The Cambridge cat detective duo, Hettie Bagshot and Tilly Jenkins, are back - this time investigating a spate of mysterious deaths at Mr Whisker’s Academy for Wayward Cats.
Mandy Morton’s latest book in her humorous No2 Feline Detective Agency series is set in a 1970s’ Cambridge entirely populated by cats and this time the action takes place in a notorious boarding school for criminal kitties.
And before Tilly even opens her notebook, the school’s hockey mistress is brutally murdered on the playing field.
Mandy says: “For my inspiration, I’m leaning on some of the literature that I read in the mid 60s and early 70s, which was really Bertie and Bessie Bunter. And of course I absolutely loved the St Trinian’s films. It was really quite frightening to be sent away to school, I think. But the very fact that those characters were sent away meant that there were options to give them adventures that they wouldn’t probably have had if they stayed at home. So I always knew that I would set one of the books in a school situation.”
The idea for the setting came from a trip to the famous Gladstone Library, where Cambridge crime writer Nicola Upson - who is Mandy’s partner - was giving a talk. Mandy says: “It is an amazing building. It also has a church in the grounds that has pre Raphaelite-type stained glass windows. And it has a graveyard that stretches down for miles.”
She knew immediately she had found the perfect inspiration for the location. “I’d always had it in my mind that I wanted to actually take Hetty And Tilly to a school where there had been a spate of murders. But I hadn’t really settled on a school building of any sort. And as soon as we got to the Gladstone library, I knew it had to be that building because it was Victorian, in respect of the fact that it was quite dark. The building is quite immense. There is a stunning library inside, which is what Gladstone himself set up. But as we entered the building I still got that feeling of what it was like to be at school… all that experience suddenly started to spring up in the book as I was writing it and I realised that it wanted to get out for years. And now it’s a comedy.”
Mandy’s own memories of school were not happy, she explained, especially as she moved house so many times as a child. “I absolutely hated junior school,” says Mandy, “because my parents moved so often that I was always the new girl and anybody that’s been a new girl or a new boy will know that everybody else picks on you until you submit. But I didn’t have a chance to do that because I think I did count up at one point there were 12 different junior schools that I went to because my parents just kept moving.
There was only one senior school. That’s when I think academically I started to flourish. Because before that I never learned anything I was always the little girl in the corner. My mother used to drop me off at school, and I used to hang on to the railings. So for me whenever I’m approaching a school just after nine o’clock even now, my stomach churns. And I think that that was important to me to actually get that sort of anxiety into the book.”
Faced with an increasing body count when they arrive at the school, our feline detectives sharpen their claws and set out to catch a serial killer. The past crimes of the pupils are enough to increase their suspicions. Did Pomadora Moseley really murder her family on the rollercoaster at Butlins? Is Clara Toddlebury’s Country Dance Class under threat? And why does Mr Whisker lock himself in his headmaster’s study?
Just as the puns in the story come thick and fast, the series does also tackle some unexpectedly difficult storylines. One of the serious issues this book raises is that of the notorious Magdalene laundries in Ireland in which women were forced to work if they had a baby out of wedlock. This was inspired by a phone-in at Mandy’s radio show in which she heard personal accounts of women who had been at the laundries.
Mandy says: “I was doing a late night show for the BBC where you literally went on air at nine o’clock and you sat there until two in the morning, and everything comes at you. The subject of the Magdalene Laundries came up and I said, has anybody had any experience of this? And the phone lines went hot. For three solid hours, these women came on and told their stories, and it was just extraordinary. Some of them had babies that they’ve never seen again, some of them were told the babies were dead and actually subsequently found out that they were alive, living a life somewhere else. Some of them had been so badly beaten and abused by religious people in these laundries that they were just completely shattered and their whole lives have been shattered by and their whole lives have been shattered by what had happened to them, and all because they had made one mistake. And usually it was a mistake that there was nothing that they could do about because a lot of these women had been raped, and had subsequently gone on to have children. But the moment that the pregnancy was revealed, they were pushed into these places where they admittedly, were allowed to have their babies but then when the babies were taken away, these women were put to work in the most horrendous conditions and this went on all night long and I was absolutely exhausted by it because I just didn’t realise that Cambridgeshire, which is where the programme went out, had so many of these people. And of course, people are still coming forward and telling their stories today.”
However, the serious moments are surrounded by the light-hearted tale of the two cats and the world in which they live, which the author says has enabled her to tackle some darker themes..
Mandy explains: “It’s so freeing to just have the cats as characters because in my mind, when I’m writing, a lot of the characters are obviously people. But it does always come back to Hetty And Tilly and their adventure. So basically, it’s easy to hide behind their fur and their whiskers and their tails when you are telling something that, if it was a normal book, I don’t think I would write it. I really don’t think I would touch those subject matters in that way. I mean, I’ve touched on capital punishment in these books. It just seems a very easy way of getting around the topic. And not only that, but the moment that something dark and terrible happens in these books, there’s a dinner, there’s a picnic, there’s a pudding. Food is a character that comes in like the cavalry. Every time something just gets so dark, they go out for tea or they have a cream tea.”
The Suspicions of Mr Whisker by Mandy Morton is published by Farrago priced £9.99.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-suspicions-of-mr-whisker/mandy-morton/9781788424714#reviews
