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 fiction can 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, since 1939