Princess Donut Understands the Assignment

Dungeon Crawler Carl is about as far from a cozy mystery as I normally wander.

There are aliens, exploding goblins, deadly traps, a galaxy-wide reality show, and a fairly alarming attitude toward survival. Matt Dinniman’s own description has Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning cat, Princess Donut, trying to make it through a video-game-like fantasy dungeon after Earth is transformed for the entertainment of viewers across the galaxy.

So, no.

Not cozy.

But Dinniman clearly understands something I strongly believe:

If you’re going to give the cat a major role, you might as well let the cat take over.

Princess Donut isn’t decorative. She and Carl are the central team, and by the second book Penguin Random House describes them as an “almost unstoppable team.”

That is exactly the kind of animal character I notice.

A cat doesn’t have to be solving a traditional whodunit to matter to the story. Give her opinions, goals, useful skills, the ability to complicate everything, and enough personality to affect what happens next.

Then she stops being a pet in the plot.

She becomes a character.

That’s something I think about a lot with Grok in my Amanda Warren Cozy Animal Mysteries.

Grok is a psychic Maine Coon who communicates with Amanda, notices things she doesn’t, and regularly has his own ideas about how an investigation should proceed.

Calling him Amanda’s sidekick would probably end badly.

Princess Donut would understand.

I also suspect Grok would admire her sense of rank. Dinniman introduces Donut as a prize-winning show cat, and the series certainly doesn’t ask her to become modest just because civilization has collapsed.

There’s a useful writing lesson buried under all the chaos.

Readers can accept a lot from an animal character if that character feels specific.

The cat can talk.

The cat can be psychic.

The cat can be trapped in an intergalactic death game.

What matters is that the cat has agency.

That’s true in a cozy animal mystery, and apparently it’s also true when the apocalypse is being televised.

Grok would probably still insist that Princess Donut has one serious flaw.

She appears to tolerate far too much human supervision.