Blood on the Cat (American Mystery Classics)

When a small town tycoon meets his end, everyone's a suspect—but it takes a clever cat to reveal the essential clue.

Bennet Farr was the richest, most corrupt, and most hated man in Cognac, a small town just outside of Chicago. He ruled the village with his money and crossed nearly all of the villagers in the process. So when he is found dead one November morning with a bread knife in his back, the chief of police faces a long line of suspects. Was it the new librarian, angered by Farr's threat to close the library? Was it the schoolteacher, whose pupil he threatened? Or perhaps his son, who he disinherited just before his death? Reporter Killian McBean is also among the list, since Farr was planning to foreclose on the Cognac Courier and put him out of a job. But, as the cops are befuddled by too many motives, Killian's journalistic acumen cuts through the noise in search of the real story—even if, in the end, it's his cat Smoky that discovers the essential clue that leads to its solution.

Never before issued in paperback in unabridged form, Blood on the Cat is a lost classic worthy of rediscovery, with memorable characters, fair-play clues, and a cat that's as clever as it is charming. Cozy in subject matter, it's sure to please any fan of Golden Age detective fiction.

Nancy Rutledge was born in Chicago and educated at Rockford College and Northwestern. Between 1944 and 1960, she authored ten works of crime fiction under her own name, two of them published only in England. She also had one mystery novel published as by Leigh Bryson, a Handi-Book paperback original in 1947. In the 1950s and ’60s, she had eight mystery novels serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, and one that appeared complete in an issue of Redbook.

Otto Penzler, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of the Mysterious Press (1975); Mysterious Press.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from Noircon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 80 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.