‘All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,’ smiled Gilman, like this was the best day of our lives: Friday 13 December 1974.
Collectively known as the Red Riding Quartet, David Peace’s novels – often bracketed as crime novels but actually far more appropriately pigeon-holed in the political, realist horror or even literary genres – are unique in their truthful, unblinking examination of murder and criminality. Where lesser writers revel in sordid details of wounds, modus operandi and depravity, Peace concentrates instead on the devastation caused by such events.
Drawing heavily on the dystopian imagery of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Red Riding novels delve into a muddy late seventies/early eighties Yorkshire of serial killings, police corruption and brutality. The first book, 1974, begins on a comparatively small canvas, introducing Eddie Dunford, a local hack whose investigations into a series of disturbing child murders draws him into an unpleasant and morally bankrupt underworld.
Subsequent novels increase in size and scope, mixing factual events – namely the Yorkshire Ripper killings – with fictional ones that often stray into worryingly believable territory. By the final book, 1983, Peace’s narrative flicks between multiple characters and forwards and backwards through time. The net effect is often dizzying, and in the hands of a less skilled writer the result could have been a bloated, unintelligible mess. But it’s the strength of Peace’s voice, emerging distinct and fully formed from the first novel’s opening paragraph, that holds the narrative together and holds the reader in an almost hypnotic grip. This is fortunate, as the frequent (and genuinely unsettling) descriptions of brutal torture and abuses of power are as repellent as they are integral to the alternative West Riding which Peace has created.
At the heart of Peace’s novels sits a palpable sense of anger; that the rottenness present in both the scenery and characters,the social and moral malaise that makes corpses of children and leaves innocent people locked up in prison, is a direct result of the Thatcher government’s indifference. Peace’s Yorkshire is a windswept purgatory haunted by the Moors murders, patrolled by a fascist, corrupt police force and wracked by poverty and unemployment.
Channel Four adapted 1974, 1977 and 1983 as a trilogy of television movies in 2008 (an adaptation of 1980 was written but never shot due to budgetary restraints). Characters and events were inevitably simplified or excised, but Peace’s bleak vision survived intact, and only slightly leavened by a redemptive conclusion not present in the final novel.
Writing in a programme for the Telluride Film Festival, film historian David Thomson described Channel Four’s adaptation of Red Riding as ‘better than The Godfather’, and this is undoubtedly true. Where Coppola’s work mythologised the murderous Corleone family (whether intentionally or otherwise), Peace, and those responsible for bringing his novels to the screen, reveal criminals for what they actually are: cruel parasites feeding off the vulnerable.
It was recently announced that veteran film maker Ridley Scott had purchased the rights to the Red Riding Quartet. Impressed by the Channel Four adaptations, he plans to relocate the story to a rundown area of Pennsylvania.
While Scott is a great visual stylist, and a sometimes great film maker, he’s never been a director particularly interested in the darker side of human motivation. He’s a master of slick thrillers, of glittering surfaces and remarkable vistas. Is he interested in the political and philosophical questions that underpin Peace’s work, or does he merely see another gritty thriller? The decision to relocate the narrative to America, away from the spectres of Sutcliffe and Hindley, away from the political choices of Thatcher and the way those choices impacted on the North, rather suggest the latter.
Fathom Five 