Once again, I completely failed to read I Am a Cat for the fab event Reading the Meow 2026 hosted by Mallika at Literary Potpourri. It’s just such a whopper! Next year I’m going to make a start in March 😊
I decided I’d see if I could find something shorter in the TBR in order to take part, and was hunting about in golden age crime. Mallika had also suggested looking for a short story, and so checking In the Teeth of Evidence by Dorothy L Sayers (1939) came up trumps, because the final story in the collection is The Cyprian Cat. My cheesy 1980s edition even has some Big Cats on the cover:
It’s a very short tale, only 13 pages in my edition. It takes the form of a monologue, with a man in serious trouble for seemingly having shot at a cat (there’s no animal cruelty in the story, despite his horrible plans) and speaking to his K.C as silent interlocutor. It opens:
“It’s extraordinarily decent of you to come along and see me like this, Harringay. Believe me, I do appreciate it. It isn’t every busy K.C. who’d do as much for such a hopeless sort of client. I only wish I could spin you a more workable kind of story, but honestly, I can only tell you exactly what I told Peabody. Of course, I can see he doesn’t believe a word of it, and I don’t blame him. He thinks I ought to be able to make up a more plausible tale than that—and I suppose I could, but where’s the use?”
He and his old schoolfriend Merridew both seemed to be following the bachelor life, until Merridew marries a woman fifteen years younger than him. She has never left the Norfolk village in which she was raised, but about a year after the nuptials, they all arrange to meet in Somerset.
Describing the train journey down, we learn of the narrator’s extreme aversion to cats:
“I found a horrible feeling creeping over me that there was a cat in the compartment somewhere. I’m one of those wretched people who can’t stand cats. I don’t mean just that I prefer dogs—I mean that the presence of a cat in the same room with me makes me feel like nothing on earth. I can’t describe it, but I believe quite a lot of people are affected that way. Something to do with electricity, or so they tell me. I’ve read that very often the dislike is mutual, but it isn’t so with me. The brutes seem to find me abominably fascinating—make a bee-line for my legs every time. It’s a funny sort of complaint, and it doesn’t make me at all popular with dear old ladies.”
He passes the time staring at the attractive young lady opposite him, who of course turns out to be Merridew’s new wife. And so they spend time together as planned, the peaceable atmosphere only spoilt by the titular feline, and others, at night:
“Every night the garden seemed to be haunted by them—the Cyprian cat that I had seen the first night of my stay, and a little ginger one and a horrible stinking black Tom were especially tiresome, and one night there was a terrified white kitten that mewed for an hour on end under my window. I flung boots and books at my visitors till I was heartily weary, but they seemed determined to make the inn garden their rendezvous. The nuisance grew worse from night to night; on one occasion I counted fifteen of them, sitting on their hinder-ends in a circle, while the Cyprian cat danced her shadow-dance among them, working in and out like a weaver’s shuttle.”
Sayers builds an increasingly tense atmosphere of oppressive summer heat and the narrator being driven to distraction by the nighttime caterwauling.
But how did he end up shooting a gun? And why is what happened so implausible? Well, you can read the story online here. Sayers leaves plenty unexplained in this unnerving tale, although I know what I think happened… Lord Peter Wimsey would never believe it!
madame bibi lophile recommends 