Literature / The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

"But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats."

The 28th Discworld book, and the first one specifically aimed at teen readers.

Imagine a million clever rats. Rats that don't run. Rats that fight...

Maurice, a streetwise tomcat, has the perfect money-making scam. He's found a stupid-looking kid who plays a pipe, and he has his very own plague of rats — rats who are strangely educated, so Maurice can no longer think of them as "lunch". And everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers. When they reach the stricken town of Bad Blintz, the little con suddenly goes down the drain. For someone there is playing a different tune. A dark, shadowy tune. Something very, very bad is waiting in the cellars. The educated rats must learn a new word. Evil.

It's not a game any more. It's a rat-eat-rat world down there, and that might only be the start.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents won the Carnegie medal for best children's book published in the UK in 2001, making it Pratchett's first book to win a major award.

The story was adapted into a ninety-minute radio drama in 2003, starring Harry Meyers as Maurice and David Tennant as Dangerous Beans. It simplified the story a little, but largely kept to the tone and feel of the book. In 2022 an animated film adaptation was released, with a script by Terry Rossio (Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek), character design by Carter Goodrich (Ratatouille, Brave) and Hugh Laurie playing the titular role of Maurice (David Tennant is also Dangerous Beans again).

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This book provides examples of:

• And the Adventure Continues: Rather then stay in Bad Blitz with Keith, Malicia and the rats, Maurice instead chooses a new boy to follow and probably do something worthy of creating new stories to tell.
• Animal Eye Spy: The Rat King can do this with any animal. Even Maurice.
• Anyone Can Die: Several rats cop it, usually unceremoniously as they get caught by traps or dogs.
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: "No rat shall kill another rat" is one of Dangerous Beans' newer ideas. Inverted by Spider, who feels that rats that kill and eat each other encourages survival of the fittest (slaves).
• Arc Number: Continuing a Discworld tradition of 8 being a magically-potent and dangerous number, there are eight blind rats that comprise the Rat King.
• Arc Words: "And you can always trust a cat to be a cat."
• Attack Its Weak Point: Apparently cutting the knot in the tails of a Rat King turns it back into a bunch of ordinary rats.
• Badass Bandolier: Darktan wears crossed belts covered in pouches to hold his trap-disarming tools.
• Bait-and-Switch: Darktan's Rousing Speech starts this way, with him telling the Clan that there's something new and strong and dangerous in the tunnels under Bad Blintz ... and it's them.
• Balancing Death's Books: Maurice gives up one of his lives to save Dangerous Beans.
• Beastly Bloodsports: One of the central conflicts involves the terrier rings where the terriers compete to kill the greatest number of rats.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Keith. He was going to put rat poison in the rat catchers' tea... before Malicia thought of a better plan.
• Big Damn Heroes: Sardines rescues Darktan from certain doom, and later Maurice rescues the Clan from Spider.
• Blind Seer: A downplayed version. Dangerous Beans, who is an albino and virtually blind, doesn't have actual prophetic powers - but he is leading his people on a quest, issuing commandments, and facing down evil on their behalf.
• A Bloody Mess: Maurice is searching for the lost Dangerous Beans and Peaches when he discovers a trail of red liquid, which he follows to find... the rats' copy of Mr. Bunnsy, lying abandoned in a puddle of water and leaking red ink. He notes that this is, in its way, just as disturbing as finding the body of one of the rats, because Peaches and Dangerous Beans take great care of the book and the fact that it's been abandoned means something dire must have happened to them.
• Bomb Disposal: Trap disposal, rather, but the work of Darktan's squad is played out the same way.
• Blood Sport: Hamnpork is thrown into a ring with a terrier. This does not go as expected.
• Body Horror: Keith's description to the Ratcatchers of Number three rat poison. They were actually only given a laxative, but the effects of the poison are real and no less horrifying (well, unless you're Malicia, who starts enthusiastically taking notes).
• Brawn Hilda: Big Savings may qualify, despite being a rat.
• Break the Cutie: Dangerous Beans dealing with the fact that Mr Bunnsy, a children's book where animals are less animal, is fiction.
• Brick Joke:
  • Near the beginning of the book, the protagonists learn that the rat catchers keep people away while they're working by spreading a story that rats carry a plague that will make your legs fall off. Near the end, when the Rat Piper arrives, one of the town guards warns his colleague to be polite because it's said that if you annoy the Rat Piper he can blow a special note on his pipe that will make your legs fall off; his colleague replies, "Oh, like the plague?"
  • The finishing touch in Keith's defeat of the Rat Piper is that the only rat who comes in response to the Piper's piping is Mr Clicky, the clockwork rat which the trap squad uses to test for traps. Mr Clicky was introduced early in the book while explaining the work of the trap squad, then disappeared from the narrative long enough for the reader to have forgotten about him before his reappearance.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Sardines is the quirkiest and most eccentric of the rats, always laughing and joking and dancing everywhere. While other rats don't always take him seriously, they can't deny that he, in many ways because of his quirks, is exceptionally good at what he does.
• Carnivore Confusion:
  • Maurice is very annoyed to be afflicted with this.
  • Also, the Clan itself has growing doubts about eating dead clanmates or keekees.
• Cats Are Mean: Played with — Maurice is rude, but generally a sympathetic character.
• Cats Are Snarkers: Maurice has a sharp tongue.
• Cats Are Superior: Oh, Maurice. The difference between cats and humans: humans think themselves the lords of creation, but cats know they are.
• Cats Have Nine Lives: Maurice literally has nine lives — or rather five, as he's lost four already.
• Combat Pragmatist: Darktan, especially in the fight against the terrier. In particular, biting its testicles.
• Con Man: Maurice is the brains of the operation.
• Continuity Nod:
  • A subtle one: at the end, Darktan and the Mayor both express skepticism about Mr. Bunnsy, because who ever heard of a talking rabbit? Anyone who read Moving Pictures, the first time that talking animals appear in the series, of course!
  • Waaaaay back in Sourcery, a swarm of rats, some of them wearing clothes, were among the mass rodent-and-bug evacuees which fled Unseen University in fear of Coin's approach. Presumably this would've been before the Clan gave up on devising an efficient way for rats to wear more than just a harness or hat.
  • And back in Reaper Man, the Clan, Maurice, and the Piper's usual trick of pretending to be a plague of rats, is mentioned as having worked in Sto Lat and Pseudopolis before people caught on, with a remark about "Mister so-called Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents."
• Crazy-Prepared: Oh, you wacky Malicia.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: What do you get when you Mind Rape an intelligent talking cat that is terrified shitless for the reason of being surrounded by hundreds of VERY big rats? When you mind rape it so hard that there's no mind left any more, that all the traces of intelligence and even common sense completely disappear? Answer: "A clever cat, but still... Just a cat. Nothing but a cat. All the way to the forest and the cave, the fang and the claw... Just a cat. And you can always trust a cat to be a cat."
• Dark and Troubled Past: Maurice eventually admits that the reason he's intelligent is that he once ate an intelligent rat, and that he still has nightmares about that.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • Maurice pounces on the Death of Rats to protect Dangerous Beans, then stands there with the Grim Squeaker in his mouth, stunned by the realization of how much trouble he's bound to be in for...
  • His attack on the Rat King is similarly spectacular.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Apparently Maurice and Death are on first-name basis- because Death has visited him three times before.
• Distaff Counterpart: Malicia's storytelling aunts are this to the Brothers Grimm.
• Do Not Go Gentle/Don't Fear the Reaper: Darktan manages to combine both of these tropes in his Rousing Speech to the rats: death in itself is not something to be feared, but the Bone Rat will only pass you over if you can look him in the eyes. Given that it's the Disc, he's likely not speaking figuratively.
• Doorstep Baby: Keith was left as a baby on the doorstep of the Musicians' Guild.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (and their scam) were first mentioned in Reaper Man, although most people reading it assumed Maurice was a human conman who trained rats.
• Edible Theme Naming: Since the rats learned to read from food packaging, many of them are named after foods or food-related words (like Additives).
• Expy: At first glance, and indeed at second glance, Maurice can come across as one for Gaspode the Wonder Dog; Maurice's Backstory is similar to Gaspode's second origin (normal stray animals made intelligent from exposure to magical garbage - indirectly in Maurice's case), they're both, on the whole, smarter than the humans they hang out with and use similar tactics in manipulating said humans, and they are both masters of snide and sarcastic comments. As the story goes on, however, it turns out that despite similar set-ups and circumstances, the two animals are actually very different when it comes down to it — where Gaspode is ultimately a pessimist who loves to wallow in self-pity and set himself up as a tragic hero, Maurice has a more positive outlook on life and is a lot more unashamedly a self-centered Jerk with a Heart of Gold — with a bit of a Dark and Troubled Past. Although, given how Gaspode mentions that other animals were affected by the magical garbage, the rats' intelligence comes from the same source.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Aside from the prologue and epilogue, the entire book takes place over the course of a single day, night, and the following morning. None of the characters get a wink of sleep, and it's noted that rats, Darktan especially, are exhausted in the concluding chapters.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: The Piper.
• Fat and Skinny: The rat catchers. Lampshaded by Malicia, who assumes that since they're the bumbling villains, there's a Man Behind the Man. She's half right: there's something behind the two men, but it isn't another man by a long shot...
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: Played for Horror - if a talking rat gets sufficiently scared, they go mute and lose their sapience.
• Funny Animal: A deconstruction. Being able to talk doesn't make the rats that much like humans; they can't wear waistcoats, they instinctively eat their dead, mark things by widdling on them, and practically everything in the world is out to get them.
• Gassy Gastronomy: A girl, upon hearing Dangerous Beans's name, says, "Dangerous Beans?! It sounds like he makes you—".
• Genre Savvy: Malicia insists on always seeing things in terms of stories, ranging from fairy tales to Kid Detective novels like Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and The Famous Five (she claims at one point that four kids and a dog is "the right number for an adventure"). Furthermore, she has trouble in coping with subversions and exceptions, and always makes herself out to be the main character of the "story". However, while her record is more miss than hit, she figures out the Monster Protection Racket within five minutes of encountering Sardines. Additionally, since this is Discworld, Narrative Causality is an actual force in the world.
• Groin Attack: How one rat can take down a battle-hardened terrier when trapped in a ring with walls too high to escape normally. Also strongly implied to be how the Clan incapacitate the highwayman in the opening scene, running up his trouser legs and threatening to bite much harder.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Spider's plan for humanity was chilling enough before it was visualized in The Plague Tale series. Reading the book after playing the games makes it that much harsher.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Dangerous Beans.
  • And Hamnpork.
• Heroic Willpower: The Rat King's Psychic Powers can paralyze a creature in its tracks, or strip it of sapience. Little, weak, blind Dangerous Beans feels that power and ignores it.
• Hive Mind: The Rat King. And it's exponentially stronger than the sum of its parts.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Rat King turns its sapience-stripping power on Maurice, reducing him to an ordinary cat with no thoughts, only instincts — including the instinct to pounce on nearby small squeaky things, and a lot of pent up aggression from having spent months repressing that instinct around the Changelings. A few minutes later, there's no more Rat King.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: Dangerous Beans is baffled by the difference between the behaviour of the humans in Mr. Bunnsy Has An Adventure and the behaviour of the humans he actually encounters.
  Surely even humans wouldn't make a book about Ratty Rupert the Rat, who wore a hat, and poison rats under the floorboards at the same time. Would they? How mad would anything have to be to think like that?
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Although there are a couple of sympathetic human characters, most of them are unintentionally cruel and deliberately murderous toward the talking-rat protagonists.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Darktan to Hamnpork. The latter isn't incompetent himself, but he's very old and inflexible. Darktan is just that badass.
• I Have a Family: One of the ratcatchers tries this. Malicia and Keith aren't buying it.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Sergeant Doppelpunkt and Corporal Knopf (German for "Colon" and "Nobbs").
• Insistent Terminology:
  Malicia: Right, and then your clever rats—
  —>Sardines: Er, we prefer 'educated rodents', miss.

Also:

Spider: What are you? Your mind is WRONG.
—>Maurice: I prefer 'amazing'.

• Intellectual Animal: Dangerous Beans and Peaches in particular.
• Intentional Mess Making: The sapient rats deliberately mess up towns by chewing on things, urinating everywhere, etc., so that Maurice can play Pied Piper and pretend to get rid of them, thereby making money.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Maurice, much to his embarrassment.
• Klingon Promotion: Evidently was the way the rats formerly got their leaders (before gaining intelligence); at one point Hamnpork rears up ready for an old-style challenge from Darktan, then gets confused when none is forthcoming.
• Lampshade Hanging: Often by Malicia, occasionally by Maurice, most of all by both together.
  Malicia: How come a cat knows a word like that?
  Maurice: Everyone's got to know something.
• Laxative Prank: Malicia puts laxative powder in the Rat Catchers' tea, then tells them they've been poisoned and holds the antidote hostage until they do as she says. The "antidote" is laxative powder too.
• Loveable Rogue: Maurice.
• Magical Flutist: Invoked by Maurice and his gang and later invoked and subverted by the real Piper.
• Maybe Ever After: Keith and Malicia agree to be friends at the end and don't engage in any explicit romance, but Malicia is uncharacteristically tongue-tied when asking Keith to stay in Bad Blintz and he is at least partially thinking of her when considering that he might have a future there.
• Mercy Kill: Darktan's order that the Clan do this for a poisoned keekee shocks many of them. Not because they don't agree that the poor thing needs to be put out of its misery, but because Darktan wants them to put it into a trap as a safe alternative to biting a rat with poison in its blood.
• "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop: Darktan performs this stunt to safely disarm a rat trap, suspended from bits of string.
• Monster Protection Racket:
  • The educated rodents make themselves known and the stupid-looking kid gets paid to lead them out of town and into the nearest river. People never check whether the rats are good swimmers...
  • The Ratcatchers themselves have a variant going, extorting money from the town to "get rid of" a plague of rats that don't exist, except in their own rat-breeding cages. Of course, they're pawns of the Rat King.
• Morality Pet: Dangerous Beans to Maurice, much to Maurice's surprise.
• Mugging the Monster: The highwayman at the beginning is aware of this possibility, and has a checklist he runs through before committing himself to the assault. He's not prepared for intelligent rodents, though.
• Multitasked Conversation: When Maurice is trying to tell Sardines to leave before Malicia turns around and sees him. He's not very good at it, and it doesn't work for long.
• No More for Me: Sergeant Doppenpunkt, after seeing two rats band together and attack another rat. And then give him a salute.
• No Name Given: The Rat Catchers are always referred to as Rat Catcher 1 and 2, though their names are mentioned in passing. Also Keith is only "the stupid-looking kid" for the first few chapters because none of the other characters bothered to learn his name.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Some details about rats, mentioned in the author's notes: he says he had to leave out some stuff that was too implausible for fiction.
• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  • The ratcatchers. No 2 has to make an effort to sound grammatically incorrect.
  • Sardines is a milder example; the rats generally accept that he's a talented and intelligent rat, but he spends so much time goofing around that they tend to underestimate him. Darktan is amazed at how wily he really can be.
    Darktan: I can see I'm going to have to watch you, Sardines. You think like Maurice.
    Sardines: Don't worry about me, boss. I'm small. I gotta dance. I wouldn't be any good at leadering.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Maurice swears he will never eat prey that can talk, and everyone reassures him they know he won't, but knows he learned to speak by eating one of the intelligent rats (who had a speech impediment).
• One Last Job: Bad Blintz was going to be this.
• Only Sane Man: Maurice.
• Palate Propping: Sardines avoids being caught in a snap-trap by bracing it open with his stick.
• Pardon My Klingon: The Clan and Maurice swear in Rat and Cat respectively. Apparently as a result of spending so much time with the Clan, Keith (the stupid-looking kid) also swears in Rat.
• Picky People Eater: Make sure you don't eat the green wobbly bit.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: Poor Hamnpork didn't take the shift to sentience particularly well, being fairly old at the time, and is now reduced to being a figurehead for Peaches and Darktan. However, Hamnpork seems to be well aware of this, and though he's thoroughly unhappy about it, frequently complaining about the changes in lifestyle and attitude, is quietly (if somewhat grudgingly) grooming Darktan as his successor. Also, while Hamnpork might not be much of a peacetime leader, he is a highly competent scrapper who took leadership and kept it when Asskicking Leads to Leadership was in full effect, and a surprisingly decent tactician.
• The Quiet One: The stupid-looking kid doesn't talk much. Maurice didn't even know his name until they were introducing themselves to Malicia.
• Rat King: The true villain of the story. Spider, so-called because it's made from eight young rats (eight being a number of great occult significance on the Discworld), has psychic powers so potent it can not only control rats and see anything they can see, but also influence human behaviour. It can even strip away the magical awareness given to the protagonist rats and cat, making them ordinary creatures. Horribly, making a Rat King is part of the qualification for mastery in the Ratcatchers Guild, suggesting that there are at least potentially many of these things across the Disc - though it's hinted that this one is unusual in that it achieved sentience, let alone Psychic Powers.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: Dangerous Beans gives a great one to Spider, pointing out that while Spider can think for his rat subjects, his plans for them show that he has never once tried to think of them.
  Dangerous Beans: I am not so blind that I cannot see darkness.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: It started out as a one-line joke in Reaper Man.
• Resourceful Rodent: The rats have human-level intelligence and can use tools. With a cat and a boy, they run a con that involves recreating The Pied Piper of Hamelin to make money. The rats are smart enough to form a dedicated "bomb disposal squad" that scouts ahead and deactivates rat traps.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: The Ratcatchers acting under the Rat King's influence try to breed larger and larger rats for their rat-coursing pit.
• Rousing Speech: Darktan and his fresh wound.
• Running Gag: Don't eat the green wobbly bit.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Malicia complains about how one of the Mr. Bunnsy books centered around a duck losing a shoe, and finding it under her bed at the end of the book.
• Shout-Out:
  • Dangerous Beans' dream of moving the Clan to an island to live without stealing is what the rats in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH set out to do, also because of emergent ethics.
  • The large medical kit and the small medical kit come from Tomb Raider and probably other similar games.
  • Malicia suggests the perfect time to go solve a mystery...
  Malicia: Of course, it would be more... satisfying if we were four children and a dog.
  • Confronting Spider the Rat King is so horrifying, it robs some of the Clan of their speech and sentience. This is also the fate of Ginger, a talking cat in The Last Battle, when he comes face to face with the demon/god Tash.
  • Jacko the terrier is named after a Real Life champion rat-courser from Victorian times.
  • Nourishing's desperate pleas for Darktan to wake up, she's gotten him out of the trap, are reminiscent of Bigwig's rescue from a snare in Watership Down. Both rescues are made possible because a young, not-too-competent character chewed through part of the trap. Dangerous Beans is also a close parallel to Fiver, that book's Waif Prophet.
  • When the rats get philosophical about what happens after you die, one rat is being expressively sceptical and doubting everything. His name turns out to be Tomato, which makes him a Doubting Tom.
  • According to the Word of God above, the pronunciation of Maurice's name makes this a shout-out to the 80s-90s era spokescat of Nine Lives cat food company. It could also be a reference to Morris Dancing, an activity heavily steeped in the Discworld canon.
• Shrouded in Myth: The genuine Rat Piper encourages tales about what his magic pipe can do so that people will deal on his terms.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Spider offers to help Dangerous Beans protect his swarm and get revenge on the humans. Beans sees right away that Spider is just a vindictive monster with delusions of grandeur who sees other rats as his pawns, and he gently but firmly rejects Spider's offer.
• Smarter Than You Look: Keith. He may be stupid-looking, but it doesn't mean he's actually stupid.
• Squirrels in My Pants: The rats deal with a highwayman who tries to rob their coach in the first chapter by scuttling up inside his pants. The bandit surrenders immediately.
• Stealth Pun: The Educated Rodents struggle with the common rat practice of eating their dead as they begin to develop a sense of religion and ethics and finally abandon it once and for all in favor of burying the dead when Hamnpork dies. Not eating ham and pork is indeed a major dietary restriction in many religions.
• Street Musician: How Keith earned his living before getting recruited by Maurice, and he continues to throw his hat down and play anytime he's left to his own devices. According to him he's been doing this since age six and by all accounts is really good at it.
• Sugar Bowl: The Mr. Bunnsy books portray a world like this. The rats (particularly Dangerous Beans) treat the books as gospel, Malicia treats them as garbage.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • This is always going to crop up with someone as Wrong Genre Savvy as Malicia around the place.
  • Used positively at the end: rather than the humans simply accepting the rats and going into a Happily Ever After ending, the rats (with Maurice as their agent) have to broker a complex set of contracts, peace treaties and amendments to the town charter to ensure that this human-rodent cooperation is going to work.
• Swarm of Rats: Played for Laughs, at first.
• Sympathetic Murder Backstory: Maurice once ate a talking rat. However, he was only a dumb animal at the time, had no way of knowing until he gained his intelligence from said meal, and none of the Clan hold it against him when they find out - if anything, their reaction is more of a collective shrug. Their only issue is that he didn't want to admit it. The guilt is shown to be why he's so careful about what he eats.
• Talking Animal: In particular, exploring Civilized Animal via What Measure Is a Non-Human?
• The Man They Couldn't Hang: Darktan is the rat equivalent after surviving a trap. His resulting horrible scar awes the other rats and smooths out the succession of power.
• Theme Naming: The rats are all named with random words on food labels they found in the wizards' garbage pile.
• This Is My Human: Maurice regards the stupid-looking kid as a necessary prop and an occasionally handy pair of hands.
• This Is Reality: After they get captured by the rat catchers, Keith tells Malicia off for insisting on assuming that life is like the kind of stories where the plucky kid hero is never really hurt and there's always a way out of any difficulty.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Bad Blintz has a serious rat problem - in several ways.
• Unfazed Everyman: The stupid-looking kid (real name "Keith").
• Unfortunate Names: Well, that's the kind of name you might end up with if you learned how to read off food labels, and chose names based on how you liked the sound. The only thing stopping Malicia from bursting out laughing at "Dangerous Beans" is a stern reprimand from Keith.
• Waif Prophet: Dangerous Beans. Maurice inwardly notes that he's the closest thing the Clan has to a wizard.
• Went to the Great X in the Sky: Some of the rats have a tentative belief that on death the Bone Rat sends them to be with the Big Rat Deep Under the Ground.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • It's never stated what eventually became of the female keekee Dangerous Beans touches paws with.
  • Nor what happened to the eight blind keekees who were freed when Maurice bit through the tail-knot that merged them as Spider: did they regain their individuality, become comatose, or just drop dead?
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • By Maurice's standards, it's a rat that can't talk.
  • Played with regarding the Clan's and Spider's various opinions on how much the life of a keekee (= non-talking rat) is worth.
  • And, of course, human opinions on the value of rat lives, whether they're talking or otherwise.
• What the Heck Is an Aglet?: A good tip-off that those aren't rat tails, for one.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Dangerous Beans. While he suffers a major crisis of faith during the story, he remains an idealist in the end.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Malicia thinks she's the hero in a Plucky Children On An Adventure story.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Oh, Maurice.
• You Didn't Ask: What Keith says when Maurice is surprised to learn that the Stupid-Looking Kid has a name, and hadn't mentioned it before.
• You Dirty Rat!: Taken to itty bitty pieces.

The BBC radio adaptation adds examples of:

• Catchphrase: Darktan gets one with "Here endeth the lesson," usually said after he's done making a point.
• First-Person Smartass: Maurice narrates the story, with a bit of extra snark added. The one he's telling the story to is an unresponsive (and dead) Dangerous Beans, while they're both in Death's domain, and Maurice is basically doing a "how did we end up here?" recount.
• Idiot Ball: Maurice briefly picks it up when he reveals his ability to talk to Malicia (as opposed to the book where he reveals it in a moment of shock and horror), though, since he immediately Lampshades it and for the rest of the story behaves in an intelligent manner, this can probably be said to be a Rule of Funny:
  Malicia: Everyone knows cats can't talk — can you, Puss?
  Maurice: I can't say a single word!
  Malicia: Hah!
  Keith: Maurice!
  Maurice: Damn! I just fell for the oldest trick in the Talking Cat Book!
• Parental Bonus: Darktan's voice, accent and general mannerisms are very clearly based on Sean Connery (including his catchphrase, which comes from Connery's famous speech in The Untouchables).

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