He continued routine vivisection on Claudandus, and as his experiments continued to fall short of expectations, the doctor descended into alcoholic madness. This particular cat was the first upon which the bonding glue worked, something Preterius attributed to superior genetics. Preterius, in his search to create a bonding glue that would heal any flesh wound, performed painful and deadly experiments on countless cats, including the legendary Claudandus. His sleep is haunted by terrifying and vivid nightmares, which offer insight into the mind of the murderer.įrancis soon runs afoul of the local bully Kong and the masochist Claudandus Sect and he discovers that his new home was once the site of a laboratory owned by Doctor Preterius.

He is aided in his investigations by fierce, gluttonous Bluebeard, blind but wise Felicity, and the elderly, technology-savvy cat Pascal. Local street cat Bluebeard is convinced that this, and the other three recent killings, must have been committed by a 'can-opener', which is cat slang for a human.įrancis disagrees, and as he finds out more about the victims, he is sure that not only is the murderer a cat, but that the killings are all connected by one common factor - each of the victims was sexually aroused at the time of death. That novel, perhaps the most moving and allegorical of the tetralogy, lays the.A cat named Francis moves with his owner to a new neighborhood, and no sooner has he set paw into his new home than he is greeted by the slain body of another cat. Pirincci subsequently went on to other projects, and another seven years would elapse before the maturer Francis would make his appearance in the third volume, Cave canem. The tremendous success of that first Katzenkrimi would be repeated some four years later with Francis (1992). Francis was first encountered in Pirincci's breakthrough novel Felidae (1989), which became a best-seller in Germany and a cult favorite among cat and mystery lovers. Kein Wunder, war ich doch bis dahin der hellste Stern im Universum meiner Wahrnehmng und die alles uberstrahlende Sonne in dem der anderen.' The reader enters the feline world (and Weltanschauung) through the eyes of Francis, a black cat with an acerbic tongue and a cynical take on modern humanity, but with one marked change: the narrator has matured and become somewhat more tolerant of the foibles of certain humans (Dosenoffner, as his species calls us).

ISBN 3-8218-0865-9ĭAS DUELL, the fourth novel in Akif Pirincci's Felidae series, begins with a seemingly self-assured narrative voice: 'ich selbst fuhlte mich gefeit gegen derlei charakterliche Abnutzungserscheinungen ('Selbstuberschatzung' and 'Geringschatzung der Jugend').

Felidae akif