Cat In A Leopard Spot

Carole Nelson Douglas Considers Louie’s Future

It’s hard to accept that Midnight Louie has actually learned a lesson from his latest case.

I thought he was far too feline to admit that he had anything left to learn.

Perhaps the lesson we could all learn is not to envy creatures apparently greater than we are. Often they face greater stresses as well. This goes for people as well cats.

I should mention that canned hunts are illegal in Nevada, although not in other states, so the Rancho Exotica is a totally fictional enterprise. But a state that boasts Area 51 and legalized prostitution ranches could very well spawn an illegal animal-hunting outfit aiming to satisfy monied clients. Those as appalled as Temple and I by the notion should look up “canned hunts” on the Web to find and support organizations that are working to ban the practice.

And real-life hunt breakers are more cautious about where, when, and how they disrupt a hunt, usually keeping a safe distance from their armed opponents, such as foiling mass bird shootings by scaring the prey into the air before the hunters are ready to shoot. I’ve researched nineteenth-century hunt parties in England and France for the Irene Adler historical series that I resume writing in September 2001, with Chapel Noir, about another infamous hunter, Jack the Ripper. These aristocratic country-house outings with their aura of upper-class civility destroyed an obscene number of animals: thousands upon thousands of birds and deer in a single day, often hundreds by a single shooter.

So given the assertion that many big cats who end up on canned-hunt ranches are less able to protect themselves than the average alley cat, it was only appropriate to let a decidedly “unaverage” alley cat take on the bully boys with the guns personally. Louie really dug into his assignment.

Some readers have fretted that Louie will not be giving (and getting) comeuppance far enough into the future to suit them. I hasten to reassure: Midnight Louie and company are launched on a twenty-seven-entry meganovel, and are less than halfway there.

That means that unsolved murders from past books and the characters’ ongoing personal quests are all part of an overarching background plotline that will be tied up by the series’ end.

For those who fear the Z book ending Midnight Louie’s many lives too soon, I can only remind them that Louie appeared in a miniseries of four romances-with-mystery before he launched this mystery-with-relationships sequence, so he’s unlikely to curl up his toes and say die at the drop of an arbitrary letter like Z.