‘There’s a dead body in my library’: crime fiction texts and the history of libraries

Abstract

Since the publication of Australia’s first crime novel in 1830, Australians have read crime fiction for entertainment, for the reassurance that wrongdoers will be punished, and to test their deductive skills against those of their favourite sleuth. The novels, short stories and plays within the crime fiction genre that have been produced in Australia between colonial times and the present day also offer opportunities to investigate a particular place or a particular time. Indeed, many crime fiction writers have mastered the art of recreating settings in both rural and metropolitan landscapes. The details provided within these works ultimately reveal a culprit (usually a murderer), yet they also outline the availability of certain products, bus and train timetables, the floor plans of local hotels or world-famous buildings and numerous other particulars, thus providing a rich, if surprising, source of material for the merely curious and the professional researcher. Crime fiction stories set within libraries present a history of the information services profession. This paper demonstrates how crime fiction can provide an important supplement to more traditional historical sources, with a focus on how the genre has documented some of the major changes within libraries over the last 75 years, since 1939.

Keywords:

• bibliomystery
• crime fiction
• history
• Library Act 1939 (NSW)
• public libraries
• public programming

Implications for best practice

•	There is value in ensuring that collection development policies, in public libraries as well as other types of libraries, include a variety of crime fiction texts.
•	Crime fiction can open up opportunities for a variety of public programming initiatives.
•	Crime fiction texts can play an important role in local studies research projects.
•	Crime fiction texts can inform historical research into the information services profession.

Introduction

In the opening pages of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library (1942/2002) Colonel Bantry demands: ‘Do you mean to tell me … that there’s a dead body in my library – my library?’ (1942/2002, p. 14). The idea of a body in the library, from which this article takes its title, has become entrenched within the crime fiction corpus, particularly those texts that emerged from or in many ways reflect the genre’s golden age – those short stories and novels produced, predominantly by British writers, between the First and Second World Wars. These works, which traditionally present genteel environments that have been disturbed by the act of murder (the most common offence committed in contemporary crime fiction), are well known for scenes in which libraries provide critical as well as incidental settings. The library, as setting, is not deployed exclusively by those writing what are commonly referred to as clue puzzles; many other sub-genres of crime fiction have taken advantage of book-lined rooms for the committing or solving of a murder.

Libraries serve to reveal crimes, as well as revealing much about the changing nature of libraries themselves, in crime fiction around the world. For Australia, crime fiction is an integral element of the national literary tradition. The first novel to be published in Australia, a crime novel, was released in Hobart Town in 1830: Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton, a three-volume work based very loosely upon real events. Since this time Australians have read crime fiction for a variety of reasons, including for entertainment, for a chance to experience people and places far removed from their own everyday worlds, for an opportunity to test their deductive skills against those of their favourite sleuth or, in the case of crime fiction series, to follow a vast array of ongoing plots and immerse themselves in the lives of famous detectives (Franks, 2014).

In the early days of the Australian colonies everyone knew a crook. Crime fiction allowed those early colonists, living alongside convicts, to engage with Emile Durkheim’s idea of the conscience collective (1893/1964). This idea asserts that Durkheim’s thesis of punishment, as a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries, works to support the reading and the writing of crime fiction. Indeed, the crime fiction genre works to reiterate the dominant social view that wrongdoers, particularly murderers, must be punished – either poetically or judicially. Furthermore, the genre of crime fiction allows readers (as well as viewers) to experience the solving of many different crimes vicariously, fulfilling strong emotional and social needs to be agents of punishment. For those of us who do not directly contribute to the incarceration of criminals, reading crime fiction allows us to feel that we have participated in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators (Franks, 2014). It is also important to note that in an era that predates social media these stories worked in some cases to give people a better insight into their neighbours and what they might be up to.

The collecting of crime fiction

The value of crime fiction, and by extension the value of collecting crime fiction works, has been debated at length. John Carter explained, in the 1930s, that, for crime fiction:

The detective story shows every sign of having come to stay. As a literary form it is not yet 100 years old, and there have not been wanting during its most recent heyday (which is still going on) certain crabbed person to prophesy that such a boom must end in a slump, with the implied, or sometimes explicit rider that the sooner this happens the better for the republic of letters. (1934/1947, pp. 453–454)

This competition – enthusiastically fuelled by some and quickly dismissed by others – of ‘Literary Artefacts’ versus ‘Popular Fiction’ has kept scholars and students of the written word busy for centuries. Some of the greatest names to contribute to the genre have entered into this debate, with Raymond Chandler highlighting Dorothy L. Sayers’ theory that crime fiction is a ‘literature of escape’ rather than a ‘literature of expression’ (1944/1988, p. 11). Yet, many solid defences have been offered, including one by R. Austin Freeman, a prolific author well known for his numerous crime novels including the Dr Thorndyke Mysteries, who noted:

By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste. (1924/1947, p. 7)

There were, at the time of Freeman’s argument, many more readers of crime fiction than office boys and factory girls could possibly account for. In fact, as early as the 1920s Sayers wrote:

It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve. (1928/1947, p. 95)

And so, ‘book upon book’ was written and published, to be sold and read, kept or discarded, to be incorporated into private collections and to fill numerous shelves in libraries around the world, including the predecessor institutions of the State Library of New South Wales. The multi-volume Subject-Index of the Books in the Author Catalogues for the Years 1869–1895 (1903) details the collection of the Sydney Free Public Library, incorporating holdings of the former private subscription library taken over by the government of New South Wales in 1869, as well as additions to this collection made up until 1895. An examination of Australian fiction reveals much of interest. Amongst the crime fiction titles works are listed that remain popular today, such as Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and T.A. Browne’s (writing as Rolf Boldrewood) Robbery Under Arms (1888), as well as those that have disappeared over the years from numerous shelves, including Reverend MacDonald’s Thunderbolt: An Australian Story (1894). More interesting than the crime fiction titles documented is the number of crime fiction works listed. Removing titles based in New Zealand and the Pacific reduces the list under the heading ‘Australian’ (modified to ‘Australasian’ from the second column) to 153 published works. These works were triangulated through the State Library of New South Wales catalogue, OCLC WorldCat, personal knowledge of Australian crime fiction and physical examination of numerous artefacts, to identify the genre and location focus of each title listed. Of these, 33 titles, or an impressive 21.5%, can be classified as crime fiction. It is extraordinary that crime fiction could constitute over one-fifth of the collection under a policy of reading for education and enlightenment over reading for pleasure, but also in the context of the aggressive weeding programme undertaken at the Library during the 1870s (Patton, 2014). The figure of 21.5%, now over 110 years old, compares favourably to Stephen Knight’s contemporary assessment that crime fiction titles account for one in every three new books published in English released each year (2010, p. x).

The appreciation of crime fiction

Crime fiction has been – and continues to be – criticised (Cole, 2004, p. 17; James, 2009, pp. 160–174; Worthington, 2011, p. ix); but there was, and is, strong demand for this material, a demand libraries have worked successfully to meet. One of the important factors of this success is an increasing appreciation for the benefits of every type of reading.

Frank Tate’s stirring introduction to Australian Libraries: A Survey of Conditions and Suggestions for their Improvement (1935), commonly referred to as The Munn–Pitt Report after the report’s authors, reads more like a grand oration at a political rally than as an explanatory note for a report on a public service. In this essay, the value of reading – all reading – is identified. Tate explains the belief that ‘the greatest obstacle to human progress was ignorance. This could be combated by the cultivation of the habit of reading’ (1935, p. 9) and continued that books need to be selected, by libraries, for ‘both study and for recreation’ (1935, p. 17). Interestingly, Howard Haycraft quotes William Somerset Maugham’s prediction that there might be a day when:

The police novel will be studied in the colleges, when aspirants for doctoral degrees will shuttle the oceans and haunt the world’s great libraries to conduct personal research expeditions into the lives and sources of the masters of the art. (1941/1974, p. viii)

Not everyone agreed on the matter of the value of crime fiction, or any other type of fiction. Recent research into Readers’ Advisory Services undertaken by Ellen Forsyth and Sherrey Quinn unpacks some of the debates around reading for education and improvement vs. reading ‘for leisure and enjoyment’ (2014, p. 6). At the time the Munn–Pitt Report was being prepared, an extensive campaign was underway, which was designed to restrict the reading of Australians through an increased control of imports:

The complete elimination of undesirable crime literature, the majority of which came from America, is being taken by business interests in co-operation with the Commonwealth Government for the effective control of distribution in Australia. … Books and magazines known as ‘thrillers’, which include detective and fiction stories, are not regarded seriously by the Customs authorities, and they will be permitted to enter Australia to the same extent as in the past. (Canberra Times, 15 November 1934)

There were attempts to compensate for these restrictions through the generation of local content. The import bans inspired what Toni Johnson-Woods has described as ‘the richest period in Australian literary history, thousands of titles were produced, millions of copies sold, and dozens of authors found gainful employment’ (2006, p. 63). Yet, even the efforts of those who turned Australian publishing into a major industry, providing employment for Australian artists and writers, were considered by some insufficient. Hilda Bridges, when writing to Frank C. Johnson, a pulp publisher of the 1940s and 1950s based in Sydney (his extraordinary archive is housed at the State Library of New South Wales), asked for more material, suggesting that Australian crime fiction ‘should be a Godsend to country places, like Sorell [Tasmania]’ (1949).

This returns us to the debates around, not the value of reading, but the value of what we read. Do we read to better ourselves, or do we read to better utilise our leisure time? Crime fiction allows us to do both. Literature serves numerous purposes, practical and profound (Eco, 2002, pp. 1–15). Fiction, too, serves a variety of purposes. Crime fiction has been noted as facilitating ‘conflicting desires: the desire to solve the mystery ahead of or at least simultaneously with the investigator and the desire not to solve it until the last possible moment in order to prolong the pleasures of the mystery situation’ (Belton in Zunshine 2006, p. 121). Indeed, the debates around literature and fiction, and their functions, are multitude. If, to summarise these, it is accepted that literary works teach us something new, while fiction works teach us about what we already know, then crime fiction has a strong claim to both types of written production. Many literary devices taken for granted today, including those devices that exploit the idea of the narrator, were perfected by crime fiction writers – Edgar Allan Poe (the anonymous narrator), Ellery Queen (the pseudonymous protagonist who would directly challenge the reader and ask ‘whodunit?’) and Agatha Christie (the unreliable narrator). Edgar Allan Poe deployed an anonymous narrator to tell the stories of his great detective C. Auguste Dupin. Ellery Queen would play with the concept of the first person narrator and directly address the reader, issuing a challenge and advising: ‘Everything is there; no essential clue or fact is missing. Can you put them all together and – not make them spell “mother”, to be sure – by a process of logical reasoning arrive at the one and only possible solution?’ (Queen, 1934/1956, p. 216). Agatha Christie experimented with several narrative techniques including, perhaps most famously, the unreliable narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Also as P.D. James expounds, crime fiction teaches us:

Not by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. [Crime fiction] confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos. (2009, p. 174)

Crime fiction entertains us and engages us, often in critical ways, with serious social issues. Whatever the hold this genre has over readers, there is no doubt that libraries can capitalise on an appreciation of the traditionally macabre nature of these texts.

Library programming

Crime fiction collections offer important segues into a range of public library activities. This is evidenced by a programme that was run by Albury City’s LibraryMuseum, designed and deployed as a fun family activity to mark Law Week. LibraryMuseum staff, led by Michelle Head (who shared her experiences with the author in an email exchange over 3–8 October 2014), collaborated with a local actor and secondary school forensic science students to develop a crime scene. This facilitated Murder in the Museum, with the students and actor all playing various characters, including dead bodies, museum workers, visitors to the museum and detectives. Various clues (and some obligatory red herrings) were laid out throughout the LibraryMuseum.

Engaging with the materials in the Legal Information Access Centre (LIAC) was an essential step in solving the murder. In consultation with the Local Law Week group and secondary schools the library ran this very successful, now award-winning, programme as a strategy to promote the Legal Toolkit and other important law resources available to the community. Indeed, the integration of the genre labelled as ‘crime’, ‘detective’ or ‘mystery’ into library programming is becoming increasingly popular and resources dedicated to implementing such programs, including Elizabeth M. Karle’s Hosting a Library Mystery (2009), are now readily available.

Local studies

We usually think of crime fiction as exactly that – a fictional tale of murder or murders. Yet, these works are often full of facts. This is seen in the details that are provided within these stories that ultimately reveal a murderer, but also outline the availability of certain products, bus and train timetables, the floor plans of local hotels or world-famous buildings and numerous other particulars, thus providing a rich, if surprising, source of material for the merely curious to the professional researcher, including those undertaking local studies projects.

Examples of the crime fiction genre produced in Australia between colonial times and the present day offer many opportunities to investigate a particular place or a particular time. Many crime fiction writers have mastered the art of recreating settings in both rural and metropolitan landscapes. For example, a private investigator who ‘parked the car over near Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and walked through the Gardens’ (Corris, 1980, p. 18) tells us that, at one point, parking near Sydney’s Central Business District for a trip into the library was a straightforward task. This example highlights how crime fiction, including the bibliomystery, can provide information around local colour and content for a variety of historical inquiries.

A detective and a librarian walk into a bar…

The relationship between the private investigator and the librarian is far more significant than the obvious interactions that are based on one profession seeking out the other for the purposes of asking for information. The similarities between the two professions are much more detailed than a straightforward encounter at a reference desk implies. Both the detective and the librarian share a determination to discover, the ability to impartially appraise a suite of facts, and both deal with awkward questions from the public. Both professions undertake specific training followed by an informal apprenticeship to hone their respective crafts, are extremely resourceful and highly skilled and, though often seen working in teams, both fields present very specialised personnel that work alone.

These shared traits are reflected in a set of library posters from the 1960s featuring Detective Dan (Detective Dan Posters, n.d.). Dan looks like a very young Sherlock Holmes, complete with deerstalker cap and magnifying glass, yet instead of looking for clues he is looking for information in the library. What these posters overlook, however, is an overarching desire – for both detectives and librarians – to see the creation, or the restoration, of order.

In a recent reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – the CBS series Elementary – Ms Hudson, a ‘long-suffering woman’ (Doyle, 1917/1994, p. 114) makes only a limited number of appearances and the traditional duties of landlady, often presented as housekeeper, are given a layer of gravitas. Hudson, an authority on Ancient Greek, sorts out Holmes’ library:

By subject matter, then by author. You start with the hard sciences on the north wall, and then you move clockwise around the room in descending order of academic rigour. That way, Physics by Aristotle is as far away from You Can Learn Telepathy by Morton Zuckerman as possible (Doherty, 2013).

Holmes is initially quite startled by the changes but quickly recognises a mind that, much like his own, wants order out of chaos.

The bibliomystery

W.H. Auden’s famous essay The Guilty Vicarage (1948) explores the idea of where a murder might take place, privileging country over town settings and advocating: ‘It should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder’ (p. 408). This argument of murder as being disruptive because of the act itself, as well as where the act occurs, can be taken further. In Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library (1942/2002), the horror of a body amongst books is made clear when Miss Marple comes to examine a girl who had been strangled in a private library:

The library was a room very typical of its owners. It was large and shabby and untidy. It had big sagging arm-chairs, and pipes and books and estate papers laid out on the big table. … It spoke of long occupation and familiar use and of links with tradition.

And across the old bearskin hearthrug there was sprawled something new and crude and melodramatic.

The flamboyant figure of a girl. (p. 21)

Of course, Christie was aware of the importance of the library within crime fiction over two decades before the publication of The Body in the Library. Christie’s first crime fiction text, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), had been submitted for consideration to The Bodley Head. Having given up hope that her work would ever make it to press, she was approached by Bodley Head’s John Lane who suggested a number of changes including, critically, the locale of Hercule Poirot’s famous dénouement: originally in a courtroom, the identification of the murderer would be made in a library (Cawthorne, 2014, p. 10).

Grant Burns, in Librarians in Fiction (1998), has pursued this theme:

If librarians serve as symbols of orderliness and the preservation of civilization, their frequent status as targets for fictional homicide may imply some thoughts about writers’ and readers’ desires to cast away the restraints of civilisation. (p. 3)

‘What better way’ Burns asks, to cast off such restraints, than ‘to pummel a reference librarian with an encyclopaedia?’ (1998, p. 3)

There are certainly some fabulous, albeit frightening, ways to meet your end in a library:

•	The rod from a card catalogue drawer is used in Lawrence G. Blochman’s Death Walks in Marble Halls (1942), in Charles Goodrum’s Dewey Decimated (1977) and again by Jo Dereske in Miss Zukas and the Library Murders (1994);
•	The pages of Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BCE) are famously laced with poison in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983);
•	Though not set in a library, the danger of books is evident in Noreen Wald’s Ghostwriter (1999), where the murder weapons are an autographed copy of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) and a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866).

It is important to note that librarians themselves, in addition to being detectives, are also often victims. ‘Librarians in fiction are, among other means of exit, shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten to death with books, rolled over by boulders, and hurled down library stairs’ (Burns, 1998, p. 3).

The bibliomystery also extends beyond the confines of the library with world-renowned anthologist, author and publisher Otto Penzler suggesting that this particular type of crime fiction can be classified as follows:

If much of the action is set in a bookshop or a library, it is a bibliomystery, just as it is if a major character is a bookseller or librarian. A collector of rare books counts, and often a scholar or academic working with rare books, manuscripts, or the archives may be included. Publishers? Yes … Authors? Tricky. (2014, p. viii)

Amidst complaints around an increasing number of sub-genres, or what Jacques Derrida (1980) politely termed a ‘taxonomic exuberance’, the world’s largest genre is hardly in need of more labels. Though these labels are certainly advantageous for writers, publishers and readers they also serve to acknowledge the diversity of crime fiction (Franks, 2011) and other genres. Moreover, labels are useful for setting parameters around a text and for testing traditional boundaries in addition to creating genre crossover works (McArdle, 2015). The bibliomystery has been readily adopted with at least one bookstore, Buckingham Books, dedicating an entire section to this type of crime story (https://buckinghambooks.com/search/?q=bibliomystery&x=0&y=0) and the School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College, curating a bibliomystery collection (http://web.simmons.edu/~schwartz/bibmyst.html).

A clear definition, despite Penzler’s efforts, is lacking. There is also a debate around the first example of the bibliomystery. One contender is Scope: or, the Lost Library, written by Frederic B. Perkins Roberts and first published in Boston in 1874, where much of the action unfolds in New York’s Gowan’s Second Hand Bookshop and at book auctions. Another, earlier, title put forward to claim this honour is Angus B. Reach’s Clement Lorimer; or, The Book with the Iron Clasps, first published in London in 1849. In this work, originally released in monthly instalments, a book is handed down through several generations and with the book, a terrible curse. It is this earlier work that Penzler cites in his bibliography of bibliomysteries as being the first of its type (2014, p. 119).

Library history in crime fiction

Books set in and around libraries and featuring librarians and other information professionals are certainly easy to identify. As crime fiction works, in general, offer a range of historical insights, crime fiction stories set within libraries present a history of the information services profession and have documented some of the major changes within libraries in Australia over the 75 years between the passing in New South Wales of the Library Act, 1939 and today.

Attitudes – including those relating to class, gender and race – come across very strongly. In Miles Franklin’s only crime novel. Bring the Monkey (1933), Ercildoun Carrington, a marvellously independent heroine and wrangler of the mischievous monkey, Percy, glares malevolently at a man who fulfils a triumvirate of perceived offences: he is Indian, he is a chauffeur, and he failed to give her the respect she felt she deserved. She recognises him as that ‘imperial creature [who] had sniffed beside me in the Reading Room of the British Museum’ (p. 46).

Race issues are prominent in older texts, while class and gender can be frequently tracked through to contemporary examples. Indeed, gender has been an issue within libraries for many years. One report notes that:

In the Aberdeen Public Library … where the right type of Scottish girl – ‘sober, steadfast, and demure’ – had been secured at the start, the results have been highly satisfactory, and the librarian was, in 1897, keeping a loaded weapon on his table to forcibly resist the machinations of any rash bachelor who might be found on the library premises with a felonious intent. (Anderson, 1901, p. 98)

A recent reviewer of the profession claimed that ‘it is more important, in library country, to be well-informed than it is to be well-built’ (Burns, 1998, p. 2). Raymond Chandler had other ideas, and when Philip Marlowe asks about an 1860 edition of Ben Hur, a very knowledgeable woman looks up and says: ‘I see. You interest me. Rather vaguely’ (Chandler, 1939/1970, p. 33). Marlowe is impressed despite the bookseller’s indifference, more so when she provides a detailed description of the man Marlowe wants to find. ‘You’d make a good cop’ he says (1939/1970, p. 34). Smart, it seems, is sexy after all.

Geography also features prominently in the bibliomystery. Matthew Reilly’s Contest (1996), though not technically a thriller and not a mystery, is an important text because, while ostensibly set in ‘the New York State Library. One hundred years old, a silent sanctuary of history and knowledge’ (p. 11), we all know that it is really set in the State Library of New South Wales. There is even a ‘park surrounding the State Library […] a pretty one, flat and grassy’ (Reilly, 1996, p. 250).

The physical spaces of libraries themselves are also, often, revealed in itemised detail. There are ‘endless rows of bookshelves – each one rising from floor to ceiling’. There are also a myriad of atriums, information desks and, in some of the examples, the idea of the labyrinth (Reilly, 1996, pp. 10, 57, 61 and 74) offering gothic overtones, as well as places where ‘a pile of books on the shelf … slightly askew’ is laden with significance (Garrett, 1956, p. 147). Technological advances are also documented, from a reference to the recent installation of a public phone booth (Garrett, 1956, p. 63) to brand-new Pentium III computers (Reilly, 1996, p. 11). Changes in how we find information are also acknowledged as card catalogues are replaced by online search tools, physical resources replaced with digital ones.

Or how things stay the same…

These books also tell us what does not change – from library signage asking people to be quiet, to the workplace conditions and practices described by Truman Garrett in his 1956 book Murder – First Edition. For one librarian ‘the morning passed rapidly in spite of my detestation of overdues. As we sat at one of the tables and wrote cards to delinquent borrowers’ (p. 29). Another librarian is depressed because she has been ‘relegated to the Children’s Department’ (p. 30). And there are several complaints around remuneration including a reference to a short ‘rest period we had mornings and afternoons, an innovation thought up by the trustees in lieu of the salary raises so sorely needed by the underpaid staff’ (p. 103).

Such themes are recurring and have been unpacked by Australian author Narelle M. Harris in The Opposite of Life (2007). This is the story of Lissa Wilson: librarian, twenty-first century geek girl and vampire hunter. Set in Melbourne, the heroine is ‘a fully qualified librarian, fresh out of uni, in fact, but no-one is hiring right now’ and so she works three days a week at the local public library. Wilson laments the lack of staff, complains about customers and children, asserting: ‘Some of them were idiots, it’s true and the kids drive me nuts the way they bashed books about’. Wilson also notes that she enjoys ‘shelving the returned books … Most people find it dull and foist it on the library clerks whenever they can, but I like the feeling of restoring order’. Sherlock Holmes would be pleased.

An excellent text for exploring both change and tradition within libraries is Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935/2003). Condemned by crime fiction critic Julian Symons as a ‘woman’s novel’ (1992, p. 135) the book is celebrated by noted historian Lucy Worsley as ‘a serious exploration of whether it was possible, in the 1930s, for women to combine work and marriage’ (2013, p. 253). Sayers manages a small defence of crime fiction when Harriett Vane’s former tutor, Miss Lydgate, commends her ‘for keeping up a scholarly standard of English, even in mystery fiction’ (1935/2003, p. 18). Libraries take centre stage for some of the novel, including much being made about the need for new, larger libraries and the comfort that comes from the unchanging ‘delicate silhouette’ of the roof of the Bodleian Library (1935/2003, p. 556). It must be reported, however, that librarians themselves do not fare so well in this work. For example, Miss Gubbins ‘is a very conscientious person’, we are told, ‘but she has rather an unfortunate knack of making any subject sound dull. It’s a great pity because she is exceptionally sound and dependable. However, that doesn’t greatly matter in her present appointment; she holds a librarianship somewhere’ (Sayers, 1935/2003, p. 19). Unfortunately, for every savvy librarian within fiction there is a stereotype, a string of pearls, a widow and a cat.

Mysteries that make reference to libraries are not confined to looking at quiet places of reflection and study. Tough guys need libraries too. In The Big Sleep, the man on the case ‘drove down to the Hollywood public library and did a little superficial research’ (Chandler, 1939/1970, p. 26). In The Dying Trade, Cliff Hardy states that his ‘first stop was the Public Library’ (Corris, 1980, p. 14). More recently, a library plays out a critical clue in Barry Maitland’s Crucifixion Creek (2014, pp. 28–32, 80, 154–155).

Conclusion

Otto Penzler notes that:

There are countless books in which a librarian, author, editor, publisher of books or magazines, scholar, or a bookseller becomes involved in a mystery but whose profession has no more to do with solving the case than if they were actuaries or farmers. (2014, p. viii)

It is argued here that the overlap between the detective and the librarian cannot be underestimated, and that a librarian within a crime fiction novel could never be substituted easily for someone from another profession. It would be like swapping out the detective. The restoration of order is central to both the plot of the crime fiction novel and the role descriptions of the detective and the librarian.

Many crime novels support this claim, while the bibliomystery provides insights into how libraries and librarians have changed, or not, over the 75 years since the introduction in 1939 of the Library Act of New South Wales. It makes sense that as libraries are for the people, and crime fiction is very much a genre for and of the people, the two subjects should intertwine so easily. The mind that appreciates the written work is one particularly adept at solving puzzles; even A.S. Byatt quipped that ‘literary critics make natural detectives’ (1990, p. 237).

It does need to be remembered that murder is a very serious business. To Captain Patrick O’Toole of Murder – First Edition (1956), ‘murder was murder whether it occurred in the slums of Northrup or in the genteel atmosphere of the city’s cultural institutions’ (Garrett, 1956, pp. 69-70). But, as Arthur Gask wrote in The Red Paste Murders (1923), ‘Crime may indeed repell (sic) – but it fascinates, always’ (p. 255). And we shall find crime fiction in libraries, always. More importantly, as we enjoy crime fiction and libraries as individual components of the process of reading, many of us will also always enjoy the idea of the bibliomystery. We may, too, find different uses for these texts: they can provide entertainment; they can also inform historical inquiries and have the potential to inspire library programming. Colonel Bantry was outraged to find a body in his library; Mrs Bantry, in contrast, was very clear on the matter, contacting Miss Marple and explaining: ‘What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one’s house, one might as well enjoy it’ (Christie, 1942/2002, p. 18). Indeed we might.

Notes on contributor

Rachel Franks is the coordinator, Education & Scholarship, State Library of NSW and a conjoint fellow, University of Newcastle. Rachel is a popular culture researcher and has delivered numerous conference papers on crime fiction, true crime, food studies and information science. An award-winning writer, her work can be found in a wide variety of books, journals and magazines as well as on social media.

Notes

¹ This article is based upon a presentation delivered at the 11th Library History Forum, held at the State Library of New South Wales on the 18th and 19th November 2014 to mark the 75th anniversary of the NSW Library Act 1939. The author is grateful for the assistance of Ellen Forsyth, Michelle Head, Maggie Patton and Richard Neville for their encouragement and support as well as to the organisers of the 11th Library History Forum, Dr David Jones and Anne Doherty with Edwina Duffy. The author would also like to acknowledge the State Library of NSW and the judges of the Jean Arnot Memorial Fellowship (for which an earlier version of this work was the 2015 winning essay). This article has been double-blind peer reviewed to meet the Department of Education’s Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) requirements.