Unsurprisingly my cat was just a tad concerned when she noticed the title and cover of my next read. Fearing for her life she was about to call the RSPCA, when fortunately, I was able to explain that no cats are harmed in this mystery. The role of the amateur sleuth’s cat, Samantha, is quite slight in this story, but Hitchens maintained the cat themed titles throughout her Rachel Murdock series. To date I have read: The Cat Saw Murder (1939), The Alarm of the Black Cat (1942) and Cats Don’t Need Coffins (1946). These are the first, second and sixth books in the series. The Cat Wears a Noose is the fourth, I am unsure why American Mystery Classics skipped reprinting the third book, Catspaw for Murder (1943).
Synopsis
‘Walking home wearily from an evening spent poring over the books of the Parchly Heights Methodist Ladies’ Aid searching for a fifty-eight-cent error, Miss Jennifer Murdock becomes witness to a terrible scene: A man, stumbling drunk, arrives home–and just as he fumbles with his keys, gunfire erupts and kills him on the spot. Jennifer is determined not to tell her sister, Rachel, anything about it. After all, Rachel considers herself a sleuth, or as Jennifer views it, a busybody who pokes her nose in places it doesn’t belong. What she doesn’t know is Rachel has just had a visit from a member of that same household, a meek eighteen-year-old taken in after she was orphaned and treated like a servant. Young Shirley has been alarmed by a series of nasty pranks–and now she’s heartbroken, and even more frightened, after finding her pet bird dead. There’s something awful going on in the house on Chestnut Street, and neither her prim and proper sister nor Det. Lt. Stephen Mayhew can stop Rachel from finding out what it is….’
Overall Thoughts
Typically, it the series protagonist, Rachel Murdock, who walks straight into a murder case, but this time it is her prim and proper sister Jennifer, who has never approved of her sibling’s habit of sticking her nose into crimes. Consequently, the way Jennifer encounters violent death is fitting and has a darkly comedic element to it. Initially, the murder seems quite unusual: ‘He was shot from inside the entry. And there wasn’t anyone else there…’ – However, the ‘how’ of the crime is not left mysterious for long. Instead, the focus is more on who had the opportunity and whose motive for murder covers all the subsequent events.
Jennifer, upon discovering the corpse, then does what no mystery novel protagonist would ever do: run away and not tell anyone about it. This action has ramifications for her later in the story, but her sister is not kept out of the loop for long, as Rachel has an eventful night of her own when a girl comes to her as a client called Shirley Melissa Grant. Shirley knows someone hates her in her uncle’s household, with events escalating until her canary dies. In The Alarm of the Black Cat there is a vulnerable child, where incidents also escalate, with Rachel swooping into that scenario to prevent death. I wonder if this is a reoccurring trope and if so, I am curious why Hitchens was drawn to returning to it. Does Rachel’s age make her the appropriate rescuer of the young perhaps? Or the reassuring figure a younger person in distress might open up to? Nevertheless, I was surprised to discover in The Cat Wears a Noose that Shirley is 18. She sounds much younger on the page. Rachel’s conversation with Shirley, is useful, as it allows us to come at the murder Jennifer witnessed, from another angle, finding out the victim’s name and the household they were a part of.
Hitchens whets our appetite for the case Rachel plunges into, with some intriguing foreshadowing at the start of chapter 2:
‘The girl’s visit marked, in Miss Rachel’s mind, the beginning of the affair she decided eventually to call the Case of the Sliver of Doubt, in which she played a game of wits with Murder over such trivialities as a cologne bottle, a red robe, a wedding ring in a nest of cotton, a werewolf, and a woman who garlic.’
An eclectic collection of items indeed!
Rachel has no qualms about snooping around people’s properties late at night, even whilst the police are in-situ, commandeering garden trellis’ as required. This arguably makes her a little high-handed, but her snooping reveals how Shirley is looking guilty of having committed the murder due to incriminating circumstances. Whilst we as the reader might doubt this, Shirley has certain family members who are prepared to throw her under the bus, out of convenience.
Since this is book four in the series, Rachel now has a reputation for being an amateur detective. Yet she becomes more of a rogue figure in this tale. For example, she plants evidence at the crime scene to shift attention away from Shirley and transfer it to her own sister instead. Her plans go awry in more than one way, and they do not fool the police for a moment. Furthermore, her actions create bad blood between her and the series police detective, Lieutenant Mayhew, who becomes increasingly more negative attitude towards her sleuthing:
‘He shook his big head; his steel-gray eyes were cold. “No, you don’t, Miss Rachel. You’ve played that tune too often. I know you saved my wife’s life, and I’ve been grateful to you, and I’ve let you dabble in police business too many times because of it.”’
Over the course of books 1,2 and 4 it seems like Rachel is on a trajectory which sees her working less hand in hand with the police. In The Cat Wears a Noose, Mayhew blocks her from openly investigating the case, meaning she has to work undercover as a cook in the suspect household.
This might sound rather batty, given that Rachel is 70 years old, and you could all too easily have visions of Rachel energetically acting like Margaret Rutherford depicting Miss Marple. Yet due to the consequences of WW2, domestic labour was in low supply, with younger and fitter people going into war work, so as Rachel says: “People are literally hiring anything that has two hands and isn’t totally blind.” Working undercover allows Rachel to come across some unusual circumstances, but I think it does limit her questioning. The werewolf component of the case and the second murder add more drama to the narrative, but I did feel like Rachel’s investigation was more bland than usual. Perhaps because of the restrictions of working undercover.
The solution is interesting, and there was one subtle clue that I definitely missed. However, this solution requires a multi-pronged trap to bring out the truth and I think it relies too heavily on the setting-a-trap plot device. It is one I am getting less keen on of late. Like Anthony Boucher I would suggest that this mystery is enjoyable but that it does not reach the heights achieved by the first novel in the series.
Rating: 4/5
Source: Review Copy (American Mystery Classic)