On David Peace’s “Nineteen seventy-four”

As some regular watchers of this space have deduced, I have taken advantage of an uncharacteristic lull in the assigned-reading slog to gobble down some good, trashy crime fiction. The latest installment of my binge is this highly acclaimed thriller from UK writer David Peace, the first of the so-called “Red Riding Trilogy,” comprising four novels all set in the north of England, taking place at three-year intervals. As someone who is a fan of the ‘Seventies, and of the culture and history of working-class northern England, and of crime fiction in general, you would think that Peace’s book would be a natural, and it is, for the most part: flawed, but generally enjoyable. The grimy setting and the violence and despair in this tale are relentless: the story tracks the investigation, by a greenhorn crime reporter, of a series of grisly murders that have rocked the community. The drawbacks are two: first, Peace’s style is exhausting, a hammering cascade of choppy, stream-of-consciousness interjections that becomes unintentionally melodramatic. The second is the crimes that Peace’s protagonist unearths are so lurid and psychotic as to beggar belief, and a basic confusion comes into play when he also tacks on corruption and greed as motivating forces for the crimes at the heart of the novel. This is a problem for me, in a way that is difficult to describe or articulate. It’s almost like, well, your crime novel can be driven by horrific psycho-sexual violence, or it can be driven by mercenary ruthlessness, but you have to pick one: the two motives in general tend to be contradictory. Slavering psychopaths don’t tend to care about money, and genuinely corrupt businessmen/murderers can’t usually be bothered with intricate torture rituals. Peace’s over-the-top delivery also seems, in the end, like piling on. You could have an extraordinarily grisly crime, and describe it matter-of-factly, thus making it seem even more diabolical; or you could take a more quotidian kind of criminal violence and inject it with horror via energetic, onrushing prose; but to meld the former with the latter is just too much. Maybe by the time he gets to 1977 he will have calmed down some.