Born Lilian Jackson in the
Willimansett neighborhood of Chicopee, Massachusetts, to Charles and Clara Ward Jackson, she began her writing career as a teenager after her family moved to Michigan, contributing sports poetry to the
Detroit News. She went on to write advertising copy for many
Detroit department stores. At the
Detroit Free Press she worked 30 years as the "Good Living" editor and retired in 1978. Lilian married her second husband, Earl Bettinger in 1979. Braun wrote a series of three mystery novels published to critical acclaim from 1966 to 1968:
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards,
The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, and
The Cat Who Turned On and Off. She resumed writing novels following a nearly twenty-year hiatus, after her retirement from the Detroit Free Press, and in 1986 the
Berkley Publishing Group continued the series, and introduced Braun to a new generation, by publishing
The Cat Who Saw Red as a
paperback original. During the next two years, Berkley released four more
Cat Who novels in paperback and reprinted all three from the 1960s. The series rose to the top of some bestseller lists; it reached number two on the
New York Times Best Seller list with its 23rd volume
The Cat Who Smelled a Rat in 2001. And beginning in 1990, Braun’s books made the New York Times Best Seller List for 20 years in a row. The
Los Angeles Times characterized her storytelling voice as being filled with “wonder and whimsy.” The 29th and last completed novel in the series,
The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers was published by
Penguin Group in January 2007. Like many writers of her generation, Braun was an admitted
technophobe; she wrote all of her books in long hand and then
typed them herself. Many of her books have been published as audiobooks narrated by
George Guidall,
Mason Adams,
Christopher Ragland and
Theodore Bikel. Little was known about Braun, who was protective of her private life. Publishers long gave the incorrect birth year of 1916; she was three years older, which remained unknown until she gave her true age during a 2005 interview with the
Detroit News. Finally she lived in
Tryon, North Carolina, with her second husband of 32 years, Earl Bettinger, and their two cats. Bettinger shared that Braun’s only regret at the end of life was being unable to complete another book she was working on—
The Cat Who Smelled Smoke—due to failing health, saying, "She regretted it most of all because so many fans wanted another book." Braun died from a lung infection in June 2011, at the Hospice House of the Carolina Foothills in
Landrum, South Carolina. She was preceded in death by her first husband, Louis Paul Braun, a sister, Florence Jackson, and a brother, Lloyd Jackson. Earl A. Bettinger (born November 24, 1923) died at the age of 96 on July 20, 2020. == Legacy ==