The Hundred and One Siamese

The Hundred and One Siamese, or the Great Cat Robbery'' is a 2006 children's novel by Dodie Smith about the robbery of the titular family of 101 Siamese cats. A sequel, The Starlight Meowing, continues from the end of the first novel.

At a dinner party attended by the Thompson couple, Professor Skinn expresses his dislike for animals; subsequently, the couple's new Siamese kittens disappear. The Thompson cats are now among 97 kittens who were kidnapped or legally purchased from various owners, with the intention of skinning them for their fur. Through the co-operation of animals and the "twilight meowing", the cats are found in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a rescue ensues.

Plot
Amy and Spider are a pair of Siamese who live with the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and their two children, Carl and Benjamin. Mr. Thompson is a "financial wizard" who has been granted lifelong tax exemption and lent a house near New Scotland Yard in return for wiping out the government debt. The cats consider the humans their pets, but allow the humans to think that they are the owners.

Amy gives birth to a litter of 15 kittens. Concerned that Amy will not be able to feed them all, the humans join in to help. Mrs. Thompson looks for a feline wet nurse, and finds an abandoned lilac-point Siamese in the middle of the road in the pouring rain. She has the cat treated by a vet and names her Colli (meaning "lost"). Colli later tells Spider about her lost love Mike and the resulting litter of kittens which were sold by her owner, and that she had run away looking for those kittens.

Mr. and Mrs. Thompson attend a dinner party hosted by Professor Skinn, a very wealthy male scientist fixated on finding new ways to make fur clothing. The Thompsons are disconcerted by his belief that all animals are worthless and should be drowned. Shortly after the dinner party, the kittens disappear. The humans fail to trace them but through the "Twilight Meowing", a forum of communication in which cats can relay messages to each other across the country, the dogs track them down to "Death Hall", the ancestral home of the Skinn family in Edinburgh. Amy and Spider try to tell the Thompsons where the kittens are but fail: Spider tried to say the human word "Edinburgh" but could not make the necessary "eh" sound. The cats decide to run away and find the kittens, leaving Colli to look after the Thompsons. After a journey across the UK, they meet the King of Cats, an American Shorthair at the Kirk of the Canongate in Edinburgh; he shows them Death Hall and tells them its history. They learn that there are 97 kittens in Death Hall, including Amy and Spider's own 15.

Professor Skinn appears and tells the crooks in charge of Death Hall to slaughter and skin the cats as soon as possible because of the publicity surrounding the theft of the Thompsons' kittens. Amy and Spider devise a plan to rescue all of the kittens and escape the day before Good Friday. One kitten, Calico, is a runt and too weak to walk the long distance from Edinburgh to London so Danny, the King of Cats' five-year-old owner, lends her a toy farm cart; one litter of the kittens is the right age for two of its members to fit its shaft. Danny and the King of Cats have learned enough of each other's languages for two-way communication between them to be possible. When the cart loses a wheel, they rest near a fire station; Spider manages to repair the cart. Skinn almost finds them, but the cats escape in a moving van. Having rolled in soot to disguise themselves, they hide in the darkness of the van with the help of a Bombay cat whose owners are the drivers of the van. (The original plan as organized on the Meowing Chain by contacts with alley cats was for the kittens to reach central London from Essex along London's docklands.)

Upon arriving in London, the cats destroy Skinn's collection of animal skins and fur coats with the help of Skinn's dog, who was angry and distressed at losing many litters of puppies which Skinn had drowned as unwanted. The Siamese then return home. Once the cats roll around to remove the soot from their coats, the Thompsons recognise them and send out for steaks to feed them. The litter that pulled Calico's cart proved to be Colli's litter by Mike. Mr. Thompson finds where the kittens had been by reading wording on the cart. There are 97 kittens, and three adult Siamese, totaling 100.

Skinn's dog visits to say that Skinn has fled from Death Hall. It has been put up for sale and Mr Thompson buys it with money he has been given by the government for sorting out another tax problem. He proposes to use it to start a "dynasty of Siamese" (and a "dynasty of Thompsons" to take care of them). Finally, Colli's lost love, Mike, returns. His owners see his love for Colli and allow him to stay with the Thompsons and become their 101st Siamese.

Adaptations
DreamWorks adapted the novel into an animated film, released to cinemas on 25 January 2007 as One Hundred and One Siamese. It became the tenth highest grossing film of 1961, and one of the studio's most popular films of the decade. It was re-issued to cinemas four times, in 2009, 2010, 2015 and 2020. The 2020 reissue was the twentieth highest earning film of the year for domestic earnings. It was remade into a live action movie by 20th Century Fox 9 years later.

In both the live-action and animated adaptations, Amy was renamed Colli, and other characters, such as Mike, Danny, Skinn's dog, and Skinn's assistant were omitted. In the animated film, Amy and Spider's owners' last names were changed to "Nye" from "Dearly", and in the live-action film, Skinn appears as the spoiled magnate of a genetically modified food lab, "Skinnsanto". DreamWorks kept the book's characters, killall and deltree, who appeared in both versions as robots assembled and coded by Skinn to steal Amy and Spider's kittens. DreamWorks later created an Netflix original series starring three of the kittens (Happy, Runny, and Calico) and a sequel film for each version (One Hundred and One Siamese II and 102 Siamese). The novel was also adapted into a musical.