Cat In An Aqua Storm

I am sure you have been dying to know: the only thing she has in common with my delightful roommate. Miss Temple Barr, is a shoe collection that would choke a trash-removal vehicle (in my humble opinion all they are good for). Imelda Marcos is an amateur. As for the literary significance of such a fact, I leave it as a fit subject for the critics.

Very Best Fishes,

Midnight Louie, his mark

Tailpiece

Carole Nelson Douglas Untangles a Few Snarls

Midnight Louie is like the Force: he is always with you. I am indeed supposed to shed some biographical insight here on Louie’s life and times, but he seems to have taken that over, too.

There may be a misconception about Louie and me that I should correct before the ugly rumor he is so concerned about crops up on another front. Our association is not physical (though 1 would hesitate to call it spiritual). Perhaps metaphysical is the word. He does not cohabitate with me and mine, and never has. Our relationship is purely platonic, for good reason. We have not seen each other since 1973. That was when I wrote a newspaper article about him being saved by a Minnesota woman from a trip to the animal pound in California. Her intriguing classified ad searching for a new home for a cat who was “as at home on your best couch as in the neighbor’s garbage can,” made me write a feature story on him for the daily newspaper I reported for. A home in the country was indeed found, and we went our separate ways.

So my introduction to Midnight Louie was a brief encounter that, nevertheless, made such an indelible impression that years later I found myself drafting him as a part-time narrator for a series of novels. Like all cats, Louie is eternal in a psychic sense. To put it in New Age terms, we communicate despite barriers of time and space. I may even be channeling Midnight Louie’s parallel life, or lives both past and to come.

Louie would scoff at such trendy theories. Yet how can he explain away the feet that the only feline presence in the author photo on the hardcover dustjacket is “a stuffed shill,” as he once described the soft-sculpture substitutes for the missing corporate cats, Baker and Taylor, in Cat in an Alphabet Soup?

This substitute Louie (a contradiction in terms in the extreme—there is no substitute for Louie his own self) is, by the way, a cat-shaped, black velvet evening purse (a zipper at the back reveals a coral satin lining) with rhinestone eyes and a midnight satin bow-tie. It’s my favorite evening bag (of a large collection—so there, Imelda!), being convenient and even comforting to hold—and easy to stash under my arm when going through buffet lines. (Louie would much approve of aiding another’s food consumption in any form.)

That purse gets a lot of comment and coos, so it was only natural that I should start calling it Midnight Louie, and even more natural to let it stand in for Louie.

Come to think of it, I know exactly how Louie would explain his lack of physical presence in the photo: because of his semi-shady past (“expeditions of a law-deriding nature”) he must remain anonymous despite his new literary fame. That’s why he allows me to maintain my self-deluding little fiction about him keeping his distance. He has also hypnotized me with his deep, emerald, Mystifying Max eyes into overlooking his very real presence. After all, a dude who is his own witness protection program can’t afford to be too noticeable.

See what I mean? In person or in print, Midnight Louie maintains a feline Force field all his own.

P. S. If you enjoyed this novel, please consider putting a good review on Amazon.com,

Goodreads and other online bookselling sites. :)

NEXT

Excerpt from Cat on a Blue Monday

Book 3 of the Midnight Louie Mysteries

1

Louie’s Dog Day Afternoon

I like nothing better than playing the role of Sage in the Shade.