This blog is done. My computer was infected with ransomware that encrypted my source document. Nothing left to post. Bye.

Holman, Hugh. Up This Crooked Way: a Sheriff Macready Detective Story (New York: M.S. Mill, 1946) 211 p.

Jacqueline Dean is a pretty, young reference librarian at Abeton College in South Carolina. When a murder is committed at Jackie's rooming house she must account for her actions to the Sheriff. Fortunately she and Sheriff Macready are already acquainted because he often comes to the college library to read books on various topics. It also turns out he can quote Chaucer from memory.

Hoffman, Alice. The Ice Queen (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006) 211 p.

A New Jersey librarian is emotionally distant and obsessed with death. She moves to Florida and gets a job at the Orlon Public Library, a bleak underused and underfunded institution with few books and no computers. Here she assists the aging head librarian Frances York.

Hodson, James Lansdale. Harvest in the North (New York: Knopf, 1934) 432 p.

Henry Brierley is assistant librarian in Chesterford, Lancashire, England. He has a “finely drawn” face, “eyes so dark as to be almost black, and by turns dreamy or smoldering, an irregular nose too long, finely curved lips rather too full and sensuous, and ears slightly prominent and large. His hair was thick and unruly, his hands long and thin and like those of a fiddler.” (p. 58). He uses £200 of library funds to make a personal investment which pays off. Later he resigns to try his hand as a playwright. 

Hodgkin, M.R. Student Body (New York: Scribner's, 1949) 226 p.

Caradoc College is stunned when a student falls to his death from a railroad trestle. There's mysterious work afoot in the library as well. Someone has been writing incriminating notes in the margins of library books. Blackmail notes in various well-known handwriting are turning up in library carrel drawers. The librarian is Miss P. Cecily, known to all as Cecily Parsley. "She was a forbidding, book-mad spinster ..." but alas a very minor character in this story. There is a suspenseful scene in the darkened stacks on p. 172: "But if I were the murderer--"

He took another step forward, and as he did so one of the fire doors far away in the distance opened, a loud cheerful assistant's voice roared a perfunctory "Everyone out?" and with a click of the master switch all the lights in the stacks went out.

Hodges, Hollis. Norman Rockwell’s Greatest Painting (Middlebury, Vt.: Paul S. Eriksson, 1988) 261 p.

Mary Ostrowski is a retired librarian in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She is “sixty-three years old, sort of short, slender, medium-length dark gray hair with a few lines of black running through it....” (p. 29) Mary finds a book of advice for older single people in a secondhand book store. She follows the advice and meets a nice older man.

Hinton, Lynne. The Order of Things (New York: St. Martin's Press, c2009) 225 p.

Andreas Jay Hackett loves being a librarian.

I love the system of numbers and titles, stacks of books all related by subject matter or fiction genre. I love knowing that if I learn the files, understand the rational method of where to put books on a shelf, that I can find any piece of literature in any library in any town in America. There's power in that kind of knowledge and I appreciate the magnitude of what I know. I love the Dewey decimal system with its classification rules and the simple ways to categorize. I love knowing that I am operating in the most widely used library classification system and that I can go anywhere and be an expert on how to find things. There is great comfort in that especially when I feel so lost from myself.

Even before I became a librarian, I felt at home in the quiet rooms surrounded by the bound pages of history and science, by the written biographies of explorers and adventurers. I have always loved the smell of leather bindings, the feel of paper between a finger and thumb, the crinkle of the page as it turns, the easy way life falls open from a book. As a child if I was missing, my mother always knew where to find me. I was always in the library. Later, as an adult, once I unlocked the secrets in the library and gained the knowledge that I can find any answer somebody needs, I felt a great pride in my work. After all, I have a real gift for reference work and I'm confident that everybody I work with would agree with that statement.

“Go ask Andy,” the other librarians would say to the researching student. “She'll know.” And they were right. I usually did. (p. 37-38).

And then Andy checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.

Hinkle, Vernon. Music To Murder By (New York: Leisure Books, 1978), 233 p.

H. Martin Webb is “head librarian of one of Harvard's music libraries” (p.12). He is forced to leave the library in the hands of his assistant, Miss Pinkham, while he investigates three deaths. “It is awkward, at the very least, to have the misfortune, ill timing and bad taste to discover more than one corpse within a three-day period.” (p. 78). Fortunately the police cooperate having learned that, “Mr. Webb … has established himself in scholarly circles … as a superior … detective, having a knack for … uncovering answers … to questions … that baffle his colleagues.” (p. 179).

Hilton, James. So Well Remembered (Boston: Little Brown, 1945) 284 p.

Livia Channing, whose father spent 14 years in prison, develops her own unique values. One day (p. 77-79) she enters the Browdley (Yorkshire) Public Library, and finds a book about her father. Later (p. 105) she starts working in the library, but she has trouble dealing with the public so she is given the task of indexing (p. 110). 

Hilton, James. Random Harvest (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, c1941) 311 p.

Mr. Woburn is a minor character hired to catalog the library of a wealthy businessman. He previously worked at a public library in Lambeth. He writes fiction but admits that he is not very original. 

Hill, Marion Moore. Death Books a Return (Corona Del Mar, CA: Pemberly Press, c2008) 284 p. The Scrappy Librarian Mystery Series.

Juanita Wills is back with her mismatched staff. Once again Mavis and Meador are dueling through Bartlett's and the quotations bulletin board.

Juanita's research into local history stirs up unpleasant memories in the town of Wyndham Oklahoma. Thirty two chapters of mounting tension culminate in a standoff and scuffle in the darkened library stacks.

Hill, Marion Moore. Bookmarked for Murder (Lake Tahoe, Nev.: Fiction Works, 2003) 236 p.

Juanita Wills is the head of the Wyndham Public Library in Oklahoma. Her two assistants are the elderly, flinty Mavis Ralston and the young overweight slacker Calvin Meador. These two do not get along well and compete to one-up each other on the quotation board. Occasionally Juanita begins daydreaming about suitable torture for Mavis whom she finds annoying. Meanwhile Juanita hunts for a gang of criminals.

Hill, Donna. Murder Uptown (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992) 216 p.

Murder comes to metropolitan Fuller College and naturally the library plays its part. A small part actually, but the library with its manual catalog and circulation system is described on p. 105. The library is the scene of the culprit's capture on p. 205-212.

Hill, Donna. Catch A Brass Canary (New York: Lippincott, 1965) 224 p.

Miguel Campos is a page at an Upper West Side branch of the New York Public Library. The library is his chance to escape the life of gangs and crime that seems his lot as a Puerto Rican in New York. Frank is the unctuous captain of pages. Victoria Davies is a young girl who lives upstairs from the library with her father the janitor. One of the assistants, Pat Burney is in love with the other assistant Sylvan Dietzler, who seems oblivious of her to a comic extent. The staff also includes Miss May Willoughby, the children's librarian; Miss Nell Kettridge; Jennifer Meade, a half time professional trainee; and talkative librarian, Mrs. Ethelbald.

When the Head Librarian Miss Tait is forced to leave for health reasons Miss Kettridge is thrust into the position. She does not want or enjoy this position because she does not like to interact with people.

Wrangles with the public, confusion at the desks, racket in the children's room, damages, losses and fines; envy, dissension and strife, all of it hated involvement with peoples' problems. And where would it lead, anyway? Nell was no career woman. Not aggressive, not witty, not flagrantly intelligent, not striking in height or appearance with her plain brown hair and brown eyes all of a piece, Nell neither wanted nor felt herself destined for success in public life. If she exhibited the conventional manner of a librarian, it was to mask and preserve from challenge the one superiority she acknowledged, her independence of mind. She remained in New York for privacy, to attend exhibitions, converts, the theater, and not for any piddling career in the Public Library. (p. 46-47).

Nonetheless, she turns out to be a very capable head librarian. She encourages Miguel and deals with all the library problems in a level-headed sensible way.

One major library problem is a crazy man who has taken on the mission of protecting society from "bad books" by defacing or destroying the library's copies of these dangerous books. He explains to Miguel while trying to enlist his help:

"Any book can be a perverter of attitudes--history, religion, philosophy have done their share--but literature and ordinary fiction, which are read with trust for pleasure, are the most dangerous. The authors themselves may not be aware of it, but where prejudice exists it comes out and make converts of the unsuspecting readers."

"But what about the librarians?" said Miguel, trying to free himself from the tense grasp. "Don't they watch out for bad books?"

"Well, but busy as they are, they couldn't undertake a study like mine. Then too, you know," Rupert added, confidentially, "they are innocent people, despite what you might think from what happened today. They are lovers of the word, you see, without my experience of the world." (p. 71).

Hersey, John. The Child Buyer: A Novel in the Form of Hearings before the Standing Committee on Education, Welfare, & Public Morality of a certain State Senate, Investigating the Conspiracy of Mr. Wissey Jones, with others, to Purchase a Male Child (New York: Knopf, 1972), 257 p.

Miss Elizabeth Cloud is the Librarian at the Pequot Town Free Library. She is a hunchback with "a sufferer's face and a most intriguing forehead." (p. 112). She likes children and provides reading material for the novel's brilliant 12 year old subject. "I hold back nothing from a child's mind-- within reason. I can smell a bad smell as well as the next person, but where there's curiosity, healthy curiosity, I believe in satisfying it. If you thwart and withhold--then's when the prurience and sneaking and perversion begin." (p. 144).

Heller, Murray. Placid's View (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1997) 179 p.

An amateur sleuth's girlfriend, Judy is a librarian. She uses interlibrary loan to get some old newspapers containing clues.

Hellenga, Robert. The Sixteen Pleasures (New York: Soho, 1994), 327 p.

Margot Harrington, a book conservator at the Newberry Library, goes to Florence in 1966 to help clean and repair flood-damaged libraries. She finds herself in a Carmelite convent drying and restoring waterlogged books. The Abbess gives Margot a work of 16th century pornography and asks her to sell it, hoping to raise enough money to save the library.

Heinlein, Robert A. Friday (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982) 368 p.

Professor Perry is "a fatherly old dear" and Head Librarian for the employer of the title character. He is responsible for a paper library in addition to computers with access to the collections of Harvard, the British Museum, and the Washington Library of the Atlantic Union (formerly LC? this is in the future). Friday finds that she can be searching for information on the history of Vicksburg and, through cross references, find material on spectral types of stars (p. 229).

Heidish, Marcy. The Torching (New York: Avon Books, 1993) 262 p.

A writer who owns a used book store does research in a “small jewel of a library, once a stately Georgetown mansion.” (p. 23). She is normally assisted by a librarian named Mr. Archer, “the angel of Special Collections” (p. 23). Another librarian is Mrs. Lind, “[a] large, middle-aged British woman, she always seemed somehow slightly damp. Her cropped gray-brown hair was always rumpled, her blouse escaping from her skirt, her manner harried, worried, kindly, alert. Despite that, she was precise and efficient, taking questions, turning with a squinch of rubberized heel, then reappearing with surprising speed, deftly balancing columns of heavy tomes.” (p. 23-24). Mrs. Lind turns up later in a historical society library.

Hegi, Ursula. Stones from the River (New York: Poseidon Press, 1994) 507 p.

The life of a small German town on the Rhine is seen through the eyes of Trudi Montag, a dwarf. Trudi and her father run a pay-library where townsfolk come to borrow novels, romances and westerns, and to buy tobacco. Trudi was introduced in Hegi's previous novel, Floating in my Mother's Palm.