It's been six months since the events of Backwards, and Qwilleran is ready to request a change of assignment. The managing editor is glad to oblige - but he does so by setting him up as editor of a new Sunday interior decorating supplement, which makes Qwill Not Happy. With Odd Bunsen as his reluctant, discontented-and-not-afraid-to-let-anyone-know-about-it photog, Qwill tromps off to his first shoot, the marble mansion of jade collector G. Verning Tait. Unfortunately, the day after the story goes to press, the jades are stolen and the rich man's wife is found dead. Tait puts the blame on his homesick Mexican houseboy Paolo (who apparently fled home the night the jade was stolen) and the Fluxion (for publishing such detailed pictures of his collection), but Qwilleran naturally suspects otherwise and strives to a) prove that the responsibility for the crimes lies elsewhere and b) keep his Gracious Abodes magazinelet afloat in the face of a series of humiliating, debilitating disasters.
Alas, while the plot about Qwilleran's involvement with the magazine develops well, the mystery really doesn't. Gone is the smooth clockwork, complexity, and sheer ingenuity of the previous effort; instead, Danish Modern simply throws in a lot of red herrings and a web of coincidental, meaningless relationships at the reader in an attempt to distract from conclusions that (even to the characters) are perfectly obvious. Admittedly, the sheer number of the red herrings is nearly overpowering and the subplots are entertaining, but they don't outweigh the saliency of the solution or the artificiality of the device.
That said, though, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, due to the strong material concerning the production of the decorating magazine. Qwilleran's frustrated passion for hard news and investigative reporting and his dutiful atempts to apply such to integrity and values to this frivolous assignment endeared the man to me. His desperate, fervent, and outright angered (but futile) controlled outburst at the end of chapter 6 in trying to convince the unsympathetic managing editor that something-is-going-on-here left me as exasperated as he was and full of respect for Qwill's resilience. And if our hero's gradual sinking horror in being relegated to the art beat in Backwards was funny, his astonished flabbergast at the prospect of writing about interior decorating is hilarious. He recovers more quickly than he did the first time, though. I love how the newsman's killer instinct changes Qwilleran's attitude (his initial attitude, anyway) from "Gracious Abodes? Is that the name of the thing?" to "Sister, keep your hands off my magazine" in under five minutes. One complaint, though - the role of women's editor Fran Unger in the story should have been prolonged. Fran trying to make a play for control of the magazine and Qwilleran, and Qwilleran fending off both advances, made for amusing interplay (and a heckuva three-way phone "conversation" between the two and Koko), but it's dropped after a couple of chapters, which is disappointing. But anyhow.
Getting back on track what made the book for me were the scenes of Qwill and Odd on the job - going from shoot to shoot, knocking down doors, talking to clients, reacting from stuation after crazy situation, kvetching about being demoted to such an assignment, and, after all the hassle, seeing fate conspire against them to blow their work up in their faces (and being sent out to do it all over again). Indeed, such scenes compose near the entire body of the book, but following the characters through their everyday work habits is both interesting and makes you more attached to them; what Danish Modern lacks of Backwards's divine inspiration, it makes up in leg work. Likewise, though the interior decorating sub-culture is not as developed or absorbing as Qwilleran's previous investigaion of the art sub-culture (though the detour to the Planned Ugliness studio seems to combine the best of both worlds), I enjoyed the characters Qwill meets in the course of putting togehter Gracious Abodes. I found decorator David Lyke to be charming company (even if he was sniping and careless), and Jacques Boulanger's autobiographical chat with Qwill and outlook on life were engaging, even if his character (unsatisfactorily) didn't come to much. Harry Noyton is one of my favorite Cat Who... supporting characters - he's "aggressive, rich, lonely" and gregarious bear of a man who "likes to be liked", treats everyone as his close friend, and is more than willing to share his wealth (which he enjoys but to the pursuit of which he isn't too devoted and doesn't take seriously) to gain companionship. Even though he's only met Qwilleran once, he loans him his posh apartment rent-free while he's on vacation in Europe and calls him up daily when he's away on business to touch base, chit-chat, and give business reports; Harry Noyton (even his name "sounds right" for his character) manages to be comical, lovable, and piteous all at the same time, and he's the type of little touch that only Braun would add.
And then there's Odd Bunsen. Odd's antics kept me riveted all throughout Danish Modern (and were quite welcome in view of Arch Riker's conspicuous near-absence). Only Odd Bunsen would drive around a rural community honking the horn and waving at strangers just to have them "spend the whole day figuring who they know that drives a foreign car and smokes cigars". Only Odd Bunsen would walk into a photo shoot shouting "Where're the girls? Bring on the girls!". (I find it mind-boggling, by the way, that an experienced newshound and a seen-it-all photographer never picked up on the true nature of the "boarding house for career girls", complete with plush canopied beds in every room and the "den mother" inviting them to "meet the girls some evening...you name it, we got it".) And only Odd Bunsen, roaring drunk and coming off a string of asinine behavior (being funny in the way people never are when they're drunk in real life, but funny), would, upon discovering that Koko has run away from home and taken roost in an apartment several balconies away, deduce that the only logical way to get him back would be to... oh, but I can't spoil what is perhaps the pinnacle of all the Cat Who... mysteries' comedic interludes.
The subplot about Koko's newfound loneliness was also a nice, gentle touch. The way Braun slips small offhand details of Koko's despondency and erratic behavior into the descriptive prose to depict how Qwilleran is overlooking the warning signs of his lonesomeness was well-done. I'm glad that Braun elected to continue the development of Koko as a full-fledged character with very human dimensions instead of a plot device, and, though I was thankful, for Koko's sake, that the problem was somewhat resolved with the introduction of Yum Yum at the end (though I have doubts as to how much of a companion Qwilleran's "little sweetheart" makes for a cat of Koko's intelligence, considering her generally dim mental facilities), I, personally, was relieved to see that someone else was missing Mountclemens as much as I was.
The only person whose presence I didn't exactly find welcome was Alacoque Wright, Qwilleran's young architect love interest. She's young and impudent, and (save for an occasional display of occupational knowledge and an affinity for natural foods) devoid of much depth of personality or even quirky idiosyncracies; I don't understand what Qwilleran sees in her. Well, OK, I canunderstand what Qwilleran sees in her (hm-hm-hmmmm), but...the chemistry's just not there. They don't even seem close to each other. Miss Wright doesn't add anything to the story, save to exist as another thrown-in monkey-wrench plot element later on in an already crowded field of red herrings. She should have been better developed or dropped entirely.
I'm a bit harsh in comparing The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern to its predecessor, since a book like The Cat Who Could Read Backwards comes along only once in a blue moon. While it's true that it lacks the utter brilliance of its forebearer, Braun's magic comes through in nearly every other area, and her sheer hard work pays off to create a breezy, exceptionably enjoyable book. We may be just fooling around much of the way, but Qwilleran and friends aren't bad company to fool around with, and that makes Danish Modern one of Braun's best efforts.
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