I wrote this follow-up to Cat Out of Hell without a contract, which was risky! But I had conceived the idea of an 18th-century maritime back-story for The Captain (one of the two main cat characters from Cat Out of Hell) – and once an idea like that is in your head, you just have to follow through.

I was very interested in particular in the real-life literary figure John Hawkesworth, who received a massive payment for writing up the journals of Captain Cook after his first voyage to the South Seas, so I brought him into the plot as one of the earlier (and more evil) Cat Masters, responsible for turning an eager young scientifically-minded cat into a benighted tortured soul. Once one knows the full story of The Captain – of all he has endured over two hundred and fifty years – he becomes (I hope) a pitiable tragic figure.

There are no scrap-book reviews for The Lunar Cats, as by this point in the 2010s I was mainly harvesting reviews digitally rather than cutting them out of newspapers, so below you will see some pictures which inspired both these Talking Cat novels: all taken from a tiny handmade book once given to me by Cate Olson and Nash Robbins of Much Ado Books in Alfriston, East Sussex.

This tiny book, entitled “The Adaptable Cat”, dates from February 1934 and celebrates a tabby-and-white cat named Huffy, photographed around a garden, once or twice in the company of a strikingly enormous black-cat friend. I can never stop looking at this little book. There is a disturbing scene in Cat Out of Hell involving a rabbit that was directly inspired by one of these pictures…