I had forgotten that Reading the Meow 2026 was coming up until I started seeing blog posts appearing, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to fit anything in. I also couldn’t think what to read, since I had gathered up all the obvious candidates on previous iterations of Mallika’s event. And then – Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge came through the door!
It was published in 1945 and is now being reissued as part of Penguin’s American Mystery Classics series. I’ve had a few of these sent, but this is the first I’ve managed to get to – and even if it weren’t for Reading the Meow, I might not have been able to resist the stare of the cat on the cover.
This is Smoky – and let me assure you that Smoky survives the book without injury. I’d put money on her to survive a war. Here is how she opens the first paragraph of the book:
Smoky’s eyes shone yellow and green in the rainy darkness, but her body was only a black shadow punctuated by a dot of white at the tip of her tail. She slid around the corner of the building noiselessly and ran up the railing to the porch. Here she stopped abruptly, her ears back, her wet fur beginning to ruffle. A large object lay on the porch floor, dark and unmoving. Smoky spat at it warningly, received no answer, sat down and regarded it patiently. She circled it, sniffing. Finally satisfied as to its harmlessness and lack of interest to her, she walked over it to get to the window sill. She saw no signs within of what she was seeking, so she walked over it again, descended from the porch, and ran up the large maple tree in front of the building. Halfway up she transferred herself to the roof above the porch, crossed it and landed with a quiet plop on the upstairs window sill.
“Mraw!” wailed Smoky. “Mraw! MRAW!”
A sleepy groan from within. “Go away, cat. Scat!”
“MRAWWW!”
“All right, all right. Pipe down. I’m coming.”
“Mraw,” came mildly from Smoky.
For quite a lot of the book, only Smoky knows of the existence of this object – we can probably work out it is a body – but she does trail blood through the house. Smoky’s owner, Killian McBean, assumes that she has killed some prey and doesn’t think much more about it (which is, admittedly, the first of many things in the novel that don’t quite stand up to examination). Killian McBean writes and edits the local newspaper and is a conscientious, if misanthropic, man.
Killian McBean was a man of perhaps forty, whose lean tough body made him seem younger, and whose tired eyes and face made him seem older. There was grey at the temples of his black hair and it was thinning at the sides. His nose was rather prominent, as was a front gold tooth. Even for his five feet ten his arms were disproportionately long, and his hands exceptionally large and powerful.
But it was his eyes that were his most outstanding feature: cold grey eyes, aloof and disbelieving. Occasionally a twinkle came into them, or a momentary softness, but it soon faded into a granite hardness. His smile, too, was sceptical, almost mocking.
You can see he isn’t necessarily a man to warm to. Easily his best trait, in my eyes, is the respect and kindness he shows to Smoky. I loved Smoky, and I loved their relationship – independent of each other, certainly, but McBean will defend Smoky against anybody. Smoky tolerates him with the secret love of a cat. Rutledge obviously understands cats, and Smoky is very believable.
Ok, so what is the murder mystery? After a few dozen pages, McBean comes across the local wealthy man, tyrannical and disliked by all, dead in his hotel room with a kitchen knife in his back. His name is Bennet Farr. Naturally, McBean pretends not to have been there. But who could have offed him? The candidates are Farr’s son, his prospective daughter-in-law, the local librarian, the local schoolteacher, McBean’s printer, his printer’s daughter, and McBean himself. They all have motives, more or less, and they all seem to have processed through the hotel in a matter of minutes shortly before or after the time Farr died. Again, this novel is not strong on believability.
Things are complicated further by a young woman being found unconscious in a car nearby, and evidence that someone else was in the car with her – missing, but having left plenty of blood behind. When this woman wakes up, she has amnesia and can’t remember who she is. Within the space of 24 hours, she and McBean have fallen in love with each other and she is discussing marriage (!)
What to make of Blood on the Cat? It’s an entertaining novel, and McBean is in the noted American tradition of hardboiled men who seek justice while being unpleasant to everyone. Actually, he is mostly unpleasant to other men, while quite a lot of the women seem curiously charmed by him, and he does behave a bit better towards them. It’s often amusing, and Rutledge keeps the tension up well. There are a couple more deaths along the way to keep us amused.
The downside is that the solution to the mystery is both terrible and obvious. While I guessed who probably did it early on, I never really worked out what their motive was – and the solution relies on a plot hole so ludicrous that Agatha Christie is spinning in her grave that anybody could put it to paper and call themselves a mystery novelist.
Appropriately for Reading the Meow, the strongest part of the novel is Smoky – in my eyes, at least. And it’s a rattling good time, with memorable characters, even if it’s very weak in terms of plot. I’m not sure I’d race to read more by Rutledge because the plotting is maddening, but I still had a fun couple of days with this one. If you go in knowing that it won’t quite make sense, you’d probably have a fun time too.