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troisoiseaux wrote up Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse: 'I'd picked it up expecting a fairly straightforward murder mystery and found myself reading a convoluted gothic thriller instead.' Obviously at that point I already knew I was going to read it, but I didn't actually expect to read it immediately. However, today I forgot to bring the book I am currently reading to work and had to search for an emergency read on hoopla, and Cat and Mouse was there for me! So it goes.
The heroine of Cat and Mouse is Katinka Jones, a journalist-turned-agony-aunt writing under the name Miss Friendly-wise who, along with her friend Miss Let's-be-Lovely, has been receiving a series of dramatically Gothic letters from a young woman named Aminta devastatingly in love with her much-older guardian somewhere on an isolated mountain in Wales. The last letter they've received explains that Aminta has finally triumphed in love and she and the guardian, Carlyon, are going to be married.
Katinka frankly finds the Aminta letters a little boring, but her holiday break in Wales is even more boring, so on a lark she decides to go see if she can drop in the Carlyons to say hello. However, when she tracks down Aminta's address, she finds only the devastatingly attractive Carlyon and his two servants, all of whom state firmly that Carlyon has never had a wife nor a ward and they don't know anybody named Aminta. But! Upon arrival, Katinka saw an Aminta letter lying in the outgoing mailbox! So she knows that SOMEONE is LYING!
At this point I very much wanted Katinka to call home and enlist the help of Miss Let's-be-Lovely, because 'two agony aunts team up to crack the case of their weirdest correspondent' is a plot so good I really want to steal it. Instead, Katinka decides to fake break her ankle so she can stay overnight and investigate more, in part because she has fallen in love with Carlyon more or less on sight and in part because she's extremely suspicious of Carlyon's other guest, Mr. Chucky, who explains that he is a police officer with such air quotes vibes that Katinka becomes sure he is a muckraking journo attempting to investigate some kind of dramatic event at the Carlyon household.
It rapidly becomes clear that Carlyon is in fact hiding a secret wife in the attic, who has suffered terrible injuries in a bad car accident, cannot speak, and is undergoing constant, painful plastic surgery that has unfortunately not been very effective. However, this does not actually solve the central mystery, because the wife's name, according to Carlyon, Angela and nothing about her seems to fit the profile of Aminta.
(On the one hand, the portrait of probably-Angela is appallingly ablist in the way that only Gothics can be -- we-the-audience are frequently invited to contemplate the horror of her appearance and the animalistic sounds that she makes -- and, on the other hand, the book really takes care to emphasize that despite the terrible injuries probably-Angela really is just a person and is trying her best to take agency about her situation and enjoys good conversation and nice walks in the scenery, and honestly it's so rare to encounter anybody who has suffered terrible disfiguring injuries in a Gothic and isn't immediately driven mad and evil by it that I'm grading the whole scenario higher by far than it deserves.)
Anyway, an encounter with a sinister German doctor washing blood off his mismatched hands in the middle of the night, I became immediately convinced that Angela had really been dead the whole time and Aminta had been the victim of horrible plastic surgery experiments so nobody could tell that she was not Angela. Katinka also became convinced of this about a third of the way into the book. Unfortunately for both of us, this turned out not to be correct. The sinister German doctor was in fact just a perfectly normal refugee plastic surgeon who fled the Nazis in 1936 and never appears in the book again.
This is my favorite red herring in the book, but certainly not the last! Over the course of the story, Katinka with at least four or five different solutions to the mystery, each more wild than the last. Every time she puts the pieces together in a new wrong way, she makes yet another dramatic speech Explaining Everything and accusing somebody new of being Aminta, and every time everyone stares at her like she's grown a second head. It is, frankly, incredible.
In the end, Carlyon reveals in a ten-page villainous monologue that:
a.) he's murdered no less than three wives (Katinka had only figured out about two and trustingly believed them both to be accidents): "You see before you, my dear, a professional charmer, a man endowed with the dangerous gift of being able to look sad."
b.) Angela -- really the famous lounge singer Angel Soone, who coincidentally happened to be Katinka's last, disastrous interview as a journalist before she career changed to agony aunt -- had to die because she'd scratched her finger on an old ring, it had gone septic, and she wouldn't be able to play piano anymore, which made her useless! useless to him!
c.) however, Aminta was not in fact any of the three murdered wives, but the nice Welsh lady who brings the milk every week who'd gotten a hopeless crush on him -- much like Katinka, and much to his annoyance: "Preserve me from women, except rich ones, of course! Drooling over me, slavering over me with your sickening infatuations [...] as if murder wasn't a tricky enough business without my having to keep half a dozen doting women at bay!"
(The real love interest is of course annoying Mr. Chucky, who eventually reveals that he has been using "being a police officer" [wink] as a disguise for, in fact, being a police officer:
"Would that be the gentleman that saved her life?"
"No," said Miss Let's-be-Lovely. "That would be the poor sap that stood waving a gun about and let a woman do all the work, as usual. [...] He was always arriving in the nick of time, as far as I can make out, and never doing anything about it when he got there."
This final vignette only confirms my firm opinion that we were robbed of having Miss Let's-be-Lovely on board throughout the entire book.)
troisoiseaux wrote up Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse: 'I'd picked it up expecting a fairly straightforward murder mystery and found myself reading a convoluted gothic thriller instead.' Obviously at that point I already knew I was going to read it, but I didn't actually expect to read it immediately. However, today I forgot to bring the book I am currently reading to work and had to search for an emergency read on hoopla, and Cat and Mouse was there for me! So it goes.The heroine of Cat and Mouse is Katinka Jones, a journalist-turned-agony-aunt writing under the name Miss Friendly-wise who, along with her friend Miss Let's-be-Lovely, has been receiving a series of dramatically Gothic letters from a young woman named Aminta devastatingly in love with her much-older guardian somewhere on an isolated mountain in Wales. The last letter they've received explains that Aminta has finally triumphed in love and she and the guardian, Carlyon, are going to be married.
Katinka frankly finds the Aminta letters a little boring, but her holiday break in Wales is even more boring, so on a lark she decides to go see if she can drop in the Carlyons to say hello. However, when she tracks down Aminta's address, she finds only the devastatingly attractive Carlyon and his two servants, all of whom state firmly that Carlyon has never had a wife nor a ward and they don't know anybody named Aminta. But! Upon arrival, Katinka saw an Aminta letter lying in the outgoing mailbox! So she knows that SOMEONE is LYING!
At this point I very much wanted Katinka to call home and enlist the help of Miss Let's-be-Lovely, because 'two agony aunts team up to crack the case of their weirdest correspondent' is a plot so good I really want to steal it. Instead, Katinka decides to fake break her ankle so she can stay overnight and investigate more, in part because she has fallen in love with Carlyon more or less on sight and in part because she's extremely suspicious of Carlyon's other guest, Mr. Chucky, who explains that he is a police officer with such air quotes vibes that Katinka becomes sure he is a muckraking journo attempting to investigate some kind of dramatic event at the Carlyon household.
It rapidly becomes clear that Carlyon is in fact hiding a secret wife in the attic, who has suffered terrible injuries in a bad car accident, cannot speak, and is undergoing constant, painful plastic surgery that has unfortunately not been very effective. However, this does not actually solve the central mystery, because the wife's name, according to Carlyon, Angela and nothing about her seems to fit the profile of Aminta.
(On the one hand, the portrait of probably-Angela is appallingly ablist in the way that only Gothics can be -- we-the-audience are frequently invited to contemplate the horror of her appearance and the animalistic sounds that she makes -- and, on the other hand, the book really takes care to emphasize that despite the terrible injuries probably-Angela really is just a person and is trying her best to take agency about her situation and enjoys good conversation and nice walks in the scenery, and honestly it's so rare to encounter anybody who has suffered terrible disfiguring injuries in a Gothic and isn't immediately driven mad and evil by it that I'm grading the whole scenario higher by far than it deserves.)
Anyway, an encounter with a sinister German doctor washing blood off his mismatched hands in the middle of the night, I became immediately convinced that Angela had really been dead the whole time and Aminta had been the victim of horrible plastic surgery experiments so nobody could tell that she was not Angela. Katinka also became convinced of this about a third of the way into the book. Unfortunately for both of us, this turned out not to be correct. The sinister German doctor was in fact just a perfectly normal refugee plastic surgeon who fled the Nazis in 1936 and never appears in the book again.
This is my favorite red herring in the book, but certainly not the last! Over the course of the story, Katinka with at least four or five different solutions to the mystery, each more wild than the last. Every time she puts the pieces together in a new wrong way, she makes yet another dramatic speech Explaining Everything and accusing somebody new of being Aminta, and every time everyone stares at her like she's grown a second head. It is, frankly, incredible.
In the end, Carlyon reveals in a ten-page villainous monologue that:
a.) he's murdered no less than three wives (Katinka had only figured out about two and trustingly believed them both to be accidents): "You see before you, my dear, a professional charmer, a man endowed with the dangerous gift of being able to look sad."
b.) Angela -- really the famous lounge singer Angel Soone, who coincidentally happened to be Katinka's last, disastrous interview as a journalist before she career changed to agony aunt -- had to die because she'd scratched her finger on an old ring, it had gone septic, and she wouldn't be able to play piano anymore, which made her useless! useless to him!
c.) however, Aminta was not in fact any of the three murdered wives, but the nice Welsh lady who brings the milk every week who'd gotten a hopeless crush on him -- much like Katinka, and much to his annoyance: "Preserve me from women, except rich ones, of course! Drooling over me, slavering over me with your sickening infatuations [...] as if murder wasn't a tricky enough business without my having to keep half a dozen doting women at bay!"
(The real love interest is of course annoying Mr. Chucky, who eventually reveals that he has been using "being a police officer" [wink] as a disguise for, in fact, being a police officer:
"Would that be the gentleman that saved her life?"
"No," said Miss Let's-be-Lovely. "That would be the poor sap that stood waving a gun about and let a woman do all the work, as usual. [...] He was always arriving in the nick of time, as far as I can make out, and never doing anything about it when he got there."
This final vignette only confirms my firm opinion that we were robbed of having Miss Let's-be-Lovely on board throughout the entire book.)
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I think you should.
I am most familiar with Brand as the author of Green for Danger (1944), whose 1946 film of the same name I love. It is not as wild a ride as this novel sounds like, but it's also not a Gothic, and it is nevertheless kind of nuts.
[edit] The sinister German doctor was in fact just a perfectly normal refugee plastic surgeon who fled the Nazis in 1936 and never appears in the book again.
Altered my icon because I realized I had immediately pictured this character as played by Peter Lorre.
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I did not suspect the Angela-is-dead theory or the Angel Soone theory, although the latter twist was probably my favorite because it felt really cleverly set-up— her disastrous interview just seemed like backstory, until the ah-ha! moment that it was relevant all along.
I almost bounced fairly early on between the one-two punch of the "ooh disabled person, how scary" introduction of Angela and the doctor— I wasn't sure where that was going, but it didn't seem like it would be great— but I'm glad I didn't, because it was an entertaining ride. (Katinka and all her red herrings was hilarious.)
I found the Ultimate Reveal vis-a-vis Carlyon a bit of an anti-climax, to be honest. Possibly "super charismatic serial killer" was a twist in 1950 but now it's like yeah, duh.
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AMAZING. I can practically see him just from this description.
I may have to read this book??? Resist... resist... the library has it on ebook, resistance is clearly futile.
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tuxedo mask?