Big Book Review discusses the true value of crime novels at Wolverhampton Literature Festival

This February, the University of Wolverhampton’s Big Book Review continues its UK tour with events at this year’s Wolverhampton Literature Festival to discuss crime, community and conflict at two online events with writers from the Black Country, Northern Ireland and beyond.

On Saturday 5 February at 7.30pm, Dr Aidan Byrne, course leader of BA (Hons) English at the University of Wolverhampton, delves into the reputation of the whodunnit in Crime Writing and Quality. Alongside psychological suspense novelist Holly Seddon (The Hit List) and thriller writer Mark Edwards (The Hollows), he’ll explore the real value of genre fiction, before investigating Northern Irish crime writing with Sharon Dempsey (Who Took Eden Mulligan?) and Brian McGilloway (Blood Ties). 

Byrne will also unveil new conclusions drawn from the team’s research on the BBC engagement project The Novels That Shaped Our World to show that the quality of genre fiction – including detective fiction – is rated lower compared to books marketed as serious literary fiction.  How we can become more aware of unconscious prejudices in our own judgment of cultural value?   

On Sunday 6 February at 2.30pm GMT, Professor Sebastian Groes, Professor of English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton, will explore the relationship between writing, place and regional identity with Stoke-on-Trent-born writer Dr Lisa Blower, Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing also at the University of Wolverhampton, (Common People Collective) and Belfast-based novelist Jan Carson (The Fire Starters; The Raptures) for The Black Country, Belfast and the Big Book Review.  

Groes will also reveal new computational research from The Novels that Shaped Our World that provocatively suggests that women writers tend to explicitly name emotions in their work at a higher rate than their male counterparts, which detrimentally affects readers’ judgment of literary quality. Similarly, the use of regional dialect also impacts negatively on people’s assessment of ‘literariness’. Especially for this event, Groes will use computational software to crunch Carson’s and Blower’s work, and show how their use of emotive language and dialect maps against writers including Charles Dickens, Kazuo Ishiguro, Muriel Spark and Nell Dunn.