Melodie Muses On A Troublesome First Name & What Became Of The Cat
Killing O’Carolan by Walt Pilcher is an entertaining romp, light-hearted crime, suitable for all ages. Adult readers might get the rich vein of parody better than younger readers, and the latter might fall about more hysterically than the former at the slapstick. I loved it from all angles, but then I’m just an avatar.
There are good folk and bad folk in this book, but hero Mark Fairley has his work cut out because — just as in real life — villains don’t come with labels any more than good people do. And when someone comes with a label, that’s the time to get suspicious and assume the label’s wrong.
What became of the cat?
This book also includes a mystery weapon, and one thing that’s clear from the start is that one of the bad people has been using it. What we find out later is that the bad guy who first got his hands on the mystery weapon is not only really really bad, but also not very bright. The fool tries out the weapon on himself. It isn’t a great move, so then he displays his irredeemable badness by trying it out on a stray cat. The cat goes berserk and runs away and that’s the last we see of it. So of course I had to ask Walt Pilcher what happened.
I realise no one in the book knows this, but cat lovers will wonder — what became of the cat?
And here’s what Walt Pilcher replied:
Like Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, we all wonder about cats. (Schrödinger’s cat — Wikipedia). During any given observation, is the cat there or is it not, and if there, is it dead or alive, or is it both dead and alive? Who can say? That is my take on the substance of the famous thought experiment proposed by Schrödinger in 1935.
And if the difficulty of wrapping one’s mind around the question isn’t bad enough, one must consider the experiment has to be performed at least nine times (the number of cat lives [or deaths]) before any reliable conclusions can be formed.
Therefore, as for the cat in question, if in fact it ever existed at all and was not a figment of the bad guy’s hallucinatory imagination after turning the weapon on himself, I can only imagine it is okay, or not, depending.
Right, well… I’m glad that’s all cleared up.
And at least I come out of this able to pronounce Turlough — it’s Ter-lock.
Melodie Trudeaux Is All About The Animals
That’s why Melodie has homed in on the animal angles of every one of the books she muses on. Melodie Trudeaux is the alter-ego of crime writer, Penny Grubb.
Melodie’s latest, Horse of the Same Colour…
… is a MABLE 2022 spotlight book along with Killing O’Carolan. Please come and join Melodie and all the other authors at Fantastic Books Publishing’s
It’s free and it’s fun!