David
Peace once spurned by publishers I Sean
Bean's brutal role in Red Riding I Red
Riding shows brutality in Yorkshire 'hood'
Now is the springtime of David Peace, a Yorkshire author whose early work was
so comprehensively trashed by publishers that he was left for dead. “Please
do not send us anything again,” their letters instructed. Fifteen years ago
he moved to Japan and has remained there ever since. Suddenly his name is
blossoming everywhere.
Channel 4’s eagerly awaited series Red Riding, based on Peace’s compelling
books about the Yorkshire Ripper and starring Sean Bean, comes to the small
screen on Thursday. For the 41-year-old novelist, the psychological trauma
inflicted on Yorkshire by Peter Sutcliffe’s 13 murders has particular
resonance. Like many boys growing up in Yorkshire, Peace feared that his
father might be the Ripper. Every night his sister prayed that their mother
would not be the next victim. The 10-year-old Peace collected press
clippings and read Sherlock Holmes stories voraciously: “I had this
ridiculous notion that I was going to catch the Yorkshire Ripper.”
Later this month sees the release of The Damned United, a film adaptation of
Peace’s fictionalised bestseller about Brian Clough’s brief and turbulent
reign at Leeds United football club. Michael Sheen’s portrayal of the
acid-tongued manager and Jim Broadbent’s turn as Sam Longson, the Derby
chairman, are treats in store.
Peace had watched Clough’s inaugural game with Leeds when, aged seven, his
father took him to his first football match, a preseason friendly between
their local team, the lowly Huddersfield Town, and the champions of England.
“There are days I wish I’d never written the bleeding book,” he later
admitted. Clough’s family complained and the mid-fielder Johnny Giles
received an apology in court. “After the book, I couldn’t watch football for
a year,” Peace said.
August brings something completely different, when Peace publishes the second
crime novel in his trilogy about Toyko, his adoptive city. Like most of his
seven other acclaimed novels, this is personal. His home is in the east end
of the city, an area that was bombed heavily in 1945 and now stands upon
landfill comprised of heaped bodies. “You are always conscious of that,” he
said. “Or at least I am.”
He has a Japanese wife, who has not read any of his books, and two children.
To his dismay, George, his 11-year-old son, is a Manchester United fan who
mocks Peace’s hopes for his beloved Huddersfield Town – “In your dreams,
Dad.” Two years ago Peace said he could not see himself leaving Japan, but
lately he conceived the idea of “trying” to live in Yorkshire this summer
with his family “to see how they get on”. He has a “love-hate” relationship
with the county.
Engaging, modest and retaining his Yorkshire accent, Peace enjoys high regard
in Britain. In 2003 he was named as one of Granta magazine’s 20 best young
British novelists on the strength of his Red Riding quartet. He won the 2004
James Tait Black memorial prize for literature with GB84, a portrayal of the
miners’ strike. Through different viewpoints, the book follows flying
pickets to the doors of Chequers, on the picket line and into the pit
villages.
“It is hard to think of another writer who could capture that picture so
suggestively and so thrillingly,” wrote the Sunday Times reviewer. The focus
of GB84 was as much on the sinister agitators as on the NUM board chaired by
Arthur Scargill, for whom the author har-boured a soft spot.
According to Alex Clark, editor of Granta magazine, Peace is a one-off: “He’s
in a class of his own in terms of ambition. He’s trying to write these
alternative histories of events we know quite well in a challenging way. The
fact that he’s dealing with very English subjects from Japan is very
interesting.”
Peace writes about crime, but is not a crime writer. He is concerned with
human evil, such as murder and rape, committed by a person such as the
Ripper who is being investigated by people of dubious morals, such as
corrupt policemen. He has a strong sense of place and uses lyrical language,
aided by a quirk of repetition that some find infuriating. This sample from
Tokyo Year Zero gives a flavour: “I itch from blackheaded lice. I scratch.
Gari-gari. I get up from the low table. I itch. I scratch. Gari-gari.”
These tics seem part of what Peace admits is his obsessive personality: “I
have this thing with numerology, like when I begin a sentence with a
nine-letter word I have to follow with an eight-letter word, and so on.
Also, I can only send the manuscript to publishers on dates that add up to
nine. Ridiculous, really.” He walks around his room chanting his lines until
they sound right.
Tokyo Year Zero is set in the aftermath of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender to
General MacArthur. Against the backdrop of a shamed city seething with
gangs, racketeers and prostitutes, a detective is charged with solving the
murder of two unidentified young women.
His latest Tokyo novel touches on the war-time atrocities of the Japanese,
notably the medical experiments performed on prisoners. His research among
Soviet court transcripts became so painful he had to stop: “All the detail
of the live dissections, infecting prisoners with syphilis and forcing them
to have sex. It was endless.”
Peace was born in 1967 and was raised in Ossett, near Wakefield, where his
parents were primary school teachers. There was plenty to read at home,
ranging from his mother’s “religious” books to his father’s library of
fiction: “We had the Penguin Classics as well as things like Raymond
Chandler and Ernest Hemingway, and local writers such as John Braine, Alan
Sillitoe and Stan Barstow [who lived in Ossett].” He spent as little time as
possible at Batley grammar school, diverted by mischief and comic books: “I
would have wanted to be a comic-book writer if I could draw.”
He bought Das Kapital when he was about 12, “though I didn’t read much of it”,
and subscribed to Soviet Weekly and Peace News. Clubs and drinking had more
appeal: “I was the kind of person who was beaten up a lot. Usually it was
brought on by the fact that I’d insist on having the last word on any
subject.”
In the musical thrall of the Sisters of Mercy, at about 13 he joined a band,
yelling his own lyrics in pubs and at gigs supporting the miners. Peace’s
father was branded “Red Basil” in the local press for giving harvest
festival donations to striking miners’ families rather than to needy
pensioners. “[The Ripper] dominated the conversation. A lot of the time you
were really sick of it; you just wished it would go away.” On the day
Sutcliffe was arrested and charged in 1981, Peace bunked off school to
witness the scene outside Dewsbury magistrates’ court, although he denied
that he joined in the mob’s baying. After “a bit of messing about”, he ended
up at Manchester Polytechnic in 1987, but left the following year to attempt
the great British novel, roundly rejected by every publisher in the Writers’
and Artists’ Yearbook. “At the time I thought I was the William Burroughs of
Manchester. Looking back, it was pretentious rubbish.”
He found Manchester “a very unpleasant” place to live. Lonely and unemployed,
he was “sick and tired” not just of the northwest but of “sitting around on
the dole, drinking, spending afternoons asleep in cinemas”. Hearing of a job
teaching English in Istanbul, he took off. Two years later, in an attempt to
clear his debts, he moved to Japan, where he discovered that he could save a
lot by restricting his expenditure to lavatory paper, bananas and
cigarettes. “You can go a long way with them.”
By 1994 he was teaching in Tokyo, where a secondhand bookshop stocked with
crime fiction fuelled his interest in the genre. Inspired by James Ellroy’s
LA Quartet, he wrote the first of the Red Riding novels in a notebook at
night. His main resource was a large research library, where he collected
microfiches of British newspapers. He also had his own memories to fall back
on: it helped that he had Yorkshire “as was, not as is” in his head. A
terse, truncated style of writing seemed to serve his purpose best: “I just
wanted to cut to the chase and keep it tight. I don’t like a lot of
descriptions of what the tree looked like across the road.”
Thanks to his father’s persistence, Serpent’s Tail, a small, maverick
publisher, released 1974, Peace’s first novel, in 1999, followed by its
successors, 1977, 1980 and 1983. Their success enabled him to write
full-time. Another four books are steadily accumulating in files. Their
subjects range from the plot to overthrow Harold Wilson and the rise of
Thatcherism to another stab at the Ripper story – less about the murderer,
“more about the harrowing of the north”.
There is also a planned book on Geoffrey Boycott, the greatest living
Yorkshireman. Peace admires “the sheer bloody-mindedness and determination”
of the former England cricketer. At the risk of alerting Boycott’s lawyers,
Peace revealed he was intrigued by the friendship between Boycott and
Clough.
Writing books has been a vehicle to maturity, he has said. His relish for
violence – dubbed “Dewsbury noir” – has become distaste, even if readers are
not spared the details. Fatherhood also seems to have mellowed him. Perhaps
it’s a case of Peace in our time.
