Number 7 in my Trove Treasures series was inspired by a little piece that appeared in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 6 December 1946. It was titled, “Men join police force after reading novels”. Naturally, I was intrigued. What novels, for example?

The story’s subject was one Constable J. Simons who had just resigned the police force, after having served for 17 years. He was speaking at a Police Association meeting and he said, to quote the Telegraph, that “most men joined the police force for adventure after reading detective stories”. (The rest of the piece was about why he is was resigning, which related to pay and and conditions, particularly regarding slow promotion due to the system operating at the time.)

It made sense that detective reading might inspire young men to look to the police as a career, but I wanted to find out more. Unfortunately, this proved quite difficult because it was hard to find specific search terms to get what I was looking for. As it turned out, in the time I gave to it, I didn’t find much, but what I did find was illuminating.

What I found were articles about what policemen (as they were mostly then) read – rather than about what caused them to join the police force. One article came from New York in 1914, and another two came from Queensland in the 1930s. All indicated that policemen did not read detective stories. Neither talked about what might have inspired them into the force, but both stated very clearly what they read once in the force.

New York New York

The 1914 article appeared in Sydney’s The Sun on 4 August. It commences with:

Whatever the world at large may think of detective stories, they do not win the esteem of those whose business it is to follow up crime. The police care least of all for this line of literature — a fact discovered by reports of books most favored among those consigned by the New York Public Library for use at the police stations. 

This story, then, is about the NYPL’s providing books to police stations for police reading. The article implied that what the police read might be affected by the sorts of books selected! They’d be, the article said, “standard and classic books” chosen by the library authorities “as to what they ought to read, that being an inclination of librarians everywhere”. (Oh dear, but I think this sort of high-minded prescription was more the case then, than in modern libraries!) Nonetheless, the article does explicitly discuss detective stories:

According to report, these particular readers find little of interest and nothing of profit in the ‘detective stories’ which have such a wide sale with the ununiformed public. The policemen say that ‘real’ detective work is not done after the fashion of the sagacious heroes of Conan Doyle and his predecessors, and therefore they scorn romantic crime-hunting. This condemnation involves the assumption that the methods of ‘practical’ men cannot be bettered — an assumption wildly fallacious, but entirely natural. The police antagonism to detective novels may be due in some part to the fact that in almost every such book it is the scientific amateur who works all the miracles, while the ‘headquarters man’ is usually a comic character who laboriously follows a false clue while the other fellow gets the results.

The article goes on to defend the writers of these books, suggesting that errors in detective work “may be intentionally made by an author for the sake of attaining some higher end of emphasis or excitement”. Indeed, says the article, “all the great advances in the task of crime-detection have been made, not by policemen, but by scientists”. Lest, however, we feel that the police were being unfairly targeted, the article continues that this is true of many professions and trades, so ‘that “the force” need not be humiliated by it”. Still, the article ends with a little sting in the tail for the poor copper, which I’ll leave for you to read.

Caring for police in Queensland

We then skip a couple of decades to Queensland and the creation of a library in that state’s Police Welfare Club. I found two articles on this initiative. One appeared in Brisbane’s The Courier Mail (24 November 1937), titled “Policemen’s reading: Logic, forensic ballistics: Why thrillers are unpopular”, and the other, nearly two years later, in that city’s The Telegraph (19 June 1939), titled “Our policemen study the classics”.

The 1937 article commences with

Few of Queensland’s detectives read detective stories. They find the novelists’ supermen unreal to the point of irritation.

The article quotes the C.I.B. man who showed the writer around the Club’s “fine new library” as saying that “We don’t detect that way”. This new library, the article claims, indicates “the higher education of the modern policeman”.

Both articles describe the broad content of the library, but it’s the second one that provides more detail about its genesis, noting something that harked back to that first article I found. It says that “a policeman’s pay does not ordinarily permit him to possess as his very own a library of any consequence”. Our detective novel reading Constable from 1946 would probably agree! Anyhow, the article’s writer, a “special correspondent”, explains that Queensland’s Commissioner of Police (Mr. C. J. Carroll), who had been appointed in 1934, had immediately set about creating a club “to give his men better facilities for recreation, educational advancement, and departmental advancement”. In 1936, after fundraising had got the club going, he turned to creating a communal library for the police and their families, in Brisbane and state-wide via mail.

Both articles write about the breadth of the collection, and engage in discussion about was being read, which ranged widely from poetry and the classics to political satire and books reconstructing real crimes and trials.

Towards the end of the second article, the writer asks the wife of a detective:

“Does he go in for detective stories?” 
“No, he reads to relax” she replied. Adventure stories—the lighter the better—were first favourite with him for recreational reading. 

The earlier article says that “Wild West books are the most popular in the relaxation class of reading”, so maybe this is what her husband was reading!

Much of the second article is anecdotal so it’s impossible to say just what “real” impact the library had on the state’s policing, but I’d like to think that our “special correspondent”, who concludes by quoting Arnold Bennet on the value of reading, is right when s/he says that

… with the aid of their library the men in the police force are developing greater understanding of mankind; consequently they must surely become better policemen.

My next Trove Treasure is not, strictly speaking, Australian, because it features the English humorist Jerome K. Jerome. But, I found it reported in multiple Australian newspapers, which means that many Australians probably read it, and that makes it at least a bit relevant here. The first one I found was in The Inverell Times on June 25, 1904, so it is the one I edited. However, I then found the same piece in the West Gippsland Gazette; the Camperdown Chronicle; the Canowindra Star and Eugowra News; the The Walcha Witness and Vernon County Record; The Gundagai Times and Tumut, Adelong and Murrumbidgee District Advertiser; the Clarence and Richmond Examiner; the Narromine News and Trangie Advocate; The Cobar Herald; The Colac Herald – and, at this point, I stopped noting them. Enough already, as they say. All of these, except for the Canowindra paper, were published between late June and early July 1904. Canowindra’s was, for some reason, printed in 1907!

Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927), as I’m sure many of you know, was best known for his comedy novel, Three men in a boat, published in 1889. This book was one of those I remember from my mum’s bookshelves when I was quite a little girl – along with M. Barnard Eldershaw’s A house is built, Eve Langley’s The pea pickers (my post), Henry Handel Richardson’s The fortunes of Richard Mahony, and her beloved “little Collins classics”.

According to Wikipedia (linked on his name), the financial security provided by his hit novel enabled Jerome to become a full-time writer. He wrote plays, essays, and novels, but, says Wikipedia, was never able to recapture the success of that first novel. Wikipedia mentions in passing his writing of satirical pieces for journals, and the piece I’m sharing here is clearly one of those, although I have not been able to identify the journal, referred to as M.A.P, from which the piece apparently comes.

Wasting time on reading!

The piece starts like this:

Our old and delightful friend, Jerome K. Jerome, in a most amusing contribution to “M.A.P.” thus discourses: —

“On a newspaper placard, the other day, I saw announced a new novel by a celebrated author. I bought a copy of the paper, and turned eagerly to the last page. I was disappointed to find that I had missed the first six chapters. The story had commenced the previous Saturday; this was Friday. I say I was disappointed, and so I was at first: but my disappointment did not last long. The bright and intelligent sub-editor, according to the custom now in vogue, had provided me with a short synopsis of those first six chapters, so that without the trouble of reading them, I knew what they were all about. ‘The first instalment,’ I learned, ‘introduces the reader to a brilliant and distinguished company assembled in the drawing room of Lady Mary’s maisonette in Park street, and much smart talk is indulged in.’ I know that ‘smart talk’ so well. Had I not been lucky in missing that first chapter I should have had to hear it all again.”

Haha, I thought, and read on. Of course, Jerome was being tongue-in-cheek, and goes on to argue why we should in fact read it all, not just a summary. He expresses concern that writers will be expected to write “novels in chapters not exceeding twenty words” and that ‘short stories will be reduced to the formula: “Little boy. Pair of skates. Broken ice. Heaven’s gates”.’

“Formerly”, he explains, “an author … would have spun it out into five thousand words”. Then, proposing that this “little boy” story would have been a Christmas story, he shares how he would have written it. He would have started it in the previous spring or summer to let us get to know the little boy:

He would have been a good boy; the sort of boy that makes a bee-line for the thinnest ice. He would have lived in a cottage. I could have spread that cottage over two pages; the things that grew in the garden; the view from the front door. You would have known that boy before I had done with him — felt you had known him all your life. His quaint sayings, his childish thoughts, his great longings would have been impressed upon you…

He continues in this vein, describing how he’d also develop the father and mother, the ice, and so on. “So much”, he says, “might have been done”:

When I think of that plot wasted in nine words, it makes me positively angry. And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion in literature? We are paid by the length of our manuscript, at rates from half-a-crown a thousand words, and upwards.

How, he asks, are writers to live on the income from the payment for 9-words? All very worrying, he says.

Aren’t we glad that what he feared didn’t eventuate!

You’ll be getting sick of my time-is-short posts, but rest assured that this too shall pass – eventually! Meanwhile, here is another Trove Treasure post. It shares two different responses to reading from churches, in the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

What the churches thought

Reading novels IN church

On 27 August 1902, a brief story was carried in Sydney’s Evening News and the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal. Here is how it went:

A telegram from Nowra states that in the local Church of England on Sunday, some young men were discovered reading novels during the sermon. The preacher drew attention to the circumstances, and made some pungent criticism about the practice.

Neither of the articles gave any more information. What was the “pungent criticism”? Well, interestingly, two days later, on 29 August, the Evening News ran a sort of correction:

With reference to the telegram that the practice of novel-reading in a local church was commented upon by the incumbent, the latter explains that his remarks had no reference to any supposed practice in his church, of which he had no personal knowledge. He points out that he was simply saying, in the course of a sermon on evil speaking, that the modern novel would hardly be read if it did not deal largely with the evil in human nature.

This seems to me to be a limited understanding of “the modern novel”, but I’ll leave that for you to think about. My point here is that the story did not end here …

The following day, 30 August, The Shoalhaven News and South Coast Districts Advertiser, ran a letter to the editor from “The Correspondent” who had provided the correction that ran on 29 August. This “Correspondent” quotes the previous two news items and then goes on to say that, although the reverend Mr Newby-Fraser was speaking generally about novel-reading,

during the course of the sermon on Sunday last, novel-reading was being practised in the Nowra Church of England by certain young members of the congregation.

In fact, we are told, the names of those readers and “the titles of the novels they had spread before them” could be furnished “if necessary”. Further, those novel readers apparently felt the sermon was being directed at them because they “immediately put away the books”.

The letter then says that as the minister “had no idea that novel reading was indulged in at all by any members of his congregation, young or old … he had good reason for being indignant at having been accused of making a charge of the truth of which he had no knowledge whatsoever”. However, concludes our letter-writer:

‘Truth,’ they sometimes say, ‘is stranger than fiction.’ At all events there is an indissoluble relationship existing between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ in this matter of novel reading on Sunday.

You could be forgiven for thinking all this had been written on 1 April – but it seems to be true!

How to spend your Sunday

Melbourne’s The Age ran a brief article on 20 October 1922 headed “Sunday Games: Preferable to reading ‘sloppy’ novels”. It was reporting on the annual meeting of the Congregational Union in Adelaide at which the issue of Sunday games was discussed, the concern being the secularisation of Sunday. Indeed, reports the paper, “a motion of protest against the secularisation of Sunday and urging members to unite with the object of preventing the desecration of the Sabbath was carried.” However, during the discussion, the chairman, Rev. G.H. Wright said

that although he preferred to see a man playing cricket or tennis on a Sunday to staying at home reading sloppy novels and the Sunday paper, it was not the highest ideal. 

And who said Australia was a sporting nation!

Comments anyone?