June 20, 1913

Lilian Jackson Braun (June 20, 1913 to  June 4, 2011) put the cozy back in mystery stories and the flea comb back in the writer's desk set.





I am quoting her Washington Times obit.; the others, including The New York Times, didn't bother to look beyond the publishers' releases.


LANDRUM, S.C. (AP) - The author who wrote 29 books in the “The Cat Who …” mystery series almost quit writing after the third book was published because popular tastes had changed so much, but a casual conversation with her husband convinced her to try again.

Lilian Jackson Braun, who died last week in South Carolina, took an 18-year hiatus between “The Cat Who Turned On and Off” and “The Cat Who Saw Red,” published in 1986. She resumed because her husband encouraged her to return to writing after she retired from The Detroit Free Press in 1984.

Braun and her first publisher parted ways when she refused to add sex and violence to her fourth book, her... [second husband, of 32 years], Earl Bettinger of Tryon, N.C., [said]...On a rainy day years later, she asked ...[him] if he wanted to read the rejected book, “And I said, 'Lilian, everything about this book demands that you send it back to your agent.’”

So she tried again, and Berkley Publishing Group, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA), not only accepted her book but also reprinted her first three mysteries.....

Braun, 97, died Saturday of natural causes at the Hospice House of the Carolina Foothills in Landrum. She had lived in Tryon, N.C., for the past 23 years. She wrote 31 books, including two short story collections, and worked 30 years at The Detroit Free Press.