Katy Hamilton

It is no secret, to anyone who knows me, that I am complete murder mystery addict. Spy stuff is fine, action and adventure all very well, but TV channels like Alibi were made for people like me. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham, Colin Dexter… it’s all about the puzzle, the solving, the sleights of hand and unveiling of the one whodunnit.

And, crucially, the clues.

My working life has become, to my great delight, a sort of continuation of these same concepts. If someone says to me, ‘please can you come and talk about this concert we’re giving,’ or ‘any chance of teaching a session on this work?’, my brain immediately starts supplying lists of questions à la Jonathan Creek. But why did the string quartet that nickname? How do we know for sure that Stravinsky didn’t just say that after the fact, but think differently at the time? How would people have even been able to hear that music? Where? When? What did it cost? How easy was it to get hold of the score?

Being a writer and speaker means being a researcher. It means knowing where to go looking for the information you need. Where do you start? Who will have the things you need? Has anyone digitised relevant sources, and do you have access to them? Who recorded it? When? How different are the available editions? And on and on it goes. Over the years, I’ve become pretty good at knowing where to look – or at least, knowing where to start to look – for information about composers from Pérotin to James MacMillan. But it’s not a static thing, of course. New things are being discovered, and written, about all of these people all the time (and if they’re alive, they’re busy writing new music too!). All part of the fun and adventure.

So where do you start? For the majority of my undergraduates, the go-to answer is: Google. The extent to which this search engine has become both ubiquitous and top option for the curious is difficult to underestimate. But then, so is the extent to which it is losing any qualities of the dispassionate information-sifter that it may have claimed in its early years. Simply put, the algorithms that sit behind the world’s biggest search engine allow the shaping of its top results according to money, marketing and technological influence. Its answers are not to be trusted.

This makes it, on the one hand, a powerful and potentially destructive tool far beyond the scope of any book, pamphlet or broadcast ever created. And on the other hand, it makes it just as fallible as all of those other things ever were.

My students long ago perfected the art of delivering the ‘this is why you think I shouldn’t use Wikipedia’ speech to me without visibly rolling their eyes. I know they do use it. Heck, I use it. But it’s not all I use, and – to bring us back to the testimonies of those wide-eyed suspects in Miss Marple novels – I don’t necessarily believe what I read. In any of the things I look at. The best-intentioned, longest-pursued, most thorough research on the planet can have mistakes in it. Sometimes that’s accidental. Sometimes it’s sneakier: a form of omission or realigning of facts to suit a certain theory. Sometimes, composers and artists themselves completely rewrite their own pasts in order to make what they believe to be a better impression (yes, Richard Wagner, I’m looking at you). And there’s also the classic ‘I didn’t have time to research this properly so I’ve copied down some stuff I’ve found in this other book’ tactic, which can go one for tens if not hundreds of years across a whole string of publications before someone finally unpicks it and discovers it was wrong to start with.

The pitfalls are many and varied, but they can for the most part be overcome by a very simple rule of thumb: look in more than one place to corroborate what you’ve already found. Pretty simple, eh? Worth remembering that Google, by the way, counts as one place. It is a site which orders and curates – it is a giant digital editor. Editors get stuff wrong, and have agendas. Trust me. I’ve been one.

A little cross-referencing should get you out of most sticky situations, for all that it gets a bad press as a tedious occupation. (When Rupert Giles tells Buffy Summers that he enjoys cross-referencing, she asks him, ‘Do you stuff your own shirts, or do you send them out?’) And there’s another thing that we could all do to acknowledge a little more, a humble three-word concept which might save us all a lot of anxiety, and not just when it comes to academic research: I don’t know. Or indeed: We can’t know. Sometimes the evidence isn’t there. Sometimes it’s all about a judgement call (and if it is, you should acknowledge that). Sometimes – and this is often how Inspector Morse stumbles his way in and out of correct and incorrect solutions to murders – an amount of hypothesising is required. There are certain scholarly traditions that don’t look too kindly on this, and prefer hard facts or silence. I confess myself a little more relaxed than that, although I wouldn’t want to extrapolate too far. But any hypothesis needs testing as far as it can be tested. It matters not whether this is for an academic paper, a CD sleeve note or a pre-concert talk. The audiences of all three deserve respectful treatment, and that includes everything on the spectrum of possible response from intense suspicion at your arguments (so you’d darn well better be able to prove it) to complete, enthusiastic trust (in which case you owe them the best answers you can give). And yes, I am also the kind of person who spends episodes of apparently ‘historical’ dramas shouting at the telly that they didn’t have sellotape then, for goodness’ sakes, and how feasible is it REALLY that someone living in a house that small at that point in history would have their own telephone? Fiction, in print or on film, is not immune.

All in all, from scholarship to stories to newspaper reports, it’s best to treat sources – particularly old books – with caution. Also, best not to lick your fingers before you try to turn the pages. Librarians don’t like it. And it can be rather hazardous to your health…