murder in the archives

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Murder in the Archives

I had a short, unimpressive career as an Archivist during the late 1980s. I worked for the Manitoba and Northwestern Conference of the United Church, at their Archives located in the University of Winnipeg. A terrific source of mayhem and mystery as events unfolded afterwards.

I wrote two Jason Midnight extravaganzas — one a novel, the other a novella — in which the Archives played a major role, and also my one and only full out vampire novel. Appropriately for an Archives piece entitled Dust to Dust.

Archives are perfect settings for mysteries. For one thing, they are full of them themselves. And what’s better, they’re also full of the answers to mysteries. If you can only find an adequate indexing system to locate the proper artifacts.

Anything can end up in an Archives, not just paper records. The three central principles of Archival work are provenance, integrity, and original order. Provenance assumes you know precisely where a record originated. Integrity means the record is complete and the genuine article, whether the information the record imparts is true or not. Because sometimes what’s missing or left out of a record can be more important. And original order refers to an individual’s or institution’s collection of artifacts being donated to the Archives being kept in the precise order in which that individual or institution maintained it his, her, or itself. Stating a great deal about the psychological make up of the suspect in question.

And all primary sources! If this isn’t a recipe for mystery building and resolution, I don’t know what is.

Great stuff. Now combine that with the always rich possibility of discovering some bit of deliciously revealing information on a shelf somewhere that really isn’t supposed to be there. Or, as we used to like to say in the business, “the real fun in the Archives isn’t the dust. It’s the dirt.”

That being said, there’s two approaches one can take to writing mysteries after having worked in an Archives. I took the approach of using the Archives itself as central to the theme. In Jason Midnight’s “The Dead Ministers List”, victims are knocked off one by one in conservationally correct manners. (Posted somewhere, I’m sure of it. Damned if I can find it. Remember what I said about the necessity of good indexes for your Archives.) Including being crushed to death between sliding shelves, a particularly nasty way to go in my opinion.

I took that approach because even though I worked in an Archives, I was never much of a History person. I liked the stories, and I have an unnatural interest in organizing and indexing information. Usually practitioners join the industry fresh from a History degree or because they have some other background in the theme of the particular Archives they work within. My friend and fellow novelist Cathy Macdonald is a perfect example of that. She was the original United Church Archivist in Manitoba, and my mentor in the profession.

Cathy worked in an Archives, is a Historian, and has a history of ministry in her family. Therefore it’s no great surprise to see that her first published mystery, Put on the Armour of Light (Dundurn, 2014), is a novel set in a particular historical setting with a young minister as her hero. She interweaves layers of historical accuracy regarding regional geography, customs, and events throughout her depiction of Winnipeg in 1899, creating a fully realized world for her drama to unfold within. You feel you are there with the Reverend Charles Lauchlan as he unravels the knots tangling the other characters in the book. Not just in a carefully developed fictional reality that might accommodate any book, but specifically in 1899 Winnipeg.

We experience a fully three-dimensional world. There is an extra resonance to a setting based not only on historical accuracy, but on accuracy regarding how people think and react within that setting as well. Accomplishing this requires a writer who has a real feel for history, acquired through an Archives or however.

Another book I read over the holidays, What We See When We Read, by Peter Mendelsund, makes a number of very interesting points regarding the fine art of a writer making a setting or character come to visual life for her or his readers. A theme I’ll be exploring in more detail next week when I make an intensive study of Anna Karenina’s nose. One of the central points of Mendelsund’s book however is that an author can never give you a photographic representation of what she or he tells you about in their story. Although it’s a fair bet Cathy researched actual photographs in the Archives of the time period and setting she wrote about in Put On The Armour Of Light.

No, Mendelsund points out repeatedly at best all an author can give you is the suggestion of details you have to visualize for yourself. Ultimately you’re given more of a feel than a look, passing through your imagination in an ever shifting blur of actual details.

In which case we can say Cathy made solid decisions regarding which details to present from her personal Archives of historical Winnipeg, and what a young WASPish minister’s life might be like within it around the turn of the Twentieth Century. The factual history doesn’t get in the way of her story, instead adding more depth to the characterization and the development of issues within the novel. As with any well-written novel, it’s fun to walk the streets of a different town in a different time. But there’s an extra thrill to think that it probably looked/felt just like this as the properly evoked details blur past us, and that people were probably speaking and thinking much the same way they do in the book.

Every author should have such a rich Archives to draw on. Dusty or not.

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week! Jason Midnight returns! A new dimension to the Contest is introduced with Chapter One of The Electric Detective on Monday, while Episode Two: The Hermit’s Tale begins on Friday, January 9th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition, continuing as always at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

We begin to get a feel for how the themes for the Episodes are being selected now, as Episode One had a distinct Dante-Ish air about it, and Episode Two comes in proudly Chaucer-Ish. Complete with illustrations by the author.