Whodunit? Ask the Librarian

Before you pick up a crime novel, you already know what’s going to happen.

A crime will occur; someone will have committed it; someone will be tasked with solving it; they’ll encounter obstacles along the way, like red herrings; and then the mystery will be revealed. Maybe there will be a grizzled older detective coming out of retirement for one last job. Maybe there will be a younger person who gets involved with solving the crime because of tenuous connections to it that are later revealed to be key clues. Perhaps the crime will take place in an isolated location – an old manor, maybe – and there will be a snowstorm, so no one can leave and no one can call for help, but somehow there’s always sherry available.

Some crime novels subvert these core tropes, but most don’t. Mine doesn’t. I don’t think that’s a bad thing: in a romance novel, you know people will fall in love; in a literary book, you know the author will have a lot of fun with language and people won’t speak to each other normally. 

But crime is unique. The whole hook is that you don’t know something, and you’re going to find it out. Crime fiction is about gathering information.

I’m a librarian – I finished my Master’s in Information Studies and Archives and Records Management in 2024, and I work as a Collection Librarian in an academic library. Librarianship is an extremely varied role: you could be shelving books in a public library; teaching people how to handle ancient manuscripts; telling high school students to stop vaping behind the picture books; defending freedom of information; or sourcing obscure Norwegian articles about weaving from a library in Hawaii for a patron somewhere on Stewart Island who’s only contactable by semaphore. 

But the thread of librarianship is information. A librarian is the connection between someone who wants to find something and the thing they want to find. A cataloguer puts metadata in books’ records so that when you search for a random keyword, a book about that subject comes up. A library assistant shelves books correctly so that when you’re in the 500 – 600 section looking for a book that might explain the mysterious mating habits of eels, you’ll find it. A subject librarian listens to a PhD student whose thesis is due tomorrow, with a reference list they haven’t even started, and guides them to the Chicago Manual of Style. In short: you may not know something, but if you ask a librarian, you’re going to find it out.

Crime appealed to me as a genre for some of the same reasons librarianship appealed to me. I liked the idea that I could hang my plot on scaffolding (tropes to play with, plot points to hit); I liked that planning was key, the timeline had to be tight, and I had to keep careful track of my events. Records, evidence, facts, information, and correct sources are cornerstones of both my professional and creative lives.

In the best crime books, there’s enough information dotted throughout the book that you can realistically solve it yourself before the end. (I never do, but that’s because I’m very trusting, and always like to think the best of everyone.) Likewise, in libraries, there’s enough information on both ends (the patron and the thing they’re looking for) that the librarian in the middle can connect the two.

Librarianship can also be a treasure hunt for clues, just like in a crime novel. For example, a patron once approached me at the desk, looking for a book. She said the spine had been white, and she’d last used the book about seven years ago. I asked if she knew the author, which she didn’t, or the title, which was also lost to the mists of time. I asked if the book had been perhaps fiction? Or a journal? She wasn’t sure. Had the book been written in English? She thought possibly not—maybe French. Or German. Or Slovak.

We regarded each other over the desk. Then the patron bent down a little, holding her hand about a foot off the ground. I remember, she said, it was about this high up, on the shelf on the first floor in the far corner.

I remembered that we’d recently moved a journal collection from that corner, and I also remembered a long run of white spines, so the patron’s mystery was solved.  

I love finding stuff out, planning stuff, and making up stories—so I was always going to be a librarian, a crime fiction writer, or a scheming pathological liar. 

Happily, I’m the first two. The Body and the Blood is out now, in most bookshops (and libraries).

Find The Body and the Blood by Molly Crighton in all good bookstores now.