Dolores Hitchens was an American novelist, who worked as a nurse and teacher before embarking on her writing career, beginning with The Clue in the Clay (1938) and went on to write nearly fifty novels until her death in 1973 – appearing under numerous different (pen) names. Hitchens wrote some hardboiled crime novels and collaborated with her second husband, Hubert A. Hitchens, on a series of railway mysteries. More importantly, she also penned a dozen traditionally-styled detective series in the "Had-I-But-Known" mold under the name "D.B. Olson." A series starring the seventy some Miss Rachel Murdock and her black satin cat, Samantha.
So don't expect a nice, sugary cozy about a sweet, grandmotherly maiden aunt and her companion cat solving a nice, clean murder that smells of cinnamon and cyanide. Now that the reader has been warned, let's get to the story.
The Cat Saw Murder begins (sort of) with Miss Rachel Murdock getting a phone call from her adopted niece, Lily Sticklemann, whom she and her sister, Miss Jennifer Murdock, "had loved wholeheartedly as a child and were faintly ashamed of as a woman." The Misses Murdock view their niece as "obviously and persistently stupid," but it's "an involved stupidity that attempted to simulate cunning," which gave her a penchant for getting into trouble – like getting suckered into a bigamous marriage. Miss Murdock is hardly surprise when Lily asks her to come down to Breakers Beach, because she's in a messy situation and badly needs advise. So she packs a suitcase and putting her cat in a basket to go down to Surf House. A rundown, beachfront boarding house that "looked remarkably ready to fall in upon its tenants." One of the reasons Lily asked her aunt to come down is that a scheme of hers (cheating at cards) backfired spectacularly and now owes a huge sum of money to the Scurlocks. An unpleasant couple who are also staying at Surf House. But it's not the only reason why she's staying at that dump. And, pretty soon, Miss Murdock concludes that not all is right at Surf House. Not soon enough!
Lily is gruesomely murdered with an ax in her bedroom, "that neck wound alone must have spouted like a geyser," while Miss Murdock was sitting next to her heavily drugged with morphine and slipping into a coma ("...a battle for Miss Rachel’s life against morphine and coma and death; and the last had almost got her"). A fascinating and very well done way to introduce an amateur detective to the world of crime, but recovering ties her to the bed for a big chunk of the first-half.
This bloody ax murder brings Lieutenant Stephen Mayhew to the boarding house and should note here that Hitchens introduced Mayhew in The Clue in the Clay, which finds him and his wife, Sara, on honeymoon in San Francisco. However, Mayhew meets Sara at Surf House. So that either makes The Cat Saw Murder a prequel or soft reboot. Mayhew has his doubts whether Miss Murdock can help him, if she survives, because "elderly people were usually slow" and "they neither heard nor saw clearly." But when he finally gets to speak with Miss Murdock, Mayhew got "an inkling of what a really valuable aid this small elderly woman might be" and senses "that keen insight into people and situations that he now thinks was given to Miss Rachel as a special dispensation of the gods." And the moment Miss Murdock enters the game, The Cat Saw Murder returns to the domestic suspense with some Gothic overtones befitting a Had-I-But-Known mystery. Most notably, Miss Murdock hiding in a dark, cold attic while the supposed murderer ransacks her room below and using that same attic to eavesdrop and enter other apartments. There are also other complications cropping up like a tenant who went missing some time ago and a child discovering a severed hand ("...brought proudly home to his mother what he considered to be an unusually fine fat starfish") on the beach "showing evidence of terrible torture."
So does it all stack up in the end? Well, yes, kind of. The plot holds up as everything appeared to fit together and Hitchens honestly attempted to properly clue, or foreshadow, every part of the story and plot. One, extremely blatant, clue made some of the last-minute discoveries, and revelations, partly forgivable as by then you should have a pretty good idea in which direction to look – which admittedly took some of the punch out of the ending. The problem is that everything from the storytelling to the plotting felt shaky, precarious and disjointed. Like a puzzle that had been laid out correctly without connecting the pieces together. It feels incomplete despite being able to make out the entire picture. That can be partially blamed on the pulp-like thriller elements creeping into the narrative towards the end and the sudden, sometimes jarring shifts from present to past tense. It gave the impression that the story and plot are a disjointed mess when it really is a little unevenly in places that some polishing or perhaps a good editor could have fixed.
The Cat Saw Murder is not a bad beginning to the series. Just not perfectly executed with the end result leaving me a little dissatisfied, but not disappointed enough to give one of the later titles a pass. Death Walks on Cats Feet (1956) sounds like it could possibly make up for this poorly written, lukewarm review.