The Cat Who

The primary human character is Jim Qwilleran, a top-notch investigative reporter who has apparently spent years in the newspaper business but because of his problems with alcohol has run out of job options.

Despite having to play second fiddle to Koko and Yum Yum (another cat who appears in the second novel) Qwill is the pivot of the series.

His life is on a downhill run, he's basically an alcoholic, can't keep a job, and one calamitous night in a drunken stupor he falls in front of a subway train to be narrowly rescued by onlookers. After that, Qwill takes himself in hand, sobers up, and lands a job at The Daily Fluxion.

This is where The Cat Who Could Read Backwards and the series begins.

Assigned to cover subjects like modern art, antiques, interior decorating, and restaurant reviews, Quill acquires Koko and Yum Yum, cats who are both orphaned by murders.

Braun keeps her private life just that, private. These days she is in her nineties - The Cat Who Could Read Backwards was written in 1966.

After writing The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern and The Cat Who Turned On and Off, Braun disappeared from the publishing scene for 18 years. It's been suggested that mystery novels were starting to focus on sex, violence, and foul language after 1968, and Braun's light-hearted books could not fit into this new style.

Luckily for readers, in 1986 The Cat Who Saw Red appeared. Over the next two years, four new novels were published and the twenty-ninth novel in the series was released in 2007.

Her books all contain the dedication "Earl Bettinger the husband who..."

The Cat Who books are highly literate, with a focus on art, classical music and Shakespeare.