Caroline: There are certain places to which stories just seem to cling, whether they are invited to be there or not. We’ve all felt it: the shiver down the back of the spine when entering a room, and the sense that somebody, long dead or imaginary, exited out of the opposite door just before we entered. Air that is still, yet heavy with the feeling that something happened here, and might happen again, any moment.
This feeling can exist anywhere, but I think it’s most reliably to be found in libraries, especially old libraries that contain a lot of very special books and have a really good smell about them. These are pivot places that hold many possibilities in parallel, where at any moment your life might change forever depending on which book you take off the shelf.
Perhaps that’s why for well over a century now detective novelists have been so fond of using them in their plots: as a place for corpses to be discovered and clues to be unravelled. Everybody’s story has both a beginning and an end, doesn’t it? Even a murder in the library.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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And where else could I begin but with The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie? First published in novel form in 1942, this second full-length adventure for Miss Marple begins with perhaps one of the most iconic library scenes in all detective fiction. Fast asleep in bed in Gossington Hall, St Mary Mead, Dolly and Arthur Bantry are awoken early one morning by Mary the housemaid dashing in, crying “there’s a body in the library!”. Dolly soon alerts Miss Marple, admitting that finding strangled blondes in one’s library is the kind of thing that she thought “only happened in books”.
The library in question is untidy, homely and much-used, featuring saggy armchairs, Victorian watercolours and a furry hearthrug. It’s a cosy, safe place that becomes grotesque, even fantastical, as the incongruous resting place of a heavily made up young woman whom nobody can identify. This isn’t a mystery where the answers are to be found in books. The library rather serves as a backdrop that, in its traditional familiarity, shows up the alien horribleness of the plot’s central killing. Why did this woman die? Why is she in the Bantrys’ library? With her deft handling of the body in the library, Christie gives a well-used trope new colour and flavour.
Because by the early 1940s, it was well-used. The first body in a library is generally considered to be found in The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green from 1878. Within the first few sentences of the opening chapter our narrator, a junior lawyer, is informed that the body of Mr Horatio Leavenworth, an old and trusted client, has been found “shot through the head by some unknown person while sitting at his library table”. The library was locked at the servants had to force the door to get in. Again, the discovery of the corpse in the library demonstrates the brutality at the heart of the puzzle: the library is Mr Leavenworth’s personal sanctum, leading off his bedroom, and yet it is here that an assassin has forced their way to take his life. Although published four decades before the golden age of detective fiction can be said to have begun, this nineteenth century novel has many elements we might expect in later crime fiction, from the map of the library that Green included to her use of ballistic evidence.
Earlier library murders of the kind that Green wrote and that Christie is referencing tend to take place in libraries in private houses — among the rich, who were privileged with enough living space to devote some of it solely to books. Bruce Graeme’s A Case of Books from 1946 is another excellent example, featuring as it does a murdered book collector and his ransacked library for his bookseller-sleuth Theodore Terhune to unravel. But as the world changed through the beginning of the twentieth century, so did the type of libraries in which characters were murdered. We start to see far more communal or public libraries and libraries in educational institutions.
As listeners to my first Green Penguin Book Club episode about Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club will know, the library at the titular London gentleman’s club plays a very important role in that story from 1928. The library also matters greatly in Sayers’ 1935 novel Gaudy Night, with the opening of a new library at an Oxford women’s college and the pursuit of a malefactor through it in the middle of the night playing a large role in the plot. A graduate of such a college herself, Sayers clearly knew how central the library can be to a place of learning.
Michael Innes, pseudonym of the academic J. I. M. Stewart, incorporated this trope himself in his 1951 novel Operation Pax, which sees the Bodleian Library in Oxford take a starring role in the story. Another university scholar, this time on the other side of the Atlantic, had tried something similar in a book from 1942 called The Widening Stain. Cornell University’s Morris Bishop, writing under the pseudonym W. Bolingbroke Johnson, set a murder mystery in the stacks of a library very similar to the one at his own university, and created a limerick-loving professor to solve it. And of course, although not strictly detective fiction, the libraries in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose deserve investigation if you are making an exhaustive study of this trope.
The enthusiasm for murders in libraries still runs strong in more recent writers. A serial killer chases their victim through the stacks of the New York Public Library in David Fisher’s 1982 novel Katie’s Terror. Around the same time, Elizabeth Peters, best known for the Amelia Peabody series, was debuting another series detective called Jacqueline Kirkby — a librarian.
Perhaps my favourite book I came across in my library quest, though, is one called Open and Closed by Mat Coward from 2005, because it truly updates the “body in the library” trope for the twenty first century. During an all-night sit in at a London library to protest its imminent closure, a garrotted corpse is found sitting in the librarian’s office, with the backdrop of council cuts just nicely confusing everybody’s potential motives for the crime.
As present an issue as library closures still feel, it has been almost twenty years since Open and Closed was published. Bringing the trope right up to date, though, is 2022’s The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill, which features the Boston Public Library, a book within a book, a murder victim in said library, and a group of strangers turned unlikely friends that just so happens to contain a murderer. We’re almost 150 years on from Anna Katharine Green’s initial body in the library, and still the corpses keep turning up among the books.
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There is one specific library that I would like to visit now, a place heavily laden with literary significance and stories, and most recently, a fictional corpse discovered by a rather unusual young woman named Dora.
Harriet: What happens to Dora Wildwood is she is escaping a terrible, unsuitable marriage in her very strange, pagan, odd village in Somerset, which I deeply enjoyed writing about. And she hops on a train in 1935, first thing in the morning in November, arrives at Paddington, is chased from the station by her dreadful fiancé who’s followed her there, and she runs through London, hardly without stopping. It is possible to run from Paddington to the London Library. You have to pause, you have to be slightly fitter than I am, but Dora is quite fit, and I think she’d stop a few times, and she arrives at the London Library, goes in, and finds a dead body in the stacks, in the back of the stacks, and it’s about her trying to solve the murder and trying to work out what she’ll do next. And the library is a very important part of that.
Caroline: There will be more on the library in just a second, but first I must let our guide introduce herself.
Harriet: Hello, I’m Harriet Evans, a. k. a. Harriet F. Townson, and my first crime novel, though not my first novel, is D is for Death.
Caroline: At the start of D is for Death, Harriet’s heroine Dora is a newcomer to the London Library. I’ll let her introduce the place a bit better.
Harriet: It is in St. James’s Square in Piccadilly in a very hidden corner. You really wouldn’t notice it unless you’re looking for it. And it’s a bit like 12 Grimmauld Place or whatever it is in Harry Potter. It seems to open up when you walk towards it. And it was founded by Tennyson and Carlyle in 18, on the mid 1800s. I should know this because I’m an ambassador for the London Library, so it’s my job to be on stuff like this. And as a private member’s library, which, there were lots of subscription libraries at the time.
Caroline: I looked up the exact dates after I spoke to Harriet — the library was founded in 1841, long before there were state-funded lending libraries in Britain. It began with 2,000 books in rented rooms in Pall Mall, above a former Georgian gambling den, and then moved to its current premises in St James’s Square in 1845. Today, it houses over a million books, all available to be summoned by members to be read any time they like, in the library or at home. Anyway, back to Harriet to complete our picture of the place.
Harriet: At the back, and at the front, but especially at the back, there are these metal rows called the stacks, which has got over three million books. And these metal stacks, which are different floors, six, seven floors, rise up above you, and you can get almost any book that you want there.
Caroline: These stacks are an extraordinary structure: bearing the weight of thousands of books while also being partially transparent so you can through above and below to the other levels. They are mostly quiet, too, with very few people around at any given moment. This is why they work so well as the setting for a murder in Harriet’s book — they are both out in the open but also full of secret hidey holes. Her heroine Dora is first alerted to the presence of a corpse by a trickle of saliva falling down through the grill to where she is sitting, and, upon investigating, she discovers the murdered body of the chief librarian on the level above. Because the floors are transparent and the metal makes footsteps highly audible, she knows that nobody has just been near the body, and yet the man has just been killed and a book that was by his body when she first discovered him has now disappeared. The physical environment of the library governs how Harriet created the crime, as did her own passion for mysteries that play fair by the reader.
Harriet: What I’ve always found fascinating about especially the Golden Age of Crime is the very perfect approach to the locked room mystery or the Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie, very pure enactment of that promise.
And I wanted to try that. I hope I succeeded, but I wanted to try that because I had no one on my shoulders saying, no, you can’t do that. I just was really doing it for myself. So when I realised the body had to be found there, then I thought, oh you’ve set yourself a challenge.
I like a challenge and always with, seemingly like sealed room, locked room, whatever. There’s always something else that you’re not being told. I am the world’s biggest Sherlock Holmes short stories fan, there’s always something else. It’s never as straightforward as that, but it’s the way you keep the contract with the reader.
I always remember when I was a junior editor at Penguin, reading a really funny, witty, romantic comedy by a very well-known journalist. And at the beginning of the novel, it said, by the way, in brackets, if you’re thinking this is a book about me and John getting together, you are wrong.
It’s not a book about that. And at the end of the book, she got together with John and I was so angry. I’m still angry because you don’t do that. You’ve broken the contract with the reader, you have lied to them. And you’re lazy. What you need to have done is take the time to make it look like she’s not going to ever get together with John, even though I’d love it if she got together with John.
Do the bloody work. Do the groundwork. Don’t just think ‘I can’t be bothered to do that’. I’m waving my hands around too much in my outrage at breaking the bond between the reader and the author.
I’m my first reader. I write books for myself to read. That’s a really important part of what I write. And I would imagine, that’s one of the things about Christie. She does the legwork. She’s not a great internal monologue person. You don’t read Agatha Christie for a huge sense of place and time, but she never ever breaks that contract. She finds other ways around it.
Caroline: I should say at this point, because Harriet and I are about to be very enthusiastic about the place, that neither I, nor Shedunnit, are sponsored by the London Library in any way, nor are they aware of what we’re saying in this episode. I pay for my own membership, and honestly, would not be able to do most of the research for this podcast without it. It’s an invaluable source of golden age detective novels, especially those that have long since passed out of print and availability. And Harriet is, if anything, even more passionate about it than I am.
Harriet: It’s my favourite place in the whole world, without a shadow of a doubt. And I moved from London where I’ve lived all my life to Bath, five years ago. And I love living in Bath, the one thing that doesn’t work is I don’t go to the library that much anymore.
I go to Bath Library, which is full of, like old men eating yogurt with a large tablespoon next to me. But the London Library, A, no food allowed in the stacks, but B, it is a private member’s library.
Anyone can join. I joined to have a place to work and because I found working at home really difficult and, home and work elided and that’s not good, you have to be able to go somewhere and concentrate and it’s much, much less than the cost of hiring an office or building a shed or anything, but it also has completely transformed me as a writer.
Caroline: Part of what makes the London Library a special place is its physical form, as Harriet demonstrated by using it for her mystery plot. But its long history is very present there too, and the knowledge that writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Baroness Orczy, Clemence Dane and others have been there before you, doing exactly what you are doing, is oddly humbling and, Harriet says, quite useful for just getting on with your writing.
Harriet: I really liked the idea you walk in and, I saw I did see A. S. Byatt in there a couple of times and yeah, famous writers and Giles Milton, the very genial fantastic historian is always in there and people I’ve published and Lissa Evans and yeah, and these are people whose books I love or revere or, and it really makes me feel in my place.
I go and sit at a desk and think, you are not that big a deal. Get the words down. And it’s not a lack of confidence thing in this instance. It’s a get over yourself and get back in your box and do that work. I love the library because I step in there and I’m like, Oh, you have to work, that’s the confine that I need.
Caroline: Perhaps its the presence of so many books, perhaps it’s the atmospheric traces of so many previous readers. Whatever it is, the London Library feels like a place where the membranes that separate the past from the present are very thin.
Harriet: One of my favourite quotes, I have above my desk, it’s this brilliant book by Oriel Malet about her friendship with Daphne du Maurier. And she writes this completely brilliant description of Menabilly, which I’m sure lots of people know is the house that Manderley the great love of Daphne du Maurier’s life, was based on this house in Cornwall that I’ve walked around the edge of many times, trying to see if I can peer in and see, you can see it from a distance down the lane. And she said Menabilly was one of those places where when you opened a door into a room, it was as if the past had been going on up until the moment that you opened the door and you felt all the time as if you were disturbing something else that had been going on.
I’m not quoting it very well. I love that idea. A Traveller in Time, the Alison Utley book, where she’s able to move from being I think an evacuee, but she will step without knowing why into Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington plot. And it’s never explained. I love that. I absolutely love that idea.
Caroline: Writing golden age style mystery that is set in the golden age is not an easy thing to do — we see plenty of it, these days, but, I find, it rarely fulfils its promise. Harriet’s period details feel spot on, though, and as she explained, that’s not an accident.
Harriet: What I took from the books I write is a huge sense of place and time and research. I do loads and loads of research. I really want you pick up the book and relax into it because I’ve done all the work for you. So I know what time the milk trains got into Paddington station in 1935. I’ve seen a picture of a piece of bunting hanging from the rafters in Paddington station because the Jubilee of George V that just happened.
I know who was at the Café de Paris. I know how someone would get a room in a boarding house, what the London Library looked like then, what shops she would have shopped at, what clothes she would have worn. And also what her school friends would have been doing and what the prospects for a vaguely aristocratic girl like that would have been, what London was like at the time.
It was just after the Great Depression. There was a lot of poverty around, a vast amount of poverty around. And when we think of the 30s, it gets elided with the roaring 20s little bit. Absolutely not true. And so I want you, Caroline, to open the book and think, Oh, I can just sink into this and I will be gripped.
Caroline: And gripped I was. People who love books tend to love libraries too, and so a mystery like D is for Death that makes such good use of the London Library feels tailor-made to appeal to the likes of me. But, for all that I do love the London Library and find great value in it, it does cost money to belong, and so isn’t accessible to everyone. And our free, state-funded libraries in the UK have been slowly closing and disappearing as austerity and cuts have made it impossible to keep them open.
Harriet: I think there are many slow elisions over the past ten, fifteen years that have been immensely damaging. And one of them is libraries. And I get really upset about it. I grew up in a library. My dad was a writer and an editor and my mom worked in publishing. And we just lived at the library.
We didn’t buy lots of books. But every time I go into the library, I’m struck again by how miraculous they are, because they’re about things that matter. They’re about, the right of everyone to have access to information, the right of everyone to be able to check facts, and the right of everyone to walk in and find a community in a place to be quiet and read and do whatever.
And the Bath Library, which I write in a lot. Every time I go in there, there’ll be like, I don’t know, a quilting circle or a how to get your confidence back after having children. We will look after your kid for two hours in a free childcare setting so you can brush up your CV. A crime book club, a book of the month, a local history thing, like the number of things that are going on and the cuts to funding.
Don’t get me started. Makes me very angry. The idea that you enter into a space where the entire world is at your fingertips, I find very powerful every time I’m there. I started talking about this at a library event in September and I burst into tears in a room full of people and just started crying.
Caroline: Whether or not they are housing fictional corpses, libraries are magical places. We need them to understand our place in the world.
Harriet: You just have to step back and go, Oh, phew, I don’t matter for a moment. My concerns don’t matter. The past is all around me and that’s immensely relaxing. I find it super relaxing. And the smell. Oh god, the smell.
Caroline: I suspect every single one of you knows exactly the smell Harriet is talking about. It’s the smell of lots of books huddling together in the same place, and it’s also the smell of possibility and opportunity. Anything could happen once you take that book off the shelf and bring it home with you to read. And who knows, perhaps there will be a corpse and a murder for you to solve when you bring it back.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and narrated by me, Caroline Crampton. Thanks to my guest, Harriet Evans — her first crime novel, D is for Death, has just been published under her Harriet F. Townson pseudonym and is available wherever books are sold. And special thanks for this episode are due to Maylin Scott for her library mystery suggestion and to Nathalie Belkin at the London Library. Harriet and I recorded a much longer conversation than I was able to fit in this episode: if you’d like to hear the bonus episode that contains the rest of it, become a member of the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.
You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/murderinthelibrary. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Don’t forget that my new book, A Body Made of Glass, has just come out and is currently available everywhere books are sold or borrowed. If you have read or listened to it and would like to share your thoughts, I would really appreciate a kind review on a platform like Goodreads or Storygraph.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from Connor McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
