The Cut Saw Murder
Written in 1937, The Cat Saw Murders has been brought back from obscurity and republished in the American Mystery Classics series with a foreword by Joyce Carol Oates. Oates' introduction is odd. Usually these reprints are preceded by an author or editor who is a professed fan of the book or series, but instead there's an essay by Oates that captures the magical connection between reader and detective, the delightful coziness of this clandestine cat mystery. And a lengthy discussion of locked-room novels in general and how The Cat Saw Murders fits into this category of crime novel.
But The Cat Saw Murders is no cozy crime thriller. Even the murder victim, Rachel Murdoch, and her cat, Samantha, are violently attacked. Other victims are tortured, drugged, have their hands chopped off... There is some pretty intense physical violence in the book, which for me puts it outside of the crime thriller genre in which it is comfortable. The writing style contains some references to noir and gothic, but it also betrays its dark and eerie atmosphere.
Even the locked room element, which Oates expresses so poetically, is immediately understood by both the detective and Rachel Murdoch and does not impede the solution of the crime or provide any information critical to the final solution.
The locked room element does not classify the crime novel in the locked room subgenre. Suffice it to say that Joyce Carol Oates and I disagree about how to interpret The Cat Saw Murders and its place in crime fiction.
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