Events

Andrew Pepper

The point of departure for my talk is the thorny, often antagonistic relationship between crime novelists and academics. Crime writers point to a residual elitism and intellectual narrow-mindedness amongst some academics, while academics argue that crime writers are by no means the best critics of their work or the genre in general – of, say, its formal complexities and political imperatives. In asking whether this has to be so and whether it is possible to imagine a less fractious association, I draw briefly on my own experiences as crime novelist and an academic writing about crime fiction, and on the not-always tangible creative-critical links which led to the creation of my first novel The Last Days of Newgate (2006). But more significantly, I want to use this thinking to (a) subject the critical discourse emerging from government and state funding bodies about creative-critical partnerships to scrutiny and (b) try and imagine what a more fruitful dialogue between novelists and academics might look like and the fora in which these conversations might take place.