I have a great fondness for little old lady detectives, but they can be a problem. It’s not that the classic mystery genre ever made a claim of being realistic. And goodness knows that the “shock value” of an sweet, elderly spinster beating the big bad policemen at their own game has entertained fans for nearly a hundred years. Back in 1928, a retired governess named Maud Silver hung out her shingle as a consulting detective and was soon invited to the best houses to take down the most fiendish killers and smooth the course for young love. Meanwhile, every Tuesday night in the village of St. Mary Mead, a little old lady sat quietly in the corner a group of friends struggled vainly to come up with the solutions to cold cases, only to have Miss Jane Marple solve the crime without dropping a stitch. 

When murder beats down your door, who you gonna call? The police, of course! Homicide detectives have the weight of their authority and the backing and expertise of an official institution behind them. Pretty much nothing stands in their way of getting information about the corpse, suspects and witnesses except those characters’ own obfuscations. Of course, if you merely suspect that death might come a-knocking at your family reunion or your niece’s marriage to that Lord or at the next office picnic, the official force won’t do much for you. That’s where consulting detectives come in! They’re tall and short and tough and charming and Belgian and weird, and while they may not be able to get on the phone to the coroner or use a badge to receive carte blanche on the information highway, most of them have fame on their side and a relationship ranging from wary to cordial with enough official mucky-mucks to get the job done!

But little old ladies don’t have it so easy. Oh, sure, they have a reputation for being busybodies, and their placid, woolly exteriors tend to make people underestimate their keen minds and understanding of human nature. And while the cops who at first underestimate them tend to develop at least a grudging respect, it’s rare that a person in need of a private detective will come beating down the door of woman who brewed you that bottle of tamsin gin. 

How do spinster detectives find cases to solve? Miss Marple lived down the road from it. Her nephew sent her on rest cures and vacations where she stumbled upon it. Her friends called upon her for emotional support when a dead girl was dropped off in the library or their sister married a “crank” or their son was wrongfully imprisoned. A lot of elderly women who were not Miss Marple got involved in mysteries because they wrote them. Because that makes a lot of sense! But Ariadne Oliver and Miss Marian Phipps and Ernestina Snoop and Jessica Fletcher, by the grace of being crime novelists, found murder wherever they went. 

Seventy-year-old spinster Miss Rachel Murdock, the creation of author Dolores Hitchens in twelve cat-related mysteries written between 1939 and 1956, got schooled in sleuthing when a desperate relative rang her up for assistance. This happened in The Cat Saw Murder, which I thoroughly enjoyed. So, it happens, did the members of my Book Club, and when Otto Penzler published its follow-up, The Alarm of the Black Cat (1942), we decided to revisit Miss Rachel together. Now, Miss Rachel doesn’t write mysteries, and while Inspector Mayhew, the detective she worked with on her first case, liked her just fine (she did set him up with his future wife), he had no reason or desire to involve her in future crime investigations. And that troubled relation who consulted Miss Rachel in the first place? Well, she’s dead, and that seems to be the only family the lady has got beside her timid sister Jennifer and eight-year-old cat Samantha. 

With no rich nephew to send her on a cruise, what’s an old lady with a penchant for murder to do? Miss Rachel has no recourse but to go Looking for Trouble. And while I might label myself a chauvinist or an agist or a something worse, this was the aspect of Alarm that bothered me no end. Rachel grabs the cat, leaves her anxious sister behind and goes looking for a house to rent. The logistics of the real estate don’t matter; what the lady wants to find is trouble. And she finds plenty in a cul-de-sac nestled in the Santa Monica foothills where four houses stand, linked together by family and strife. She risks her own life multiple times. She is attacked and nearly dies!

Worse than that, it strikes me as kind of creepy that the lady is hoping against hope that someone will die for her own entertainment. Why not pick up the latest Christie (in 1942 it happens to be The Body in the Library!) Why not at least write her own mystery novel and then hire a sleazy agent who skims off the top of all his clients’ royalties and downs some cyanide-laced champagne at Miss Rachel’s launch party? But, no – Miss Rachel rents a run-down little house with a bad history because while she is checking out the kitchen, she looks out the window and sees a little girl in the backyard burying her pet frog. And when Miss Rachel goes outside to express her condolences, she can’t help but notice that someone seems to have caused the frog’s death by stomping on its head.

Within a few pages, the old lady is caught up in a fairly gripping:  years ago, Ronald Byers was in love with his neighbor Alma Tullingham, but in a surprise move he wound up marrying his other neighbor, 16-year-old Annie Hayes, and moving into the house now occupied by Miss Rachel. And for a year they were married, but the story goes that Ronald and Alma continued to carry in plain sight of poor Annie. Then Annie bore Ronald a child and died – but instead of taking up where they left off, Alma and Ronald have steered clear of each other. While the house where Annie died remains empty for no discernible reason, Ronald lives next door with his father, daughter Claudia, and spinster sister Bernice. Alma lives in a house across the yard with her elderly mother and a moody Slavic serving woman. And the Hayes family – Annie’s parents and their grandmother, Mrs. Ruddick, live in the fourth house. And every day the tension mounts, and the hatred within this small enclave of neighbors builds until one of them is found brutally murdered by Miss Rachel in her own cellar. 

What does Alma’s late grandmother’s will, involving a great deal of real estate, have to do with past and present? Did the murder occur to hasten a marriage between Alma and Ronald or to drive them further apart? What does the death of the frog have to do with all of this? Is it a sign that the killer is mentally unstable? Does someone have it in for little Claudia? Oh, and why is the book called The Alarm of the Black Cat where there isn’t a single black cat in sight?!?!

What follows is a perfectly adequate domestic mystery that moves along at a decent pace. Perhaps there is a bit too much skulking around at the start; I think four different people break into Miss Rachel’s home at one point. There’s plenty of peril, and in the end Detective Mayhew provides his share of the solution before Miss Rachel comes in for the big finish. For some reason, however, the whole affair left me cold. I think some of the blame can be laid to the fact that, for once, I had a really hard time embracing the sleuth’s business in being there. Not only did Miss Rachel’s initial impetus to move out of her own home and get involved with a group of strangers for the fun of it rub me the wrong way, but then she goes about hiding evidence from Mayhew merely to have “a bit of an inside track” on her policeman partner. 

Miss Marple never treated the solving of murders as a competition. She always respected the police – even that awful Inspector Slack! But Miss Rachel, at least in this book, strikes me as being out of control. At one point, she speaks up for herself against Mayhew’s pleadings, and what she has to say sounds perfectly reasonable, at least within the confines of classic detective fiction:

“’Miss Murdock, I suggest you go home. I don’t like to be abrupt, but since a crime has been committed here, and the house seems to have been the center of a good deal of plotting and hatred, I think you’d be safer there. Suppose you run along and call me later. I’ll let you in on anything new . . .’
“She shook her head firmly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not going because you need me.’
“For an instant he looked incredulous. ‘We need you? But, forgive me for saying it, you’re – you’re – ‘
“Miss Rachel cut in smoothly. ‘I’m seventy. I haven’t the strength of a mouse. I’m a woman. That’s what you mean, don’t you? Well, stop and think a moment. I was here long enough to size up all these people before a murder, put them on their guard. I met and talked at length with the dead woman. And I have imagination . . . ‘ Miss Rachel entertained a mental picture of boredom and anxiety. She smoothed her collar, adjusted her cuffs. ‘I want to be in on things. And besides that . . . it’s my house, you know. I’ve rented it for a month.’”

She wants to be in on things. Let’s face it: within the rules of this genre, she has to be in on things, or we’re stuck with a procedural, with nary an amateur sleuth in sight. And Mayhew does need her because – again in the world of Golden Age amateur sleuths – the police are never bright enough to solve the whole thing. But this time around, for me at least, Miss Rachel goes too far. Miss Marple was able to one-up the police every time and still come out of it a lady. She used her intuition and her village parallels to aid in the pursuit of justice – never for thrills.

Miss Rachel could learn something from her.