What is quality in crime-fiction writing? : An analysis of the place crime-fiction literature has in public libraries.

This Bachelor’s thesis is about crime-fiction in Swedish public libraries and aims at investigating the attitude of librarians employed within the public library sector with regards to crime-fiction writing. Therefore, our aim is to examine how public sector librarians assess the quality of crime fiction writing compared to other forms of fiction. And research has shown that librarians haven't always looked upon crime-fiction favorably. The established view of crime-fiction was widely seen by the majority of public sector librarians as a lower form of literature and regarded it as a form of mass culture. However, public sector librarians' views of crime-fiction writing have changed throughout many decades. One of the reasons for this change in attitude is related to a debate on Swedish culture during the 1960s which influenced the way popular culture was regarded, and crime-fiction writing, too. Moreover, the improved quality of crime-fiction writing has also affected the way this form of literature is now seen in the public library sector by a profound change of attitude towards it, brought about by such authors as Sjöwall, Wahlöö and Henning Mankell. During the course of our research, we carried out 3 qualitative interviews with 4 librarians concerning how they regarded crime-fiction writing and what emphasis they placed on such writing with regards to its quality and public library users requests' for this kind of literature. One aspect, however, which they all seem to agree upon, apart from the mere solving of the crime/mystery, was how society is depicted, characters portrayed, the environment presented and the readers' familiarity with them, including both the exotic and the foreign. Furthermore, we also analyzed the answers given by our interviewees, observing both the similarities and differences between them. The similarities, with regard to the librarians interviewed, were an unbiased attitude towards crime-fiction literature and library users’ requests' for such books. Our interviewees all held the view that quality is a subjective matter, and that public library users should themselves define what quality is with regards to this kind of literature. Another factor, which gained our attention, was that public sector librarians responsible for book purchases use the Library Service Sector (Bibliotekstjänst) far less than its counterpart AdLibris. Our analysis was based on Bourdieus' theory and his concepts with regard to field, habitus and capital relating to the context of views held by libraries on crime-fiction literature