Rhode, John as Miles Burton - The Cat Jumps (1946)

Who killed the wealthy widow with the fatal propensity to hold on to her money instead of handing it out to impecunious relatives? The pampered cat, Belisarius, has some notion, but he's not saying -- at least not directly. There's also the matter of the strange knife that found its way into the horse's rump--and its relation to the identical one that killed the wealthy widow a week later.

One of an excellent group of Burtons from the mid-forties, including Murder MD, The Three-Corpse Trick, Not a Leg to Stand On and Situation Vacant, The Cat Jumps offers readers not merely a locked room, but an entire locked house mystery. The whole thing is quite ingeniously solved for the police by Burton's brilliant amateur detective, Desmond Merrion. Mostly set in a small provincial town at the home of the murder and the local inn and with a cast of rather stick-like characters (Belisarius the cat outshines all the humans in the matter of personality), the book does not offer conventional excitement, but it does afford readers the pleasure of ratiocinating a very technically clever crime.

Curt