Macavity the Mystery Cat, also called the Hidden Paw, is a fictional character and the main antagonist of T. S. Eliot's 1939 poetry book ''Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. He also appears in the Andrew Lloyd Webber 1981 musical Cats'', which is based on Eliot's book. Macavity is a cunning criminal and con artist; he possesses mystical powers and is the antagonist of the musical.
Macavity the Mystery Cat, also called the Hidden Paw, is a fictional character and the main antagonist of T. S. Eliot's 1939 poetry book ''Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. He also appears in the Andrew Lloyd Webber 1981 musical Cats'', which is based on Eliot's book. Macavity is a cunning criminal and con artist; he possesses mystical powers and is the antagonist of the musical.
== Origins and etymology == T. S. Eliot was a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and the character of Macavity is a literary allusion to Professor Moriarty, the criminal mastermind in the Sherlock series. Evidence that Macavity was based on Moriarty was first presented by H.T. Webster and H.W. Starr in 1954, and later rediscovered by Katharine Loesch. In a letter to Frank Morley, Eliot wrote, "I have done a new cat modeled on the late Professor Moriarty, but he doesn't seem very popular; too sophisticated perhaps." The name "Macavity" is thus a pun on "Moriarty". The word 'cavity' also implies a hole or void or absence of something, and Macavity is described in the poem as being "not there" at the time or location of any crime.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).