Books SFF Bestiary Playing Dr. Watson to a Cat: Lilian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who… Series Come for the whodunit, stay for the mystery-solving cat… By Judith Tarr | Published on April 20, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share And now for something a little bit different. We’re still on fantastical cats, and we’re still in genre, but we’ve stepped sideways into mystery. There’s a fair bit of cross-fertilization, and cat mysteries are one place where it happens. Mystery series are like potato chips. You start one, you end up scarfing down the whole bag. You come for the whodunit, but you stay for the characters and the setting and the author’s voice. Voice is big in mystery. The books are short, which makes it easier to crunch one down and grab another right after it. You get your closure, you find out who did it, but there will be connections with the previous volume and the next one, usually having to do with the lives of the characters. You get invested in them, and you want to follow them as far as they’ll go. When one of those characters is a cat, there’s added fun, with a taste (large or small) of fantasy. Lilian Jackson Braun is one of the grande dames of the cat-sleuth subgenre; her main cat-character, Kao K’o Kung, or Koko for short, is a poet-prince of cats, a regal Siamese who dines on filet mignon and who solves crimes with inimitable panache. After the first couple of volumes of 29, he gains a companion, a lady Siamese named Yum Yum, but she is a much more normal feline who mostly sleeps and eats and does cat things. We first meet Koko in The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, which was published in 1966. Koko’s human sidekick is a newspaper reporter named Jim Qwilleran, Qwill to his friends. Qwill has circled the drain of the job market, probably because of an alcohol problem that he has managed to get under control—throughout the series, he takes care to stick to tomato juice, fruit juice, and what he calls poor man’s champagne: ginger ale. He’s been reduced to writing feature articles on the arts scene in an unnamed Midwestern city. His first assignment for his new job leads him to the infamous art critic for the paper, who becomes his landlord, and who shares the apartment upstairs with Koko. Qwill is not exactly a cat person, but he gets along with Koko, and he pays attention—eventually—when the cat points him toward the solutions to various mysteries and murders. Koko is considerably smarter than the average cat. He has acute senses and extreme athleticism like all cats, but he goes well above and beyond. For one thing, he can read. Not only that, he reads backwards. When presented with the daily paper, he scans the headlines from right to left, and he lets it be known if there’s something significant in a particular article. The humans may take a while, sometimes a long while, to figure it out, but that’s not Koko’s fault. Koko knows things. He finds clues, picks up signals that the humans miss, and leads them toward the murderer or the thief or the stolen object. He does it with body language and expression, and often with the operatic voice that Siamese are notorious for. Koko’s yowl can be heard several hundred feet away, through walls and doors. Qwill is his Watson. Like many film-Watsons, notably Nigel Bruce, Qwill is most easily identified by his moustache, though his is more luxuriant than Bruce’s. It is, in fact, sentient, and it alerts him to clues and directs him toward mysteries and their solutions. In that he’s like Koko. Koko, we learn as the series evolves, has an unusual number of whiskers. The average cat, according to Braun, has 48, but Koko has 60. The extra dozen seem to contain, or at least indicate, extrasensory powers. According to a police detective whom the pair encounter later on in the series, Koko is psychic. Qwill however clings to skepticism. He doesn’t know how Koko does what he does, but he refuses to believe that there’s anything paranormal about it. In that he’s a man of the modern world. He’s a news reporter by inclination, despite his persistent sidetracking into feature articles. He wants facts and just facts. He knows that Koko finds clues that humans miss; he has ongoing proof that the cat’s extraordinary senses (whether natural or supernatural) allow him to make connections beyond the ordinary or the obvious. He accepts the reality of Koko’s talents, whatever their origins. Like Dr. Watson before him, he looks after the great detective, indulges his quirks and foibles, and does legwork when and as needed. He never truly understands the detective’s mind or his thought process, but he doesn’t need to. It’s the results that matter. And results he gets. Twenty-nine novels’ worth, and a thirtieth that was written but not published before Braun’s death in 2011. It’s always sad to come to the end of a detective series, and to have to say farewell to the characters and the setting. Especially when the main character is a superintelligent Siamese cat with an entourage of quirky and comical humans.[end-mark] The post Playing Dr. Watson to a Cat: Lilian Jackson Braun’s <i>Cat Who…</i> Series appeared first on Reactor.