Cat of Many Tails

3 ideas

1. Random-seeming victims share a hidden selection filter

   Crimes that look random usually are not. The killer is drawing victims through some filter, and the filter tends to leave a trace in an institutional record such as birth registries, hospital files or directories, not in anything the victims have in common socially. The investigator's job is to stop looking at who the victims knew and ask which shared document or event could have produced exactly this list, including its ordering, here the steadily falling ages of the victims.

2. Mass panic as a second disaster

   An invisible, unpredictable threat does more damage through the fear it causes than through its direct harm. Newspapers, rumour and vigilante committees turn a handful of murders into a whole city under siege. In the novel's climax a panicked crowd stampedes and kills far more people than the Cat ever did, which shows that the public's response to a threat can become the deadlier danger.

3. Fallible reasoners must still act and accept error

   Ellery is still shaken by an earlier deduction that went wrong and cost lives, and he hesitates to take on the case at all. He is also shown to have misjudged parts of this one. The book's resolution, delivered by an old Viennese psychiatrist, holds that anyone who reasons about human lives will sometimes be wrong. The responsible course is to keep acting while accepting that limit, rather than retreating into inaction or pretending to infallibility.

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