‘There’s a dead body in my library’: crime fiction texts and the history of libraries (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bodies and Books: crime fiction novels and the history of libraries
Since the publication of Australia’s first crime novel, Henry Savery’s 'Quintus Servinton' (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 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 to the professional researcher. Similarly, crime fiction stories set within libraries present a history of the information services profession. This paper will demonstrate how crime can fiction provide an important supplement to more traditional historical sources, with a special focus on how the genre has documented some of the major changes within libraries over the last 75 years.
Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as what these tropes reveal about prevailing discourses regarding thieves more generally. The book thief – invariably constructed in the popular imagination as a middle-class male – was a classed and gendered figure, one at odds with contemporary understandings of theft as an act committed by members of an uncultured criminal class. By scrutinizing the development of popular conceptions of the book thief as an entity clearly distinguishable from the ordinary thief, I demonstrate the centrality of literacy and literary culture to how thieves themselves were read.
2015
"In March 1928, the Modern Library, a uniform series of reprints marketed as “the world’s best books,” added two new titles – Fourteen Great Detective Stories and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While reprints were generally not reviewed in periodicals, the cheap price and stylish presentation of the Modern Library attracted plenty of attention. For example, the Hartford Courant published a review that praised these additions to a “remarkable series.” For today’s reader, it seems surprising that Joyce’s text could be reviewed in a few sentences after a lengthy discussion on detective tales. The “great divide” between modernism and mass culture, described by Andreas Huyssen, conveys the impression of two radically different cultural spheres – even if recent scholarship has traced the influence of popular culture on many modernist works. Despite this increasing interest in the intersections between the “High” and the “Low,” most scholars have failed to notice that modernist and detective texts were often published in the same venues. Indeed, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, many mainstream firms issued texts that we now see as “high modernist,” alongside detective fiction. For instance, the renowned publisher Alfred Knopf released Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon in 1929 and 1930 (the latter was then reprinted in the Modern Library). Knopf’s list also included D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield and Langston Hughes. Moreover, in 1928, Scribner’s Magazine serialized S. S. Van Dine’s “The Greene Murder Case.” The fact that Scribner, the publisher of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, could proudly endorse Van Dine’s story shows that popular culture and literary modernism were increasingly intertwined. Drawing on extensive research in the Random House archives at Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library, this paper uses a book history approach to show that the Modern Library contributed to the blurring of boundaries between modernist and popular fiction."
Stealing Stories: punishment, profit and the Ordinary of Newgate
Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the 21st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) Conference: 1-11. ISBN: 978-0-9876205-0-7, 2016
The mid-1700s witnessed, in England, the development of a standard format to tell the stories of malefactors. In this way, storytelling was simple as tales of various criminals followed a strict pattern of crime, capture and punishment. The origins of this was seen most obviously in the formula relied upon by Samuel Smith in the preceding century. Smith was the Ordinary of Newgate, a position that would be referred to today as the prison chaplain, and throughout his tenure, from 1676 until 1698, he would publish Accounts of criminals and their grisly ends. These Accounts, of which there were over 400 editions––offering over 2,500 biographies of hanged men and women––published between 1676 and 1772, were incredibly popular. With a price point of only a few pence, print runs were in the thousands and by the early 1700s the Ordinary was earning up to £200 per year for his entrepreneurial efforts. This paper argues that these biographical, and ostensibly didactic, stories were stolen: as criminals were perpetrators of a crime they were also the victims of greed. The practice of this authorised theft of criminals, their lives and exploits, clearly established the fact that penitence and profit make comfortable bedfellows, ensuring that true crime writing became a firm feature of the business landscape. That victims and villains suffered was, of course, very regrettable but no horror was so terrible that anyone forgot there was money to be made. Biographical note: Rachel Franks is the Coordinator, Education & Scholarship, at the State Library of New South Wales, a Conjoint Fellow at the University of Newcastle, Australia and is at The University of Sydney researching true crime. Rachel holds a PhD in Australian crime fiction and her research in the fields of crime fiction, true crime, food studies and information science has been presented at numerous conferences. An award-winning writer, her work can be found in a wide variety of books, journals and magazines.
Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the 6th Annual Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) Conference: 13-24. ISBN: 978-0-473-34578-5, 2015
Australia has a long history of debating the value of different types of reading, where ideas of ‘literary works’ versus ‘popular fiction’ dominate these debates. In 1939 Australia imposed import restrictions – ostensibly targeting pulp fiction – that lasted two decades. In response to this action a number of publishing houses emerged, almost overnight, to fill the void and supply Australian readers with pulp stories of every kind. One of these publishers was Frank C. Johnson. Johnson’s success ran parallel to efforts to ban the importation of cheap storytelling: when restrictions were lifted in 1959, Johnson could not compete with the influx of overseas material and the introduction of television. The State Library of New South Wales acquired Johnson’s archive in 1965. This article looks briefly at Johnson’s life through an unpacking of some of the materials within this collection, which includes a rich reservoir of correspondence, a stunning array of original artworks and examples of printed materials exemplifying the era of quick and dirty publishing in Australia.