Midnight Louie's Pet Detectives
Edited by Carole Nelson Douglas
Forge, $23.95
ISBN 0312864353

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A cat with an attitude -- that's Midnight Louie. Carole Nelson Douglas has been permitted by this former "motel-cat" (abandoned, living off lizards and room service trays) to adopt him, writing a series of mysteries (now totaling nine -- for each life?) featuring Louie as the "smart-sass" narrator. Louie refers to Douglas as "my biographer." The series is set in Las Vegas, which this mystery-solving cat calls "my kind of town -- all night action; crime and punishment; dolls, dudes, and shady dames; moolah and murder; neon and nefarious doings."

Ah, but this hard-boiled cat noir has the heart of a cozy. Both sides of his split personality are covered in the latest from Douglas and Louie -- a collection of 17 stories (both hard-boiled and warm fuzzies) featuring a variety of animals who step in where humans fear to tread, solving mysteries and providing clues to their detecting human colleagues.

The introduction is by Lawrence Block, whose Burglar series features a bookstore cat, Raffles. This mouser doesn't detect, but clearly Block knows how valuable an animal is to a story -- so much so that he once attempted to have the Edgar Awards divided into two categories: Books with Cat and Books Without Cat.

These stories are the perfect fix for those of us who love mysteries and animals. Among the anthropomorphisizing writers are Lilian Jackson Braun (The Cat Who series), who Louie refers to as "The First Lady of Feline Fiction," and Anne Perry, whose conversion from Victorian noir to crime most furry is ap-paw-lauded by Louie. Douglas herself contributes a story, for which Louie begins his introduction, "My collaborator cheats on me."

There are no dogs (in the sense of failures) in the collection, but dogs do make an appearance. As do elephants, a Tasmanian devil, an owl, a pair of lovebirds (of the feathered variety), hamsters, raccoons, and, of course, cats -- lots of cats and kittens.

As Midnight Louie might growl, this compilation is the cat's meow.