Shelfies #1: Kaaron Warren

This is my main non-fiction bookshelf. Here I keep books that can help with research and ideas. It’s the bookshelf I go to if I’m bored, or need something to read for five or ten minutes. I go to it if I’m stuck on a plot point, or even a character. Pretty much everything is covered here, from Wonders of the Past (three volumes about ancient buildings and monuments, the books themselves very old) to True Crime, to dictionaries and books about language, to obscure books about moments in history no one remembers.

A lot of these books can’t be found online, which is why I keep hold of them. I also love the random possibilities of them. I can pick any book, flip it open, and find inspiration.

There are photo books, too. I love these. A Day in Life of London, of Australia, of Queensland. Moments in time, captured and now almost entirely strange and lost. I can easily pass a day with these books.

I opened A Day in the Life of London because we just spent nearly two weeks in that wonderful city and I wondered if I’d recognise anything. It was published in 1984 and it’s like I’m in the future. I am in the future but it feels like time travel. I’m jumping forward to see if these people are still alive, if the restaurants still exist, if the building still stands.

Pentonville Prison is functioning. The men featured are un-named and every one of the stares confidently at the camera.

We stayed a block or two from the Quality Chop House, featured in 1984 and still serving. I’m sad I didn’t check this book before we visited London.

I found pages of notes at the back of the book, probably from 25 years ago or more. These are my responses to the photos, with stories in mind. I never wrote any of these stories, never used any of these characters.

Maybe I should.

I did use one of the photos from A Day in the Life of Australia. It’s of a sex worker in Kalgoorlie, standing in front of a line of tin sheds. She featured in my novel Mistification, a kind woman who finds a ruby ring.

I love photo books.

The second book I plucked off the shelves is Teach Your Baby to Read. I bought this from a library sale, but this book was on our shelves in my childhood home. I learned to read pretty young, but not as a baby. I’m not sure when my mum got this book but I always kinda loved it. Well, not the book itself, but the bits that came with it. There were large words you tore out of the pages, and (I remember once I looked the book up) a box full of these words. THIS is what I loved. The box full of words I could move around and turn into stories. I always loved words on their own. 

Today I’m fascinated by one of the case studies, a boy called Tommy Luski who learned to read when the doctors said he would never learn anything. There’s nothing about him on the internet apart from people wondering if he was a real person, so clearly I’m going to have to write a story about him.

Third is Murder Whodunnit. This is a brilliant resource. It tells me how the gas chamber works, what mercury poisoning can do, and what strangulation looks like. There’s a page on stomach contents and how analysis can lead to conviction. It discusses the Alice Crimmins case. Her children went missing and she claimed they were kidnapped sometime after midnight, but when their bodies were found, it was clear from their stomach contents they were killed just after the dinner she’d fed them, which was pasta and beans. I felt so sad reading this. Those little children, eating their dinner. I only hope it was a happy meal. That they weren’t frightened, and didn’t know what was coming. 

This book has sketches of crime scenes, and photographs used in evidence, such as a bloodied coat and, the most disturbing of all, the impression of a car crash victim’s face against the car window. This is haunting; it looks ghostly. 

It goes into great detail about some elements of crime detection and evidence. Sometimes details can make a story. Murderer Samuel Morgan was caught because he left a piece of bandage behind at the crime scene and it was matched to a bandage his sister did for him. They also matched traces of soil to him. He was hanged. Murder Whodunnit tells me the history of hanging as well, and it gives me a scale ‘showing the striking force of falling bodies at different distances’. Now THAT would be a great story title. 

The last book I want to talk about is An Old Woman’s Reflections by Peig Sayers. The Life of a Blasket Island Storyteller. Oh, I love this book. I love it for the small details about a place I know nothing about. For the life she brings to it all, and the oddness, and the warmth. She tells us about the tailor, who would go from house to house, village to village. He’d sit on the dining table in the middle of the room because that was the best light, and he’d tell stories from other houses, other villages, and he’d listen to the stories told. The chapters have the most wonderful titles: The Snail-Trick; Tommy Griffin’s Death; a Wake. The snail-trick is fortelling who you will marry. Put a snail on a dish of sand and it will scrawl the initials for you as it moves about. And how’s this for language? “We went down helter skelter, and we had an edge to our teeth, because it was a long time before that since we saw the like.”

I’ll stop there, because I’m going to read the rest of that story, and another.

Kaaron Warren is a multi-award-winning Australian writer based in Canberra, Australia. She’s sold over 200 short stories to publications big and small around the world, including Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best. She was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy, Stoker Con, Geysercon, and Genrecon.

Her latest novel is The Underhistory, from Viper Books, was described in the Guardian as ‘a beautifully constructed, suspenseful gothic tale’.

Her other novels are Slights, Mistification, Walking the Tree, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone. She has seven short story collections. Her writing podcast Let the Cat In showcases ideas, objects, and inspirations.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.