This week, I’ll be reviewing a selection of cat-themed short stories and books for #ReadingtheMeow2025. Most of my picks are from the Golden Age of Mystery fiction, which is set between the two world wars.
So far, I’ve reviewed three short stories: “The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael” by Agatha Christie, “The Cyprian Cat” by Dorothy L. Sayers, and “Hanging by a Hair” by Clifford Witting.
I’ve also reviewed three full-length novels: Murder at the Cat Show by Marian Babson, The Cat Screams by Todd Downing, and The Cat Who Caught a Killer by L. T. Shearer.
Thank you to Literary Potpourri for hosting #ReadingtheMeow again this year.
Introduction
The Cat Wears a Noose, the fourth book in the Rachel Murdock series, is a compelling mystery written by Dolores Hitchens under her D.B. Olsen pseudonym. In my previous reviews of the series, The Cat Saw Murder and The Alarm of the Black Cat, I’ve highlighted the unique partnership between spinster sleuth Rachel Murdock and police detective Mayhew, who work together to solve intricate murder cases.
Amazon Except:
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.…
The Cat Wears a Noose was previously published under the pseudonym D.B. Olsen.
The Plot
Rachel Murdock is embroiled in yet another domestic crime when her sister, Jennifer, sees a man shot and killed on the doorstep of his home on Chestnut Street. Jennifer, terrified, decides to keep quiet about what she saw and sticks to her story that she was accounting for a 58-cent discrepancy at a ladies’ church meeting.
That same night, Rachel is visited by the young Shirley Grant, a meek and downtrodden eighteen-year-old who has become the target of malicious pranks in her Uncle’s household. Orphaned and friendless, after her poor pet bird is maliciously killed, she pleads with Rachel Murdock to help her investigate her relatives. Intrigued by the pettiness of the crimes and their apparent escalation, Rachel ensconces herself within the household as their elderly cook. Not to be left out of the action, she brings along her trusty black cat, Samantha, to help her snoop around.
However, police lieutenant Mayhew soon finds evidence that Jennifer Murdock was a witness to the shooting of Shirley Grant’s uncle. He suspects that the sisters are withholding crucial information. This strains his once good-natured relationship with Rachel Murdock to the breaking point. The complex dynamics of their relationship, coupled with the high-stakes investigation, will keep you engaged.
With Shirley Grant, Rachel Murdock, and Samantha left to their own devices, the situation becomes urgent. Without any help from the police and Jennifer’s freedom on the line, Rachel Murdock and Samantha must catch a killer running amok on Chestnut Street. The urgency of the situation creates suspense and keeps readers on the edge of their seats, eager to find out what happens next.
The Review
The Cat Wears A Noose is a fascinating book. It incorporates several familiar themes explored in earlier books in the series, but also breaks the formula it has carefully established in the previous books to varying degrees of success.
Firstly, the book opens with Jennifer complaining to her sister, as she often does, not to be such a busybody and give up sleuthing. It’s an unseemly hobby for a seventy-year-old woman; it’s dangerous and, of course, an utterly ridiculous hobby for a good Christian woman; however, Jennifer must eat her words when, on her walk home, she sees a drunk man get shot before her very eyes. To Jennifer’s credit, she does try to keep what she witnessed to herself, but is soon entrapped by her sister and some evidence she accidentally left at the scene by Lieutenant Mayhew. Despite Jennifer’s vocal misgivings and eternal embarrassment, she is left to ask her sister to clear her name.
It’s a nice change of pace to involve the fussy and parochial Jennifer in the case – she’s mostly been left behind as the author finagles a pretext that will allow Rachel to leave Jennifer behind as she galavants around solving crimes. The previous books set up a dichotomy: Jennifer is a homebody, and Rachel is more in tune with the outside world, eager to engage with the injustices she faces wherever she is.
Hitchens flips the script by having the crime come home to the Murdoch sisters. With Jennifer on one of her few outings, coming home from church, she was confronted by a heinous killing. Hitchen’s once again separates the sisters by having Jennifer in a cell (horror) or hidden away at home attempting to shield herself from police scrutiny while her sister is playing cook in the house of the murderer.
Hitchens’ books love to explore how the home can be a dangerous and deadly place. In her first two books, her mysteries are domestic thrillers, where people are killed at home, by their relatives, for private reasons. In fact, even the Murdocks’ home is no longer a safe haven for Rachel or Jennifer, with police pounding at the door all night and day, questioning Jennifer.
Hitchens even begins one of her previous books by having a little girl’s pet frog trod in a fit of malice as a prelude to several heinous killings. Hitchens repeats her theme of killing an animal- this time Shirley’s pet bird as a prelude to domestic violence and death. I’m not sure whether this theme will appear in all of her works or if it’s just an effective opening gambit to show unabashed cruelty to the reader. I did think to further her theme that Hitchens was going to harm Samantha, but she stops short of killing Samantha.
However, Hitchen breaks her earlier conventions of having Rachel Murdock operate outside the family she’s investigating and gathering evidence with Lieutenant Mayhew in two ways. Firstly, she gets herself hired as the Terrice’s elderly and eccentric cook, complete with a black cat. And she manages to anger Mayhew by keeping evidence from him and inserting herself in the investigation, so that he refuses to help her.
Gone is the friendly banter as a police professional indulges the whims of an elderly lady with her hobby, and in its place is the cold officialdom of a police officer. The book paints Rachel into a corner, without her biggest ally and having to rely on a) Shirley Grant, who is terrified that she’ll be thrown out of the house or killed or b) her cat Samantha, who is universally hated by the household because Mrs. Terrice has an absolute terror of cats.
Without her usual allies or avenues of detection, Murdock is forced to cobble together ridiculous situations to get the information she needs, veering into some rather broad slapstick, which jars badly with the serious thriller tone set up by this book and the previous books. I didn’t mind the light-hearted elements at first, but as they became increasingly desperate and bizarre, until the eventual makeup between Mayhew and Murdock, it changed. They felt out of place, given the tone of the book and its subject matter. I hope Hitchens leaves her attempts at humor out of future installments of the series. A more fitting and organic source of humor emerges from the trio’s clashes as the investigation progresses. Also, Rachel Murdock is a pretty assertive woman, and a lot of humor comes from other people putting their erroneous assumptions upon her capabilities.
Additionally, having Murdock as the cook put her and Samantha in a tight spot – their movements were highly controlled by their environment, which meant that the sleuthing was more contrived in comparison to the other books in the series. Poor Samantha was reduced to essentially a footnote in the story until her big action sequence at the end, where she wears a ribbon (not an actual noose) that causes a killer to make a startling confession. Unlike the previous books, where Samantha is a companion in the story and often defends Rachel or finds clues on her own, she was primarily a set dressing in this novel.
The yellow, …I mean, black cat!
One final note about Samantha is that in this book, she is finally described as a black cat. One hilarious mistake in the previous books in the series is that in the first book, The Cat Saw Murder, Samantha is described many times as marmalade or yellow-colored, but the cover art displays her as black. The second book is titled The Alarm of the Black Cat, but again, the cat is described therein as being yellow-colored. There is no other cat in the book, especially not a black cat like in the title or cover art. It seems, however, by the time The Cat Wears a Noose comes around, Samantha is indeed a black cat!
Final Thoughts
The Cat Wears a Noose is a good mystery, but a definite downgrade in quality and story mechanics from the previous two books I have reviewed in the series. I think in an attempt to make the story more interesting by breaking and reconfiguring the conventions of the series, Hitchen accidentally put her two sleuths in an untenable situation and neutered the point of Samantha almost entirely.
I don’t blame Hitchens for wanting to take some chances-and I liked what she did with Jennifer’s character- although I was hoping that Jennifer would become a reluctant helper to Rachel by casting her as the eyes and ears of the investigation outside the Terrice’s house, but that never came to pass- which is a missed opportunity in my opinion.
The Cat Wears a Noose didn’t rise above the sum of its parts and floundered to find its footing without the core trio of Samantha, Lieutenant Mayhew, and Rachel running parallel investigations together. It’s still a fun read, but not my favorite of the series.
I hope you enjoyed my reviews for #ReadingtheMeow2025. Please comment below with your thoughts on what you think I should read for next year’s event.
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
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