Within lies a long overdue review of The Cat Who Had 14 Tales.
14 Tales is, as most of you probably know, a collection of short stories written by Cat Who... author Lilian Jackson Braun, all cat-related (but not, depsite the similar cover design, Cat Who...-related, save for "The Mad Museum Mouser", which involves Moose County supporting characters Rhoda Finney and Homer Tibbitt, and "Tipsy and the Baord of Helath", which gives us the backstory of the famed cat from Kennebeck and her tavern). Five of the fourteen - "Phut Phat Concentrates", "The Dark One", "SuSu and the 8:30 Ghost", "The Sin of Madame Phloi", and "Tragedy on New Year's Eve" - were written during the '60's and published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (not all of the stories, contrary to what other sources and, as of this writing, this very site's FAQ say (gonna hafta fix that)); the rest, I presume, were written around the middle-late '80's (the book was published in 1988). Can a difference in Braun's writing style be detected? What the hey, I'll say yes, much like the difference between the Down Below and Moose County Cat Who... episodes - the Ellery Queen '60's ones are darker, feature a tenser atmosphere, and focus more on the cats, who are generally more memorable; the '80's ones focus more on "local color" and local (human) characters.
14 Tales is a good buy for Braun fans - there a couple spectacular successes (that are best appreciated if you're a cat aficionado) and a goodly share of worth-your-time reads. There indeed are disappointments, but none of them are horrible - most of the "bad" ones come off as flawed rather than incompetent (save for "Weekend of the Big Puddle", which is).
But why keep jawboning expositionally? Let's get to the main event - the stories:
"Phut Phat knew, at an early age, that humans were an inferior breed. They were unable to see in the dark. They ate and drank unthinkable concoctions. And they had only five senses; the pair who lived with Phut Phat could not even transmit their thoughts without resorting to words."
"For more than a year, ever since arriving at the townhouse, Phut Phat had been trying to introduce his system of communication, but his two pupils had made scant progress. At dinnertime he would sit in a corner, concentrating, and suddenly they would say: 'Time to feed the cat,' as if it were their own idea."
"Phut Phat Concentrates" is THE definitive psychoanalysis of and paean to the Siamese, personifying all the uniquely transcendent traits of the species Braun described through Mountclemens in Chapter 5 of The Cat Who Could Read Backwards. To be frank, it's tough to properly review or adequately praise the story, save to say that it proves its case for feline superiority the best way it can - by affording us a glimpse into a Siamese's perspective and thought process during a few days of routine and unroutine events at his household, and doing an exceptional job of doing so. (Why do you think I started my review by quoting extensively from it? The story is its own best argument for its excellence.) Phut Phat's confident dignity makes the humans, those whose minds "hop about like sparrows", and all their frivolous chatter seem all the more hopelessly mired in their own limitations and ridiculousness and, well, mortal beside - or, more appropriately, below him. Far from me, a lowly human, to contradict Phut Phat's sagacity, but Braun's piercing articulateness here makes words seem like not such an inferior way to transmit thoughts - or insights - after all. A
One word best describes "Weekend of the Big Puddle" - overplayed. It concerns an English cat and his humans, recently transplanted to upper Midwest logging country (familiar territory), visited first by an obnoxious Texas couple, then by a pair of even worse-behaved ghosts. The characters, however, are nothing beyond overblown stereotypes - Cornelius and Margaret, the prim and proper English folk, Bill and Deedee Diddleton, the overbearing hick Southerners, Morgan Black and Pigtail Beebe, the yahoo frontiersmen of the overly colorful language - even the cat, Percy, is uninteresting. Moreover, the expositional prose is is written in a precious, faux-stately-serious style that's so cloying, it's a turn-off. D+. Next.
"The Fluppie Phenomenon" is a cute story about a likable, sensible couple's tribulations with taking care of a relative's crafty and curious young Siamese princess. Anyone who has lived with a Fluppie - an "upwardly mobile feline", as the tale explains - can identify with the couple's travails, and I appreciated the tale's unpresumptuous tone and the natural, relatively straightforward narration by the wife. B+
"The Hero of Drummond Street" stars a stray feline dubbed "The Drooler" (for his unfortunately distinctive habit) that hangs around the titular avenue - owned by no one, fond of everyone, though his affections are not returned - who loses the tip of his tail (and doesn't much mind), finds a gas leak, and becomes a celebrity. The Drooler is an affable cuss, but the residents of Drummond Street are intolerable brats and self-absorbed would-be yuppies ("each family owned two cars, three bicycles, a tricycle, a baby stroller, a power mower, and an electric lawn edger" (they're would-be yuppies that breed like rabbits, what's worse)), and it's downright painful to see them profiteer from the Drooler's heroism, so the supposedly happy ending ain't all that happy. The story is fairly insubstantial, too. C
A connection to Moose County - "The Mad Museum Mouser" follows a would-be author of a book about "minor museums of the northeast central U.S." to the Lockmaster Museum, where she meets Rhoda Finney, Homer Tibbitt, and a seemingly rabid resident cat with a secret. The real focus here is not on the cat but on the small slice of Moose County served up - the family history of Lockmaster, the li'l convincing touches that make it 400 miles north of everywhere (like the police cruiser circling the block three times upon spotting an unfamiliar car or Homer's exit line after relating his incredible tale to the reporter as she leaves), and the well-rendered familiar faces of Rhoda and Homer, who prove more than capable of carrying a tale on their own - the story makes an excellent case for a few more short stories featuring other Cat Who... supporting characters in the spotlight. I didn't care for the interviewer too much, though - too much of a cross between teeny-bopper, committee woman, and superciliousness. B
"The Dark One" - A Siamese saves his mistress from her abusive husband. The story reads like a combination of "Phut Phat Concentrates" (the Siamese viewpoint) and "The Sin of Madame Phloi" (catly revenge, right down to the exact method) and suffers greatly in comparison to either. "Dark One" does not contain quite the sharp insights into a Siamese's view on the world that "Phut Phat" does (though Dakh Won is a less confident cat than Phut Phat, and I did like how he took comfort in homebody pleasures like "sprawling full-length in any patch of sun that warmed the rug" or exploring a "fascinating new world of fringed rugs, cozy heat registers, wide windowsills, soft chairs, and a grand piano") nor the satisfaction that "Phloi"'s vengeful tale yielded. Though I much liked Dakh Won himself, it's tough to care about the victim he risks his life to protect when she doesn't much care about herself - she seems to regard her husband's threats and curses and abuses as...cute more than anything, and she never thinks of much less attempts to extricate herself from the situation she's in - not because of the usual battered-woman's inhibitor of fear, but because - well, she just never takes the abuse seriously enough, if at all. She's exasperatingly flighty and dumb - and, on top of all else, it's even more difficult for me to work up sympathy for someone who would drag a poor cat into such a perilous situation. So "Dakh Won" drops to a C+.
"East Side Story" - An elderly woman reminisces about her Flapper-era tale of a feline Romeo & Juliet. The lady is a delightful storyteller, and her racontres of the events at Cat Canyon - and of her own daily life and the times - spin an enchanting, romantic, moving tale that seldom wastes a word. A-
The info given by "Tipsy and the Board of Health" is obviously important to the Moose County oevure, but as a story...I dunno. Yes, we got the word on the cat behind Kennebeck's famed Tipsy's Tavern - but the tale is meandering and anticlimactic and resorts to stock characters in a stock conflict - by-the-book law enforcement vs. country common sense. It would have fared better were it related through a page or two of background from Homer Tibbitt in one of the main Cat Who... series books. C
"A Cat Named Conscience" - A tale told in retrospect of strange goings-on down at a bank during the Twenties. The story itself starts out interesting but degenerates into arbitrariness and pointlessness, and the cat's role is so small that she might as well have been completely excluded from the proceedings. The entire strength of the story lies with the self-confident narrator, who could teach those so-called Moose County "individualists" a thing or two. With her assured, plain-spoken, stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling (she's at times delightfully "unpreoccupied", so to speak, with the main narrative), interspersed with spurts of unrelated personal memories and funny-yet-astute observations on her present-day surroundings, she could make any story interesting - kudos to Braun for endowing the character with such a vivid, realisticly-inflected manner of speaking. The bank stuff is still weak, though, so B.
SuSu and the 8:30 Ghost - Siamese living with two sisters befriend wheelchair-bound antique dealer who later disappears under suspicious circumstances. The plot could've worked well, but none of the characters elicit any sympathy from the reader - Gertrude is aimless, the antique dealer has just three traits - codgerly, German (well, Dutch, but he's painted more like the stereotypical stock literary German), and appreciative of cats - the sister narrating is a complete ignorant, self-importantly obnoxious jerk, and even SuSu the Siamese is barely developed. C-
Before I review "Stanley and Spook", lemme ask you something - can you absolutely not stand pampered yuppie women who sit around bragging about their wonderfully spacious home in the country and their wonderful housekeeper and their husband's wonderful salary and the fabulous vacations it pays for and how they have just a perfect rough and tough little boy but are planning to have a sweet little girl sometime next year - to have a matched set, y'know - and how their husband absolutely takes care of them so that they haven't a care in the world, except accidentally eating one bite too much of their watercress sandwich, which might push them one ounce over their uniform weight of 105 pounds, or what color to paint their dado? Do you just wanna knock 'em back into reality with the business end of a claw hammer? OK, maybe it's just me. But if you're like me, "Stanley and Spook" might not be choice reading material for you. It ostensibly concerns an apparent mind-(or at least personality- or instinct-)swap between a cat and a child at birth, which is a fascinating idea for a story from an author with as much insight into the feline species as Braun, but spends far too much time on the lives and "personalities" (in the loosest sense of the word) of two insufferably self-absorbed, overindulged women of the mold described above - good God, having one of them as the narrator was bad enough. The other fatal flaw in the tale is that its extraordinary goings-on are treated with very little mystery or awe - we're simply presented with the boy's strangely feline behavior (which is very well done) and outright told by the narrator why he's acting this way and (worse yet) why it's spooky. The mind-swap (which needed no rationalization in the first place - supernatural happenings are spookier when one doesn't get too caught up in the explanation for their existence) is given hokey origins - something about the boy's mother being treated by some mean ol' voodoo priestess during what we're told by the mother was an exceptionally difficult pregnancy (though I'm skeptical to believe that the pregnancy actually was difficult, considering that the most painful thing this woman probably experienced before said pregnancy was having her cuticle nicked by a nail file during a manicure. Labor would've sheer torture for this woman in any event - yeesh, even if she had received proper medical assistance, getting her skin pricked by a syringe for an epidural would've been unbearable for her), and the supernatural premise is never developed beyond just that - a premise. Moreover, the "problem" (if one can call it such - would a human with the mind of a cat (or a cat with the body of a human) have been a bad thing, really? Wouldn't that have been a great leap forward in human evolution?) is resolved through a singularly unsatisfactory solution - hey, the cat got run over! Yay! Now that the spell's broken, the boy can be a normal little yuppie brat and grow up to cop an obnoxious attitude with all the menial folks who have to work for a living in society, get arrested for statutory rape and recreational drug use, and splatter himself all over the pavement one night while driving drunk in the BMW he'll have gotten for graduation, as life meant him to! Anyhow, far more confidence in the strength of the story idea and the reader's capabilities - and far less in the yuppie women's - would've turned "Stanley and Spook" into the spellbinding tale it deserved to be. As it is, it merits only a C. And that's being generous. Feel free to ratch that up a grade, though, if yuppie women don't spark homicidal urges within you.
A new visitor has arrived at the posh Hopplewood Farm - "A Cat Too Big for His Whiskers" - among other peculiarites. I won't ruin the surprise, but I will say that story covers material incorporated less successfully in the main Cat Who... series itself - and pulls it off effortlessly, thanks to the whimsical, charming attitude it takes toward it and the Hopple family's ostentatious wealth and how they take outrageous luxuries as matter-of-fact (theirs are the only barn cats that are required to have pedigrees). Refreshingly lightweight and funny and fun. B+
"The Sin of Madame Phloi" is undoubtedly the most famous and most significant of the stories in The Cat Who Had 14 Tales - it's the tale of a female Siamese that avenges her son's death that Braun wrote to exorcise her anger and anguish after having her own Siamese knocked out a window by an insane neighbor - and the first feline-related story she wrote, which eventually led her down current career path. Raw emotion and personal experience prove to be the best authors here - Braun's grief and mournful love for her lost one is so evident in the so tender and convincingly written motherly love and endearment Madame Phloi holds for her child, Thapthim. The tale's three main players are simply, sharply, skillfully drawn, with words meted out sparingly and actions speaking volumes. The plain, declarative, yet vividly - if such a word has any place in such a somber tale - descriptive prose lends weight and form to the story, grounding it in reality and realism, and its narrative tone is very removed, as of one still in shock - or of a numb observer relating an unrelenting tale of necessary, measured vengeance. "Phloi"'s power lies in its deadened understatement and its heartache and grief, muted and internalized but unwilling to be denied - sad, powerful, haunting. A
"Tragedy on New Year's Eve" - A van crashes into a warehouse, killing the driver, and a woman living in a nearby apartment building, drawn to the victim due to his resemblance to her son overseas in the service, begins to take an interest in his life, his widow and children - and evenutally into the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. The story is related through a series of letters written by the woman to her son as the tale unfolds, and while I have to admit that I myself am a sucker for this particular method of storytelling, it works especially well here in allowing the woman in her own words to detail her state of mind and the bond she develops with the dead man - we know that the woman is concerned not because of nosiness, but due to true caring and sympathy for the victim and his widow and children. The story delivers (or, rather, the woman discovers) one twist after another, but the actual motives behind the mystery are disappointingly straightforward, and the cat has nothing to do with the mystery - the woman had enough motivation on her own. This would make a good half-hour teleplay, though. B
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