Below is the complete list of Lilian Jackson Braun books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of The Cat Who Books
Publication Order of Cat Who Short Story Collections Books
Publication Order of Midnight Louie Books
About Lilian Jackson Braun
Lilian Jackson Braun was an American mystery novelist whose long-running The Cat Who… series became one of the most recognizable bodies of cat-centered detective fiction. Her novels follow journalist James Mackintosh Qwilleran and his Siamese cats, the intuitive Koko and the affectionate Yum Yum, through mysteries shaped less by graphic violence than by eccentric personalities, community rivalries, old grudges, and suspicious disruptions of everyday life. Braun’s light, observant style helped make the series a cornerstone of the cozy mystery tradition.
Born in Chicopee, Massachusetts, in 1913, Braun moved with her family to Michigan while she was young. She began writing as a teenager, contributing sports poetry to The Detroit News, and later worked in advertising and public relations. Her longest professional association was with the Detroit Free Press, where she spent approximately three decades as a feature writer and editor. That newspaper background became central to her fiction. Qwilleran is not a police detective but an experienced reporter whose curiosity, interviewing ability, and sensitivity to inconsistencies repeatedly draw him into criminal investigations.
Braun made her novel debut with The Cat Who Could Read Backwards in 1966. The book introduced Qwilleran and Koko within the worlds of newspaper journalism and art criticism. The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern and The Cat Who Turned On and Off followed over the next two years, establishing the series’ combination of mystery, cultural satire, domestic detail, and feline behavior.
After those three novels, Braun disappeared from book publishing for nearly eighteen years. She continued her newspaper career, but no new Qwilleran mystery appeared until The Cat Who Saw Red in 1986. The revival transformed a promising short sequence into a major publishing success. New installments appeared regularly, the original novels returned to print, and Braun developed a readership that followed the series for more than two decades.
The fictional world also changed as the books progressed. The earliest mysteries place Qwilleran in an urban environment, moving among artists, designers, collectors, and newspaper colleagues. Later, an inheritance allows him to relocate to Pickax, the principal town of Moose County, described as being “400 miles north of everywhere.” The rural setting gave Braun room to create a large recurring community of shopkeepers, librarians, restaurateurs, civic organizers, craftspeople, historians, and wealthy local families. Pickax gradually became as important to the series as any individual mystery.
Koko’s apparent ability to detect clues provides the books with their most distinctive device. He reacts to words, objects, sounds, and people in ways that Qwilleran initially struggles to interpret, while Yum Yum supplies a gentler counterbalance. Braun generally leaves room for readers to decide whether Koko possesses extraordinary perception or whether Qwilleran has simply learned to treat feline behavior as evidence. The mysteries therefore retain a playful ambiguity without becoming fully supernatural.
Braun completed twenty-nine novels in the main series, ending with The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers in 2007. She also published related collections, including The Cat Who Had 14 Tales, Short & Tall Tales, and The Private Life of the Cat Who…. A proposed thirtieth novel, The Cat Who Smelled Smoke, was announced but never completed or published and should not be counted as a finished installment.
Braun died in 2011 at the age of ninety-seven. Her bibliography is dominated by one fictional world, but its appeal extends beyond the individual crimes. Through Qwilleran’s journalism, Koko’s unsettling instincts, and the social life of Moose County, she created mysteries that treat gossip, architecture, food, local history, and communal memory as essential forms of evidence.