“Cats Can Kill” by Ray Cummings is a mystery wrapped up in a hair ball. This tale of were-cats appears in December 1941’s The Masked Detective. This Pulp was a hero Pulp disguised as a Mystery magazine. Hero Pulps like Doc Savage, The Spider and The Shadow were big sellers in the 1930s and 1940s. The Masked Detective was begun in 1940 but died after only twelve issues because of the paper shortages of WWII.
“The Masked Detective” was Rex Parker, an able-bodied sleuth who in this particular issue had a jungle adventure called “Death Island” (probably written by Sam Merwin Jr. under the house name, C. K. M. Scanlon.) The second story was “Pop-off Rookie: by Leo Hoban, pretty typical Mystery magazine stuff and lastly, “in the basement” (as I call it), alternating between columns of ads was “Cats Can Kill” by Ray Cummings.
Cummings was one of the foundational Science Fiction writers with classics like “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (1919) and “Brigands of the Moon” (1931) but he also wrote many Mystery stories too. Sometimes with SF-sounding titles like “Atom Boy” that appeared in Thrilling Detective, April 1947. Sometimes he combined both genres in a series called Crime 2000 in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
“Cats Can Kill” would not have surprised me if it had been a Science Fictional Mystery. Instead it is a piece of almost Lovecraftian horror. A rather unlikable narrator, an unlicensed physician, James Porter, is telling his story from an asylum. He insists he is not insane and tells us “what really happened”. Like many an HPL character he writes a secret diary of what took place, the reader always wary to read between the lines. He often stares out his barred window at a cat with burning green eyes in the bushes.
Porter lays out his plan to marry Gloria, get her fortune then get rid of her. At first his scheme is thwarted by the appearance of Tom Rance, a man who is handsome, equally rich and in love with Gloria. Rance’s hobby is capturing unusual animals for zoos. He meets his timely death when the largest bobcat ever found escapes from its cage and claws him savagely to death.
Before Tom’s death, Gloria comes clean with both of her suitors. Her family suffers from “Lycanthrobia”, not werewolfery but a mania that convinces the afflicted that they have turned into a cat. During spells of this illness, the cat-woman will attack and kill those most dear to her. Rance and Porter laugh it off as an old wives’ tale. Tom plans to marry Gloria after his wild cat hunt.
Porter admits there are things about Gloria that do bother him. Her green eyes sometimes flash like a cat’s. Her fingernails are overly long, gray and hard varnished. She moves silently like a feline, appearing as if out of nowhere. Now free to pursue Gloria without a rival, Porter takes every opportunity to encourage Gloria’s mental weaknesses. He alternates between laughing at her fears and faking fright of her. This will make it easier for him to get rid of her after he has all her money.
Part of his plan is to get her hooked on narcotics. He tells her it is only a simply sedative so she can sleep. Now an addict, he messes with her more. Taking her to the Canadian woods, he dresses in a cougar costume at night to frighten her more. Finally he gives her a toxin that will finish the job. It is a pseudo-rabies serum that is based on an injection she is allergic to. Filled with this insanity-driving liquid, Porter chases her through the woods dressed in his cougar costume. She finally falls down dead from the combination. Unfortunately for him, she dies near another cabin and the madman is arrested.
Locked up, Porter has time to write his diary and to consider something else. Gloria’s old legend says that if a were-cat is killed, its soul will find the largest cat it can inhabit that body. This cat-fiend will haunt the killer. Porter laughs at this. That cat is outside his prison, though it never appears to anyone but him. But Porter pretends he is not afraid. Hadn’t he killed Tom Rance? He admits that he went to the cabin with a metal claw device he created and raked the man with it, severing his jugular. The cat ghost knows this and wants revenge. Porter laughs a last time. He is ready with his metal claw, ready for any ghost cats that might appear… The diary ends there.
The last section of the story is in the third person. Two asylum attendants find Porter’s body clawed to death. They find the diary and guess that he drove himself insane when he created his pseudo-serums. He had experimented on himself in secret. They also find the metal claw and believe he used it on himself, though they wonder how that was possible. Lastly, they see a cat outside the window, with large glowing green eyes. They quickly shut the window and ask no more questions.
M. R. James, speaking on the writing of ghost stories said that the writer may give a logical explanation for the unearthly events but that they should be “not quite practicable.” When you are writing for Weird Tales, that pretty much holds. But if you are writing for a detective magazine, you get more leeway. In fact, you are encouraged to follow in the footsteps of Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic school, and explain away the ghosts. Cummings straddles this fence pretty well. It is obvious that the narrator is whack-a-doo and his constant and annoying “Aren’t I clever?” insertions don’t let us forget this. The presence of the metal claw could explain any cat-related terrors (just as Edmond Hamilton used a similar device in “The Leopard’s Paw” in Popular Detective, March 1936). But Cummings doesn’t ruin it all. He allows us the green-eyed fiend in the bushes at the end. The reader can decide. Those who like a rational ending can go that way. Those who like a supernatural one can walk the other direction looking for a newsstand that sells copies of Weird Tales.
In the end this tale really is more of ghost story in the Jamesian sense, because it becomes the traditional “pursuit tale” as Jack Sullivan categorizes them in Elegant Nightmares (1978). Stories like “Count Magnus” have an unwitting narrator who has aroused the ire of a supernatural fiend and runs from it. Ultimately, he meets a terrible end. H. P. Lovecraft borrowed this structure for many of his Cthulhu Mythos stories like “The Hound” (Weird Tales, February 1924) where two men dig up a body then are chased by a ethereal hound until they are killed horribly. Many Mythos stories have this plot including Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos” (Weird Tales, March 1929). The difference is in “Cats Can Kill” the monster’s killing is a form of poetic justice. In the supernatural worlds of James, Lovecraft and Long, the victims are often innocent of any crime.
Now if you are familiar with Weird Tales or the movies you will immediately think of either Val Lewton’s The Baghetta” (Weird Tales, July 1930) or the Jacques Tourner film, The Cat People (1942). Simone Simon in that movie turns into a leopard when sexually aroused. Here Cummings has a similar idea– a complete year earlier than the film! “Cats Can Kill” appeared December 1941 and The Cat People premiered in December 1942. Did Cummings steal it from Lewton and his 1930 Weird Tales story?
Lewton used that piece when he wrote the screenplay for The Cat People. That would be a nice explanation, only it doesn’t fly. The Weird Tales story has a young man go out to kill a Baghetta so he can claim his chieftanship. He fakes it and there are no were-cats in the story except as background. It is only a very small nugget that Lewton used as a launching pad for a much different work. So where did Cummings get the idea? He had no connection with Hollywood so he didn’t have an insider knowledge of a future film.
I don’t know where Cummings got his inspiration. Legends about were-cats can be found in Africa, Asia and America. They also appear in literature before 1941 like Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” (1908) and “The Empty Sleeve” (with Wilfred Wilson) (The London Magazine, January 1911) as well as in Weird Tales (a magazine Cummings appeared in several times) with Greye La Spina’s “The Tortoise-Shell Cat” (Weird Tales, November 1924). So he could have picked up the idea lots of places but it is the strangely familiar Cat People vibe that is intriguing.
