Okay, then, in which city did Qwilleran work in the early books?
It’s beginning to look more and more like Detroit all the time, although that isn’t an ironclad assertion. In the lengthy hiatus between The Cat Who Turned On and Off and The Cat Who Saw Red, Braun worked as an editor at the Detroit Free Press, which alone gives the city first-choice status. Moreover, The Cat Who Went Underground specifies that Down Below is in the “southern end” of the same state as Mooseville and Pickax; considering the aforementioned overwhelming likelyhood that Moose County’s in Michigan, I really wouldn’t place money on anywhere else but Detroit. (Wherever it is, it’s not Chicago; both Arch Riker and Qwilleran make frequent references to having grown up in Chicago in the city episodes, and it’d be awkward for them to refer to Chicago in the “third person”, so to speak, if they’re in the city at the time. It’s also, as attentive reader Adam Elliott pointed out to me, not Milwaukee, as the art critic Mountclemens in The Cat Who Could Read Backwards mentions that he
