Literary detectives can be unusual — oddballs like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or elderly ladies like her Miss Marple — or they may come from a different age altogether, ancient Egypt, classical Rome or medieval Shrewsbury. As the title hints, Felidae, a detective story in German by a writer of Turkish origin, has an even less usual detective, who is also the first-person narrator: a cat named Francis, who solves crimes — a series of murders, of course — in a feline world. Francis lives with an overweight, and from Francis’s point of view not terribly bright, human called Gustav, a writer with a penchant for Egyptology. Humans in general are referred to as ‘tin-openers’ and much of the incidental attraction of the novel is the cat’s-eye-view of our own world (from which, incidentally, he has to run away, temporarily, in the sequel Felidae on the Road, when a certain familiar operation looks imminent). At the same time, the cat world mirrors that in the human detective novel, with a wide range of characters including feline gangsters, religious zealots and a computer-operating professorial type called Pascal. There are scenes of sex (involving a seductress, all nicely observed and with a footnote on feline copulation) and plenty of violence, while the cats demonstrate their superiority by using such human things as they like or need, including books and computers.

On arrival in a new neighbourhood, Francis comes upon a series of murders, which he begins to investigate, together with a somewhat battered sidekick called Bluebeard. Francis, the gifted amateur and crime-solver goes through the stages so familiar to the human detective: he works out that the murdered cats were all unneutered killed when about to mate, but then a female is killed (though of course this is because she knows too much). He encounters a dangerous feline cult, worshipping a deity called Claudandus, and eventually unmasks the villain, uncovering a plot the he and his henchcats have masterminded and carried out for a selective breeding-programme of a race of pure-bred supercats. Thanks to Francis, all the records (and the cat behind the killings, a kind of embodiment of evil) are destroyed in a fire. The parody element is not only of the detective story, which is more of the intellectual and donnish variety than Raymond Chandler (though Francis does at one point ‘adopt a Humphrey Bogart look’), but also of master-race theories. The closed genre of the detective story (now almost always self-parodying to some extent), requires strikingly original features if it is to be memorable, and Felidae is highly effective in this respect.

‘«I have an idea,» I said. «Tell the computer to find out the breeds of the murder victims.»

«Not a bad idea,» agreed Pascal with pleasure. Now he was in his element. The joy of having found an equally enthusiastic game partner was written prominently on his face, although he must already have known the answers because he himself had entered the data. His paws whooshed with blinding speed over the keyboard.’ p79