I've been rather vocal and forward with my complaints about the recent additions to the supporting Cat Who... cast like Thornton Haggis, Rollo McBee, and Pender Wilmot. To be succinct for fear of overrepitition otherwise, their characters are insipid, indistinct, and add nothing to the Cat Who... world - and yet such personnages have kept being added to the series over the last few books. One might wonder what Braun's purpose is in this, and I have a theory.
The settings of the Cat Who...s tend to mirror Braun's then-current environment - when she began writing the books during her tenure on the Detroit Free Press, she made her hero a big-city reporter who was a composite of five male journalists she knew personally, and when she resumed the series after her eighteen-year hiatus, she moved Qwilleran to Moose County, modeled on the Michigan countryside which had become her new home in the interim. Braun relocated again to the mountains of North Carolina in 1989, three years after which came The Cat Who Moved a Mountain. Moved a Mountain read much like Braun may have been at least initially considering changing the series venue to the Potato Mountains; she seems to take a bit more care than in other one-shot locales in crafting the world of the Potatoes, paying more attention to defining the local geography and the various landmarks in relation each other's positions, and spending more time to establish the network of characters and relationships. Qwilleran was given another splendid residence to inhabit in Tiptop - barren in Mountain's timeframe due to the former owner's sweep of the premises, but not without potential or atmosphere (hey, you can't beat the view) - and the book was set at an ideal time for such a significant transition, the end of Qwilleran's five-year stay in Moose County mandated by the terms of his inheritance - a transition that would once again allow Braun to write about a place more like where she then (and now) lived, the North Carolina mountains. (You can indeed find little bits and pieces of the South creeping into the Moose County books created in the '89-'92 interim, such as with Talked to Ghosts's Boswells, with whom Braun seems to take delight in recreating a bit of the accent with Verona's lilting, pseudo-interrogative sentence endings, or with Knew a Cardinal's focus on the genteel world of horse breeding and steeplechases, a more popular pastime in the South than in Michigan.)
For whatever reason, though, Braun decided against such a move in the end - probably because she realized that Moose County was too beloved among the fans to junk (in maintaining this site, I've met a significant number of devotees who buy the books just to periodically revisit such a comforting place, all the other potential draws of the series (Qwill, the cats, the mysteries) go hang) and that Qwilleran had too much unfinished business and too many developing relationships to just have the man suddenly up and leave (indeed, the next book after Mountain, The Cat Who Wasn't There, concentrated heavily on old character relationships and resultant unresolved plot threads and featured a diverse and surprisingly cooperative and cohesive Moose County supporting cast to pitch in to help find the killer). And if a bit of the South snuck into Moose County beforehand, then a bit of Pickax popped up in the Potatoes - Bill Treacle and Sabrina Peel are strongly reminiscent of Junior Goodwinter and (an insufferably arrogant) Fran Brodie - so the county was not entirely absent from her mind during penning Moved a Mountain. Even though she recognized how vital the Michigan setting had become to the series, though, judging from the amount of work Braun invested in Mountain's setting, it's doubtful that she'd drop the desire to somehow work her experiences in North Carolina into the books just like that.
Which brings me to my theory - the recent glut of new supporting characters have been part of an another, alternate attempt by Braun to "change the venue" to her home area not by physical locale but by working in people she knows from her home into the story. Ironically, this theory could explain why they're relatively ill-defined; when describing characters based on friends, many writers tend to overlook detailing to readers traits with which they (the authors) are so familiar they take for granted - they know their friends so well that they're likely to jump to having the narrative relate to that person on the same level of familiarity, without going through the typical prerequisite proper introduction and character establishment readers usually need to really get to know (and like) a character themselves. (This mistake is very prevalent in fanfics.) Thus, we get new entries like Rollo and Thornton, whom both Qwilleran and the story seem to think are such grand old guys and blazing individuals but whom seem unengaging and devoid of uniqueness to readers. This would also explain why these characters seem so aimless in Moose County, since they weren't created to fill a niche in the Moose County community, but just for the sake of shoehorning avatars of the author's real-life acquaintances into Pickax to have some of her friends in the story. (The new characters' other half-developed accoutrements, such as Pender's and Rollo's existant-but-rather-ambiguous-and-very-in-the-background wives and children, might also be an offshoot of their strong identification with their real-life counterparts - the author feels that since such "accessories", so to speak, are part of the basis for Thornton, Rollo, or Pender, they must be included in their Cat Who... alter-egos, even though they aren't necessary or well-used in the book characters. The transience of actual people's lives and personalities also poses a problem, since, in order to remain true to their models, the character must change with them, even if (like with Thornton's ever-changing disposition and vague profession) there isn't any reason in the world of the books for such a change to occur. The identities of Braun's earlier, more usual supporting characters are more firmly established - and in a place like Moose County that provides a comfort zone for so many, stability is a virtue.)
This also, depressingly, might indicate that Braun's interest in the series is waning, if she feels she has to bring real-life friends into Moose County for the place to hold her attention and affection - especially that now, with Robbed a Bank, the new avatar-characters seem poised to take over the roles better-developed folks have played - Barry Morghan replacing Junior Goodwinter as the jocular, cheerful career-minded young man, Kirt Nightingale replacing Eddington Smith as the local book expert.
Just a theory - albeit one with a pessimistic outlook, as all my theories seem to sport lately.
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