Lilian Jackson Braun (June 20, 1913June 4, 2011) was an American writer known for her light-hearted series of The Cat Who... mystery novels. The Cat Who books features newspaper journalist Jim Qwilleran, eventually retired, and his two Siamese cats, Koko (short for Kao K'o Kung) and Yum Yum, first in an unnamed midwestern American city and then in the fictitious small town of Pickax located in Moose County "400 miles north of everywhere". Although never explicitly located in the books, the towns, counties, and lifestyles portrayed in the series are generally accepted to be modeled after Bad Axe, Michigan, where Braun resided with her husband until the mid-1980s. Life and career Born Lilian Jackson in the Willimansett neighborhood of Chicopee, Massachusetts, to Charles and Clara Ward Jackson, she began her writing career as a teenager, contributing sports poetry to the Detroit News. She went on to write advertising copy for many Detroit department stores. At the Detroit Free Press she worked 30 years as the "Good Living" editor and retired in 1978. Braun wrote a series of three mystery novels published to critical acclaim from 1966 to 1968: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, and The Cat Who Turned On and Off. The New York Times called her "the new detective of the year" in 1966. But she disappeared from the publishing scene for 18 years. In 1986 the Berkley Publishing Group continued the series, and introduced Braun to a new generation, by publishing The Cat Who Saw Red as a paperback original. During the next two years, Berkley released four more Cat Who novels in paperback and reprinted all three from the 1960s. The series rose to the top of some bestseller lists; it reached number two on the New York Times Best Seller list with its 23rd volume The Cat Who Smelled a Rat in 2001. The 29th and last completed novel in the series, The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers was published by Penguin Group in January 2007. Like many writers of her generation, Braun was an admitted technophobe; she wrote all of her books in long hand and then typed them herself. Little was known about Braun, who was protective of her private life. Publishers long gave incorrect birth year 1916; she was three years older, which remained unknown until she gave her true age during a 2005 interview with