Libraries in fiction

I was prompted to these thoughts having recently re-watched Ghostbusters which, as you may remember, starts inside the magnificent New York Public Library with the ghostly terrorisation of a librarian by levitating books and flying catalogue cards. In the future remake of this film I wonder how the film makers will get round the inconvenient fact in the intervening years catalogue cards have gone the way of the dodo in most libraries…

In this example the library was simply a location for the plot. Another example is Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. Here the library is used as an example of locked room murder mystery so popular in early crime fiction. Other authors such as Colin Dexter (Inspector Morse) and Dorothy L Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey) used college libraries as part of the Oxford setting of their novels.

  

Libraries however have played a more significant role in some relatively recent crime novels. Sue Grafton’s detective series is set in the 1980s, in other words pre personal computers / the internet and such library resources as Newsbank. Therefore in several novels in this series, the investigator Kinsey Millhone visits her local library to consult old newspapers issues on microfilm.

More recently I have enjoyed reading Donna Leon’s novel By its Cover, set in an Venetian academic library. This novel starts with the discovery of a theft of an early printed book from the collection and leads to a murder. As a librarian I was cheering Commissario Guido Brunetti on in his efforts to solve these crimes.

  

One fictional library together with its orangutan librarian loom large in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. It would be a very foolish thief or murderer to enter this library to commit a crime. If The Librarian did not apprehend the felon the chances are that the magical books would. This is the library whose contents were chained to protect the user from harm rather than to protect the books from theft. In fact there was one library book theft in Pratchett’s novel Guards! Guards! A book on summoning dragons was successful stolen to order as part of a plot to overthrow the city ruler. Not that it did the conspirators much good, as the summoned dragon quickly incinerated them.

A hero to many library staff, Discworld’s The Librarian is a member of a small elite group of senior librarians who have the knowledge and ability to travel through L-space, an extradimentional space that connects all libraries and other large accumulations of books; a skill that alas has not passed onto this member of staff. I can’t speak for my colleagues.

[Francis]

The British Amateur Sleuth

The BBC recently started a new 6-part series Partners in Crime. It stars David Walliams and Jessica Raine as Thomas (Tommy) and Prudence (Tuppence) Beresford, an unsuccessful businessman and his wife who get drawn into a world of espionage and crime-solving during the Cold War days of the early 1950s.

The series has been adapted from two of Agatha Christie’s books – The Secret Adversary and N or M?  Agatha Christie wrote a number of books featuring these amateur sleuths interspersed between her other books. These books were actually first published in 1922 and 1941 respectively, and the last novel she wrote – Postern of Fate (1973) also featured the duo, having aged in keeping with the novel’s setting.

Christie’s best-known amateur sleuth is of course Miss Marple, who has been played by various actresses on film and TV, notably Margaret Rutherford and  Angela Lansbury on film, and Joan Hickson and Geraldine McEwan on TV.

Other contemporary authors from the ‘Golden Age’ of crime writing also featured amateur sleuths. They usually came from an upper-class background, for only they would have the time or the money to get involved. Margery Allingham had the aristocratic Albert Campion as her protagonist. Dorothy L. Sayers had Lord Peter Wimsey. But this was not always the case – for instance G.K. Chesterton created the priest-cum-detective Father Brown.

      

The concept of the British amateur sleuth is far from dead. There are a number of current authors who have created characters and written books in the style of the ‘Golden Age’ originals. One such is the US author Carola Dunn with her British 1920s heroine Daisy Dalrymple.  Simon Brett revives the aristocratic sleuth with his Blotto and Twinks series set around the post-First World War period. He has also created another character Mrs Pargeter, a widow who solves crimes with the help of her dead husband’s friends.

      

Amateur sleuth stories do not have to be set in the inter-war period! A present-day setting is the format for M.C. Beaton’s popular Agatha Raisin series featuring a former public relations executive who retires to the Cotswolds and soon finds herself involved in crime-solving. The first book in the series was Agatha Raisin and the quiche of death (2002).  On TV, the most popular amateur sleuth series is probably Rosemary & Thyme – the gardening duo who are always coming across dead bodies.

This year – 15 September, to be exact – would have been Agatha Christie’s 125th birthday. Reading – or re-reading – her novels or watching the BBC’s new series are just two ways to mark the occasion – visit www.agathachristie.com/125th-anniversary/ for more.

[Malcolm]