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From blood and corruption to Old Big 'Ead – and Boycott
Mark Branagan talks to writer David Peace about his future plans, after this year's screen versions of The Damned United and Red Riding.
To author David Peace, writing The Damned United was a break from the blood-soaked crime novels which have now been brought to television as Channel 4's Red Riding.
From the moment he started writing Nineteen Seventy Four in a school exercise book – initially for his own amusement – Peace knew he wanted to write 12 specific books.
One of them was to be about Geoff Boycott, but first Ossett-born Peace wanted to get inside the head of Old Big 'Ead himself, Brian Clough.
It was also a chance to break away – albeit briefly – from the murder, madness, and corruption themes of his Yorkshire Noir work, which started 10 years ago with Nineteen Seventy Four and culminated in his Thatcher vs Scargill opus GB-84.
In an era where detective fiction is increasingly measured by the depth of its research, Peace's debut was spun
almost entirely out of his own imagination, and rattled out in spartan prose influenced by LA Confidential and Black Dahlia writer James Ellroy.
"I just asked my mum to go to Ossett library and photocopy old copies of the Yorkshire Post. I think I went to the library once," he admits.
Even then he was more interested in the small ads – those promotions for food, drink and consumer products which recall the minutiae of 1970s' life – a technique he also used to bring his version of Clough to life.
Red Riding expanded to three more novels, Nineteen Seventy Seven, Nineteen Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty Three, which also fills in all the gaps and unanswered questions of the first book, except the fate of Yorkshire Post reporter Eddie Dunsford.
So did Peace do a JK Rowling and map out the novels in advance? Will Eddie rise from the dead in a future novel? "No. I'm not nearly that clever and I don't think Eddie is coming back.
"Two-thirds of the way through Nineteen Seventy Four I realised I wanted to write about The Ripper – his effect on the time and the place of Yorkshire.
"So I wanted to stretch it out. First it was going to be a trilogy – then a quartet ending with the miners' strike. Then I thought I could not do the strike justice in Nineteen Eighty Three.
"So I decided I wanted to go back to 1974 in the last book. In a way it was a kind of apology for Nineteen Seventy Four and all its Ellroy mannerisms."
By the time TV interest in Red Riding first surfaced five years ago, Peace was established as a crime writer – having written his pit strike social history GB-84 very much with an eye on the role of the security services and their alleged criminal servants.
A lucrative career in Yorkshire crime writing – Dalziel and Pascoe but less cosy? – beckoned. Instead, he chose Clough. To Peace, The Damned United was the real leap into the literary unknown.
He has since returned to the crime fold with his new series of thrillers – although they are set in Japan, where he now lives, and focus on the post-war period.
So what next? Peace had been aiming to return to Yorkshire Ripper territory with a novel based around the so-called "Geordie Connection".
But with the hoax taper now unmasked, Peace is becoming increasingly drawn to ideas which should ensure he is never pigeonholed over Red Riding – to post-Norman Conquest Yorkshire, the War of the Roses, and – don't forget – Geoff Boycott.
But there is unfinished business in Red Riding Yorkshire. Although Channel 4 commissioned four scripts they could only afford to make three films, leading to Nineteen Seventy Seven being dropped.
Now there is interest in making Nineteen Seventy Seven for the big screen. So is that likely to win him even more friends in West Yorkshire Police?
In fact, he says, he never intended the books to be a criticism of West Yorkshire or the police in general. The torture scenes were based on the alleged treatment of some of the Birmingham Six by West Midlands officers.
So just one thing bothers him when he comes back to Yorkshire. "A couple of people have approached me saying they worked for the police or were retired policemen.
"They said – 'Someone must have told you what was going on.' That's a bit worrying because I had made most of it up."
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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