Lilian Jackson Braun was an American writer born in Chicopee, Massachusetts in 1913. She became widely recognized for her light-hearted mystery series The Cat Who..., which began in the 1960s and eventually grew to include dozens of novels. The Cat Who series centers on Jim Qwilleran, a newspaper journalist, and his two Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum. The stories are set first in an unnamed Midwestern city and later in Pickax, a fictional small town in the equally fictional Moose County, described as being "400 miles north of everywhere." Although the books never explicitly identify their real-world location, the towns, counties, and lifestyles depicted are generally understood to be modeled after Bad Axe, Michigan, where Braun lived with her husband until the mid-1980s. Braun passed away in 2011 in Landrum, South Carolina, leaving behind a substantial body of work that made her one of the most prolific mystery writers of her era.