Rachel Franks, Double Agent: A Librarian and a Crime Author - William Blick Interviews Rachel Franks (January 2024)

Rachel Franks is the Coordinator, Scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales and an Honorary Associate Lecture at The University of Newcastle (Australia). She holds PhDs in Australian crime fiction (Central Queensland University) and in true crime texts (University of Sydney). A qualified educator and librarian, her extensive work on crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and information science has been presented at numerous conferences, as well as on radio and television. An award-winning writer, her research can be found in a wide variety of books, journals, magazines and online resources. She is the author of An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard (2022).

1. Can you tell me about your experience with Librarianship? You do have a degree in Library Science and Information Studies?
I have been working in libraries since 2009 and have done all sorts of things including: supporting other librarians, working as a curator, working in acquisitions and looking after public programs. In 2011 I had an opportunity to pursue an ambition to qualify as a librarian through postgraduate study; I completed a Master of Information Studies (Librarianship) at the University of Canberra.

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2. Can you tell us about your current role in the Library you work at?
Today, I am the Coordinator of Scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales, one of Australia’s largest cultural institutions. The Library is well-known for holding the country’s preeminent collection of colonial material, but we also have vast holdings that document our history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across a range of formats such as: architectural plans, ephemera, objects, pictorial collections, manuscripts, maps and printed materials including rare books.

In my role at the Library, I am responsible for the Fellows and Visiting Scholars program; I look after people who have successfully applied for funding or other types of support to work with the special collections held by the Library. Most of these researchers are historians, some are literary specialists and a few have a particular expertise in art. It is a wonderful job: after recruiting the researchers, who will spend roughly a year working on a project at the Library, I offer support in lots of different ways. I can teach someone how to use the Library’s catalogue more efficiently, introduce them to an expert in their area or provide research assistance. All the work being done by the Fellows and Visiting Scholars is fascinating. There are topics that I already have an interest in, and there are questions I never would have thought of!

3. Let’s talk about your studies in Crime Fiction studies? How did you get interested in this discipline from an academic perspective? 
I started reading crime fiction when I was quite young. Those books I read first, such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) left a big impression on me. I then went “from America to England” and started reading the English writers who wrote crime fiction during the genre’s Golden Age between World Wars I and II. After devouring lots of international writers, I started reading crime stories set a little bit closer to home and discovered lots of Australian authors. I have always believed that crime fiction talks about serious issues – although not always in a serious way – and that works discussing what drives one person to murder another have an important role to play in how we understand crime in society. Crime writers often pride themselves on realism, they take their stories, the emotions and the motivations of their characters, from the real world. I wanted to explore that. 

I have been very privileged to work with enthusiastic and generous researchers over the years, benefiting from advice and mentorship. I am especially grateful to have participated in crime-focused conferences at Gdansk, Poland as well as Oxford, England in addition to conferences in Australia. I have also benefited from editors who have published my work in collections or in journals … Some of my early pieces feel a bit old fashioned now, but that is a good thing: it shows how much great work is being done in the field of Crime Fiction studies.


4. Can you talk about your PhDs? What were the processes like? What were your thesis questions?
My first PhD, completed at Central Queensland University in 2011, is titled “Blood on their Hands: Representations of Class, Gender and Ethical Questions Attendant on the Act of Murder in Australian Crime Ciction”. In this research, I mapped a few of the changes in the way Australian writers have crafted characters in terms of class and gender from 1830 to 1980. I also exploited some different motives for murder and what drives someone to take another person’s life. The process was a little daunting at times, as I completed this doctorate as a creative work. I wrote a crime novel in which the good guys and the bad guys exemplified the points in the arguments that I made in the exegesis, or the academic anchor for the thesis.

For my second PhD, completed at The University of Sydney in 2020, I wanted to do something different. My thesis, titled “Documenting Our Most Heinous Sins: True Crime Texts and the Conscience Collective in Colonial Australia”, is a monograph that looks at why so many of us have an almost insatiable desire to consume true crime stories. As a more traditional doctorate, based on case studies, the process was quite different to a creative thesis that can accommodate some flexibility in writing style. There was a real benefit to being able to “swap writing styles” when doing a novel and an exegesis, if I was stuck on one part of the project, I could slip in and work on the other part. With a monograph, I could move between case studies but, essentially, I just had to keep going! While I developed a genuine affection for my characters in my first PhD, I also grew to enjoy spending time with Émile Durkheim for the second one. I used Durkheim’s writings – mainly The Division of Labour in Society (1893) – to explain our keen engagement with crime stories, from the evening news through to long-form works, and a need to feel that we share something in common with our fellow citizens: a shared outrage for the worst crimes.


5. Can you talk about any current research that you are working on? What is your greatest interest in Crime Fiction/True Crime right now? 
I hope to start work on a new book in 2024, looking at crime and corruption in colonial-era New South Wales. I need to do some historical research first; I always try and do as much preparation work as possible before I sit down and actually start writing. (Otherwise, I am too easily distracted … I will write a few words and then need to look something up!) Whatever is next, will look at how people experienced crime and justice everyday: not just through sensational newspaper headlines, but how criminal activities – and the punishments that followed, or not – impacted the lives of ordinary people.


6. Is there a piece of work that you are most proud out of your substantial body of work?
I think the piece of work that I am most proud of is my biography of Robert Howard: An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard (NewSouth, 2022). I spent about eight years, on and off, researching and writing the first full-length biography of the longest-serving hangman for New South Wales. 

I came across the man known as Nosey Bob (a moniker given to him because he had no nose, not because he was a nosey neighbour) when I was researching how women, as victims and villains, at the centre of criminal cases were treated by colonial Sydney’s press corp. It had been widely assumed that Nosey Bob was an incompetent executioner who routinely botched his job. Instead of neatly breaking a person’s neck, it was said, Howard would compound the suffering of those who had been sentenced to death. Labelled the ‘Champion Choker’, quite a few of Nosey Bob’s clients were, regrettably, strangled slowly once the trapdoors of the scaffold gave way. There is no denying that Howard had the odd bad day at work, but the idea that he often bungled when he dealt with a felon is simply not true.

In my research, I found so much that had been fabricated, or at least embellished, about this important Sydney identity. Looking for the truth was made harder as the newspaper editors and journalists of Howard’s day worked to leverage the executioner in debates for and against capital punishment. Fact and fiction often merged seamlessly with Nosey Bob easily recast as someone who was different, even evil. He was never just the hangman; he was always the noseless hangman. Woven in with Howard’s story is also the story of capital punishment, and its abolition, in Australia’s oldest colony. 

I have contributed book chapters to other people’s volumes and have co-edited a few volumes with colleagues over the years, but this was my first sole-authored long-form project to be published. It was very exciting to see all my scraps of paper and numerous computer files transform into a book. 


7. Let’s connect the dots between Librarianship and Crime Fiction/True Crime studies. Do you think an academic librarian can write on other areas other than library and pedagogy? 
I think librarians, of any type, can write on all sorts of topics. Librarians are well-trained researchers and problem solvers, that if we are given the time (and a little bit of support) we can present and publish on matters that extend far beyond what many conceive of as standard library activities or spaces. I think the issue is time. Most employers are happy to consider writing about library-related work as “real work” and so librarians can incorporate these efforts into their day-to-day work life. It can be much more difficult to secure support for projects seen to be “outside” of a role description. If a reader or a researcher approaches a library with a criminally focused question, then it is obviously much easier as a librarian to look in-depth at crime narratives. If, though, you are more likely to be fielding queries about family history or safety standards, then undertaking crime studies (though excellent training for solving puzzles!) might be considered a bit of a stretch for some library supervisors.

I have an advantage in that I work with collections that have a lot of criminal content: fiction and non-fiction. But I cannot write about crime full time – as much as I would like to – and will often write during evenings or over weekends. Not everyone is able to give up so much time at home. So, for me, the issue is not the capacity of librarians to write on any topic that interests them but rather their opportunities to write widely are more limited. 


8. Why is it the subject of Crime Fiction and True Crime studies an important discipline to be studied from academic standpoint? Why is it relevant in University studies?
Crime narratives tell us a great deal about what it means to be human. Through Crime Fiction and True Crime, we can see why people do bad things, and we can also see the social conditions that can work to set up lives of crime. Sure, lots of stories focus on love gone wrong, revenge or a get-rich-quick scheme, but there are also more nuanced tales available that seek to unpack the “whydunit”, not just the “whodunit”, of crime. These genres are useful for criminologists and sociologists, while historians can also rely on such works as windows into the past. These stories – often overlooked by scholars of all types – contain great details on how we lived and interacted with each other. This allows you to glean bus timetables, social mores and almost everything in between.


9. Do you think Librarians can make important contributions to the Crime Fiction/True Crime studies discipline?
Absolutely. As a librarian and as an Honorary Associate Lecturer at The University of Newcastle (Australia), I am a member of the University’s Detective Fiction on the Move Network. This group looks at the history of this genre, the different ways of writing crime stories in addition to experimenting with new ways to read a type of fiction that has been easily dismissed over the years as “not academic”. It is a terrific group of people who have done a lot to highlight crime fiction’s value to writers, readers and scholars.
 
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10. Do you also write Crime Fiction? Can you talk about a current project and any past fiction writing endeavours?
I have not written any Crime Fiction since I wrote a novel for my PhD at Central Queensland University. My latest Crime Fiction effort was a short history of Australian Crime Fiction (1830–1950) for The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel (2023) edited by David Carter. I still try to read Crime Fiction when I have the time, but most of my criminal activity is in the world of True Crime these days.


11. What classes do you teach and what is your teaching style?
I do not have a formal roster of teaching. I run sessions on the Library’s catalogue or national collection tools like Trove as well as sessions on aspects of the Library’s collections using original materials. These are all “on demand”, as are the one-on-one sessions I offer to researchers who require specialist advice or want to improve their advanced searching skills. My style is reasonably relaxed: I know that search strategies are essential to finding not just any answer but the right answer, but I appreciate that for lots of people it is not the most exciting aspect of research because it can be quite drawn out and laborious. And all those rabbit holes! I try to let the people I am teaching lead – after offering an overview – by asking their own questions. Setting up a safe space to be curious (and to make the occasional mistake) helps to develop confident researchers. Or, as is often the case at my Library, researchers might just need a bit of practice, in addition to a few tips and tricks, to work with archival materials.  

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William Blick

William (Bill) Blick is a Librarian and Assistant Professor at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English Literature and a Master of Library Science and Information Studies degree. Additionally, Bill is also a crime fiction/ true crime and film  writer/scholar. He has published articles and fiction at Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of Noircon, Senses of Cinema, Cineaction, Film Threat, Film International, Pulp Metal Magazine, Beat to a Pulp, and Out of the Gutter.