Macavity

Macavity is the villain of T. S. Eliot's 1939 collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, a book of comic poems the famously austere poet wrote for his godchildren under the nickname "Old Possum". In the poem that bears his name, Macavity is a "Mystery Cat", a "master criminal" and the "Napoleon of Crime" — a knowing nod to Sherlock Holmes's arch-enemy Professor Moriarty, who is described in almost exactly those words.

The joke of the poem is that Macavity is defined entirely by his absence. Whenever a crime is discovered — a pilfered larder, a rifled jewel-case, a missing Foreign Office treaty — the cry goes up, but "Macavity's not there!" He has a cast-iron alibi for every occasion because he is never caught in the act, and the refrain has become one of the most quoted lines in English comic verse. Eliot paints him vividly: a tall, thin ginger cat with sunken eyes and a head "highly domed", his coat dusty and his whiskers uncombed, swaying his head from side to side "with movements like a snake".

The poems sat quietly as a minor charm in Eliot's serious body of work until 1981, when Andrew Lloyd Webber set them to music as the stage musical Cats. There Macavity became a full-blown antagonist, kidnapping the wise old cat Old Deuteronomy, and "Macavity: The Mystery Cat" turned into a show-stopping number. The musical ran for decades in the West End and on Broadway and was seen by tens of millions, carrying Eliot's sinister ginger tom to a global audience who had never opened the book.

Macavity endures because he captures something true about cats: the sense that they lead secret lives, that the innocent creature dozing on the hearth may well have been up to no good, and that you will never, ever prove it.