4 out of 4 stars
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Serendipitous Mystery: Diary of a Snoopy Cat
This seventh episode of the Inca Detective Agency finds Inca the Siberian detective cat vacationing in Sri Lanca, enjoying the soft warm sand. Her diary entry describes their “behaving like flower buds”, which presumably means that they were enjoying the sun. She and her colleagues, Cara and Fromage befriend the local sea turtles, becoming quite close with Rani, the smallest turtle, who first mistook Inca for a mermaid. They then meet the Meena, a baby elephant, and her mother who live next door. It seems a glorious holiday. The Kitties, who are from France (by way of London) are fed with the finest French cuisine, but their island fare seems to lean heavily towards ice cream on the beach. While Cara, the Siamese, sits “under the large umbrella to protect her fur from burns”, Fromage acts a bit more cat-like. He carelessly licks his cone, and when “he dropped his ice cream cone onto the sand... [he] continued licking the ice cream, sand and all.”
But as often seems to happen, when famous literary detectives vacation, mystery travels with them. By lunchtime, Inca learns of the theft of a valuable artifact from a local museum. “The mysterious disappearance – or theft – of an old sword”, she claims, “was right up my alley.” A precipitous location, how could any cat resist!
The museum calls in Solo, “a well-known international [human] detective, who arrives with his dog Terrence, a fortuitous choice as they are Inca's next-door neighbors from Kensington. Terrence, she says, is “someone that we all admired, despite him being a dog”, very open-minded of her.
Meena, the baby elephant, provides the first clue to the crime having seen the evil caretaker of their home, Mr. Appu, who she'd seen skulking about with “that mean rogue from the village, Babu.” Later, Rani followed the two men as they rowed out from the beach in a small boat and overheard them “talking about the stolen sword and what to do about getting it off the island without getting caught.” With Mr. Appu away that night, the newly expanded Inca detective agency & friends “search the premises”, coming up blank. Mama Elephant then shows them a secret entrance that she saw Mr. Appu and Babu use recently and the youngsters all slide down a tunnel and discover the stolen treasure: the sword and a pot of gold coins. They bring the loot back to their cabin and pile it at the foot of Solo's bed where he can't help but stumble upon it in the morning. Mystery solved!
This being the first Inca tale (tail?) I've read, I can't say if it is up to her usual standard of detective work. As the title suggests, this is a Serendipitous Mystery – one solved by chance more than by careful logic or inspired deduction. “What a coincidence”, exclaims Inca,”that the rogues actually lived next door.” But if Inca had been a less friendly kitty, as many we know are, Meena may not have mentioned the cryptic encounter between the two spurious men. And Rani would not have been dispatched on water-borne reconnaissance. Without Mama Elephant's help, identifying the secret passage, and using her long flexible trunk to retrieve the treasure and the detectives, they may have been trapped or forced to leave empty-handed (empty-pawed). “It had”, as Inca acknowledged,”been a group effort.” Clearly, one lesson from this book is about the importance of friendship and cooperation.
For a relatively short children's book, this story is packed with adventure. Aside from the mystery of the stolen sword, it contains a tail of great suspense. Fromage, wanting to meet his cousins, the leopards, sneaks out into the moonlit jungle. Inca wakes to find Fromage missing and his friend, Charlotte the hamster distraught. Inca sets off into the pitch dark in search of him. What she finds instead is a python, who is definitely not to be trusted. Fleeing from him, she becomes helplessly lost in a strange landscape, filled with sounds she's never heard before. Eventually, she arrives at a cave and comes face to face with two leopards. Two cubs not much larger than she is. Apparently forgetting her fear, the fact that she is lost and that her brother is missing, she acts like a kitten and plays with her new friends. There is a moment of renewed fear when the cubs mother returns and appears furious that someone has invaded her den and approached her children, but recognizing their shared kinship, she accepts Inca and helps her return home to the cottage on the beach. Fromage, of course, had already returned after a short time in the dark jungle gave him second thoughts about a midnight stroll. Inca is clearly a brave cat and loyal to her family.
There are many moments of comedy that will appeal to children. Fromage is probably my favorite character because he is carefree and uninhibited. He licks his ice cream, despite dropping it in the sand. He tells long tales about his cheese shop. He assures that a generous lunch accompanies them on a day trip, but claims all the cheese for himself. He is a Bertie Wooster of cats: happy-go-lucky, if a bit self-centered and dunder-headed at times.
The vocabulary of the book should appeal to children. Words like “blunderbuss”, “globetrotters”, and “heebie-jeebies” are fun to hear and say. Inca is also a fount of, perhaps unintended, comedy. Faced with the opportunity to ride one of the elephants she has several questions: “Would I be crushed like a bug? Would I be flattened like a pancake? Would Mama Elephant sneeze and blow me all the way to China?” Then she thinks: why not? “I still have all of my nine lives left. Why not take a chance with just one?”.
It was a pleasure getting to know Inca, the Queen of Kitties, and getting to see her detective agency in operation. I'm sure many children, and their cat-loving parents will enjoy this book, and probably the rest of the series. These cats are a bit anthropomorphic (people-like), but retain the essence of cat-ness. Certainly, the humans in their lives have no clue all that is going on in their little kitty minds. Solo never did figure out how the loot ended up at the foot of his bed. When Terrence expresses his joy at seeing his neighbors, all Solo hears is “woof, woof, woof”. Truthfully, that may be all Terrence was saying, but every cat owner knows that there is much more going on in the brains of those silent felines.
I made the mistake of first reading this story on my standard (black & white) Kindle. Even so, the illustrations were charming. These cats bear a certain resemblance to those of T.S.Elliot's (pre-Broadway) Ol' Possum's Book of Practical Cats – quite urbane. In color, they are even more engaging. The coloring is more subtle, less primary, than in most children's books, adding to the sense of sophistication.
Because this book met or exceeded my expectations: the cats were cute, but not sickeningly so, and the story was actually quite riveting, especially the midnight foray in the jungle, I am happy to rate this 4 out of 4 stars.
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Serendipity Mystery: Diary of a Snoopy Cat
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