MICHAEL ALLEN DYMMOCH – The Man Who Understood Cats. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1993. Avon, paperback, 1995.

   This is a first novel, an entry in St. Martin’s 1991 Best First Malice Domestic Novel contest. Dymmoch is a pseudonym (and a rather odd one) for “a woman who is a municipal bus driver in one of Chicago’s upscale neighborhoods.” Okay. Seems kind of strange to me, but whatever.

   Dr. Jack Caleb is a Chicago psychiatrist with two cats, Freud and Skinner, and John Thinnes is a Chicago police detective. They meet when one of Caleb’s patients, an accountant, is discovered dead of apparent suicide. Neither Thinnes nor Caleb believe that the man killed himself, and the story deals with their efforts to find out what really happened, and their own somewhat troubled lives.

   The novel opens with a dream sequence done in purple, flowery prose, which really isn’t all that well crafted; after that, the prose style is completely straightforward, and quite adequate for a first novel. Both Thinnes and Caleb emerge as reasonably sympathetic characters, but everyone else ranges from stick to not believable.

   The plot, unfortunately, didn’t hang together too well, and was particularly lacking in verisimilitude when it came to police work. Other than the author’s obvious familiarity with parts of Chicago, there was little about the story that rang true.

   The book was more about the lives and troubles of the two leads than it was a mystery or a detective story. Like so very many first novels in “our” field, it was reasonably good prose-wise, but engendered the feeling in me that it was a mystery only because the author thought it would be easier to sell as such. I can’t recommend it.

Editorial Comments:   For an interview with the author in 2007 (but one that does not reveal why she chose the pen name she did), go here on the Internet.

   A complete list of books by the author can be found here on her website. She also posts occasionally on The Outfit, a blog shared with a group of other writers based in Chicago.