RESEARCHING ABROAD
Neil McKenna on the benefits of using a local researcher.
The short ad was the very last on the single page of classified advertisements of The Author, the estimable magazine for members of the Society of Authors. ‘Proxy researcher available – New York area libraries and archive.’
‘Hmmn…,’ I thought to myself. Now, I’ve always been a sucker for small ads. I’ve never able to resist reading them and responding to them. And I have to say, that small ads have generally been good to me. I’ve ended up with a variety of interesting and dead-end jobs, a flat, the odd boyfriend – some very odd indeed, and some extremely nice – as well as numerous useful and useless possessions.
There is, I’ve come to believe, a zen-like quality (that’s zen with a small ‘z’) to the art of the small ad; a kind of synchronicity, a serendipity, a sort of responsive appropriateness to the circumstances of one’s private and professional life. And these thoughts struck me more even fully as I pondered Sue Fox’s proxy research ad.
It was with some reluctance that I had been contemplating making a trip to New York to do some research. Although I’ve been to the US many times, I’ve never actually set foot in New York, apart from changing planes at JFK, once. For my book on Oscar Wilde, I spent a month in Austin, Texas visiting the Humanities Research Center, and a month in Los Angeles working at the Clark Library. Both trips were incredibly valuable in terms of the material I turned up. But on both trips I felt rather lonely and homesick.
But I still needed to do some research for my current book. Unlike Oscar Wilde, I wasn’t consulting impeccably catalogued collections in one place, I was hunting for clues I wasn’t sure evening existed. I wasn’t hunting for needles in haystacks. I was hunting for the haystacks themselves. And where to start?
There were several libraries and archives in New York which might yield material – and equally might as easily not. I felt very daunted. I would have to go to New York, find a hotel (not the easiest of tasks for someone very sensitive to noise and atmosphere) and somehow schelpp myself round the vast archives of that vast city.
Which is why I said ‘Hmmn..’ to myself several times when I read and re-read Sue Fox’s proxy research advert.
I decided to take the plunge and sent an e-mail to Sue. I was, I told her, on the trail of two disreputable young men who had washed up in New York. I had some dates and a few clues. I even had a photo of one of them taken in New York. Might she be able to help me? And how would it all work? I got an immediate and very friendly reply from Sue. I was to send her what clues I had, and then we would talk on the phone and decide the best line of attack. Sue lives about 45 minute from the centre of the city and is very familiar with all the archives.
It all happened as Sue said. I sent her what I had, we spoke on the telephone. I explained that the New York adventures of my two disreputable young men, if, indeed, we could find anything out about them, would only ever constitute a small but beautifully formed coda to the book.
I was slightly worried about the cost of all this. Sue charges US$25 an hour plus travelling time. I didn’t want her to spend hours and hours turning over haystacks and not discovering anything. I was also a bit worried about getting someone else to do something I’d always taken pride in doing myself, however haphazardly. There was also the question of confidentiality. Sue seemed to intuit all this and put my mind at rest. I realised very quickly that she is very attuned to the needs of writers in a way that other researchers I’ve met, especially in television, simply aren’t. She’d get down to it, she said in a week a so.
A fortnight later I got an e-mail from Sue. She’d trawled the archives electronically and in person and found some interesting snippets: some press cuttings, a death certificate, and a few varied references to people my disreputable young men had consorted with. There was more than I had hoped she might find and, more importantly there were a few new leads to follow up.
The bill, including Sue’s travel time, came to US$303, around £200. I thought it exceptionally good value, bearing in mind that a flight to New York and a week’s accommodation in even an average hotel would set me back in the region of £1200, at a conservative estimate.
One of the unexpected joys of writing a book – as opposed to the long list of expected difficulties and disappointments – is meeting people like Sue, people who care about writing and who care about doing things properly. Sue’s coming to London in January and I’m really looking forward to meeting her. I hope we’ll be good friends.
Sue Fox can be contacted on 001 914 7034 or suefox2@optonline.net.
