The Cat Saw Murder (1939), Dolores Hitchens’ first book featuring septuagenarian spinster sleuth Rachel Murdock, saw Miss Rachel move into some vacant accommodation following a vague suspicion only for murder to occur and our protagonist to slowly put together the pieces based on her observation of the sundry types living around her, achieved with the help of her black cat Samantha. The Alarm of the Black Cat (1941), the second Miss Rachel novel, also does this, and exposes what I feel might be a recurrent flaw in this series going forward: namely that Hitchens is superb at suspense, but sorely lacks when it comes to plot construction and detection.

It is while arbitrarily wasting the time of letting agents, asking to be shown around houses she has no intention of renting, that Miss Rachel first observes 8 year-old Claudia Byers burying a toad in the garden. When it becomes apparent that the toad was killed deliberately, and apparently left for Claudia to find, Miss Rachel decides to rent the house for a month and…observe, I guess. As it happens, the house is the centre of a variety of tangles: Claudia lives on one side with her father, aunt, and paternal grandfather, while her great-grandmother, grandmother, and maternal grandfather live on the other side. Previously, Claudia’s parents had occupied Miss Rachel’s house, and her father might have been having an affair with the woman who lives behind, to whom he was engaged before marrying Annie Hayes, who died aged seventeen while giving birth to Claudia.

There’s…a lot going on here.

The plot, then, essentially concerns people showing up in Miss Rachel’s house — sometimes carrying a gun, sometimes trying to creep in through a window, oftentimes simply appearing when Miss Rachel has been out or asleep — and it feels like at least half of the resulting difficulties could have been avoided if she’d just lock her doors. When one of these incursions results in a dead body, Lieutenant Mayhew enters into proceedings and we’re basically in the first book again, only with fewer culprits to choose from.

On a sentence-by-sentence level, I enjoy Hitchens’ writing…

But sleep she did, eventually, and perhaps much for the best. There was little she could have done to help what happened that night, and to have been awake would almost certainly have guaranteed her own death.

…and she conjures well the fears of an old woman living alone in a house where murder has been committed, even if it is difficult to then reconcile said old woman withholding evidence from the police just because she thinks they have some sort of unfair advantage when it comes to catching murderers…I mean, pick a lane. What’s less successful is the need for all these actions to fold into a coherent plot, with much of what unfurls feeding the steady stream of suspense that Hitchens has going but then making little sense when it comes to the eventual answer — surely some of this was done purely to provide suspense for a reader than because it helped further the villain’s (rather pedestrian) aim.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the entire book concerns the eponymous cat, Samantha, jointly owned by Miss Rachel and her sister Jennifer, and taken along to these crime scenes to provide company for our spinster detective. In The Cast Saw Murder she is described as a “black satin cat”, which makes sense given the title of this one…except here she’s repeatedly referred to as being “marmalade” in colour, and even “orange” at one point. She’s the only cat in the entire book, as was black originally, so it’s not like my too-literal mind is struggling to grasp some literary allusion, so what the heck is going on? The mind boggles.

Two books in to this series, and with fourth title — not third, I checked — The Cat Wears a Noose (1944) on its way in the American Mystery Classics range, I have to say that I’ve read about as much of the Rachel Murdock mysteries as I feel compelled to right now. Hitchens has done well to imagine the burgeoning Domestic Suspense genre and attempt to tie it into something approaching detection, but for me there’s not enough coherence or invention, and certainly not enough intelligent deduction — the word is misused herein in a manner that made me hoot — to warrant further time spent in this universe. I mean, I’m kind of curious to see whether Samantha becomes calico or tortoiseshell in future volumes, but that alone does not a valid reading experience make.