A heart-warming, colour-illustrated novel about Kaspar the Savoy cat, from the
award-winning author of Born to Run and The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips
Kaspar the cat first came to the Savoy Hotel in a basket – Johnny Trott knows,
because he was the one who carried him in.
Johnny was a bell-boy, you see, and he carried all of Countess Kandinsky’s
things to her room. But Johnny didn’t expect to end up with Kaspar on his hands
forever, and nor did he count on making friends with Lizziebeth, a spirited
American heiress.
Pretty soon, events are set in motion that will take Johnny – and Kaspar – all
around the world, surviving theft, shipwreck and rooftop rescues along the way.
Because everything changes with a cat like Kaspar around. After all, he’s
Prince Kaspar Kandinsky, Prince of Cats, a Muscovite, a Londoner and a New
Yorker, and as far as anyone knows, the only cat to survive the sinking of the
Titanic! From the Author.
I’m a story detective. I hunt down clues because I need evidence to write my
stories. So what was the evidence behind the writing of Kaspar?
A year ago I was asked to be Writer-in-Residence at the Savoy Hotel in London.
This involved putting on some literary events and staying for three months at
the Savoy. My wife Clare and I had a bed the size of Ireland, and breakfast
every morning looking out over the Thames.
Everyone in the hotel was very kind. We were treated like royalty – which was
great!
Then one day, in the corridor next to the American Bar, I met Kaspar, the
Savoy Cat. He was sitting there in a glass showcase – a sculpture of a huge
black cat – very elegant, very superior.
I made enquiries, as detectives do, and found out why he was there.
One day, almost a hundred years ago, thirteen men sat down to a dinner party
at the Savoy. One of them scoffed loudly at the suggestion that thirteen might
be an unlucky number, said it was so much tosh.
Only a few weeks later, he was shot down in his office in Johannesburg, South
Africa. Thereafter The Savoy decided that they would never again allow thirteen
people to sit down together for dinner.
They would always have a fourteenth chair, and sitting on the fourteenth
chair, there would be a specially carved sculpture of a lucky black cat.
He was known as Kaspar. .
My first clue.
My second clue: I came down to breakfast one morning, and was walking down the
red carpeted stairs into the River Restaurant, when I looked up and had a
sudden sense of déjà vu.
The whole decor and atmosphere reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the
restaurant on the Titanic. I knew then my story would be about a cat called
Kaspar, who would live at the Savoy and become the only cat to survive the
sinking of the Titanic.
But it was the people who lived and worked at the Savoy who gave me my last
and most vital clue. I discovered that they came from every corner of the
globe. And I soon discovered also that their lives were very different from the
lives of the guests they looked after.
It would have been very much like this, I thought, in 1912, at the time the
Titanic went down.
My evidence was complete. A little dreamtime, to make some sense of all the
clues, and I could begin my story, about how Kaspar was brought to the Savoy by
a very famous diva – an opera singer, a Countess from Russia….
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