfight behind the cabin, and of course, he attempts to feed Koko and Yum Yum meatloaf from Vacation Helpers. At one point he adds smoked oysters as a thank you for driving June away, and they eat the oysters but leave the meatloaf. It turns out, the meatloaf is made with rabbit meat, as well as beef, and the cats don’t like it!  When Qwill gets an all beef loaf just before the storm, they gobble it down. 

Paws - I give this book two and a half paws up. Publisher's Weekly keeps describing these books as “Meandering” and I really have to agree. This is not the tightest of her mysteries, and the final reveal is a bit too pat but it’s still a satisfying read AND Qwill didn’t have to get anybody drunk or escape death to solve the crime! But - it should be pointed out that Qwill didn't actually solve the crime, and certainly not in time to stop any of the accidents from happening. So, it's more like he figured out what happened after the fact.