On Libraries & Librarians

Ro: This week I'm in Philadelphia preparing for the American Library Association's MidWinter meeting. Twenty-five mystery writers from MWANY will be meeting and greeting librarians from all over the country.

Almost every writer I know has a favorite library or librarian story. Tell us yours. In the meantime here's one from best-selling author Clea Simon

Clea: How do I love libraries? Let me count the ways. While I was researching my last nonfiction book, “The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats,” I saw a mention on a TV special of a study done in England on predation by cats in a small West Country village. Seriously. Being the tech savvy girl that I am, I immediately went online to find it. Well, I did. In German. Which I do not speak. And when I tried the Google “translator” the result was wildly humorous, but not at all useful.

So I went down to my local brick-and-mortar (or, this being Cambridge with its beautiful 19th Century H.H. Richardson Romanesque castle of a library, hewn-stone-and-mortar) library and explained my predicament to one of the librarians. “No problem,” she said to me. “But it may take a few days.” Within two days, she had the original journal article – in English – copied for me. Once again, I was reminded that electrons in the ether are still easily trumped by human ingenuity, know-how, and (I suspect) a phone call from one research librarian to another, perhaps overseas. I thanked her profusely, and in the “Feline” acknowledgments, but it hardly seems enough.

I wish I could drop by my local library tomorrow, seek out that librarian and thank her again. But for now, I can’t. My library is being renovated – its beautiful lawn with the names of great Greek thinkers set in stone, its Japanese peace garden, and its shady walks are all torn up, replaced by a construction site that looks more like a crime scene. There is hope: The copper beach, such a pleasure to read under, is still standing. And all the plans posted along the makeshift fence promise everything else will soon be back, perhaps as early as this summer. But until then, it’s a mess, more than half the books in storage, accessible through a temporary library housed in a nearby school. And that’s not the same, somehow, and I miss my library something fierce.

So when I was asked to contribute to a small volume by local writers celebrating the return of our library – oh, soon, I hope! – I wrote a mini-mystery featuring a local cat, who waits under that tree, and waits and waits for the day her book-borrowing friends will come back. I guess at heart I am that cat, waiting and hoping. How could I not?

Neither libraries nor librarians figure in my current full-length mystery series, in “Cries and Whiskers,” “Cattery Row,” or “Mew is for Murder.” The heroine of these books, Theda Krakow, knows how to research, but as a freelance music journalist. One of her best buddies, Bunny, works in a newspaper library – aka the “morgue – but while she invariably helps Theda dig up useful and interesting background tidbits, she hasn’t had a huge part in the action. Not yet. But in a nonseries book that I’m working on, my grad student heroine spends much of her time in Widener, the main Harvard College library. It’s a place I came to know and love during my undergrad years, and I’ve recently signed up for an alumna pass so I can revisit the scene of my youth – and figure out where exactly a killer would hide. I have very mixed emotions about setting a scary chase scene in a library. But, hey, mysteries all resolve, so I won’t be chasing anyone out of the stacks, will I? Maybe a little bit of suspense will just lure more of us in to that wonderful world, a mystery of its own.

Clea Simon is the author of the Theda Krakow mysteries, most recently “Cries and Whiskers,” and three nonfiction books. She can be reached at http://www.cleasimon.com