Nineteen Eighty-Three: The Red Riding Quartet, Book Four (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) [ペーパーバック]

When a figure dominates a genre as James Ellroy does modern crime fiction, then it is inevitable that blurb writers suggest unnatural comparisons between authors and the master. Many have suffered. Ian Rankin is Scotland's Ellroy; and David Peace is Yorkshire's. While some writers suffer from the comparison, Peace does not.

His series of novels set in and around Leeds at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders is in my view the finest modern British series in crime fiction. Dark, desperate, highly stylised, moving, they engage with modern Britain - drawing on a number of topical themes: abuse; corruption; conspiracy.

This the final novel in the quartet revisits many of the threads initiated in 1974, but are presented in such a way that knowledge of the previous novels is not necessary.

The three principals here: BJ, a rent boy, Piggot, a corrupt solicitor, and Jobson, a corrupt policeman, are set in three different interlinking narratives. In demonstrating how his style has developed since his earlier work, here various devices are used effortlessly. Piggot's chapters are written in the second person, BJ refers to himself continually in the third person. The device differentiates the narrative threads, but also serves to demonstrate the distancing each character has from their story.

The characters are all too human, complex people with complex motivations. Violence is presented explictly, the consequences of actions explored (throughout the whole of the twenty five year span covered by the novel).

The subject matter - violent child murders and abuse - may be too much for some. The writing style may be too much for others. BUt make no mistake, David Peace is the most exciting and most important thing that has happened to crime fiction in the UK in a very long time.

Since publication in the UK Peace has been listed as one of the Best Young British NOvelists in Granta magazine. He is the only genre writer listed.

In this last book of the "Red Riding Quartet", we come back to three protagonist from the other three books. Maurice 'The Owl' Jobson is followed through his twenty five year corrupt career. Barry 'BJ' the rent boy of 1973 is a strange catalyst for the story who is always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jim Piggott is a solicitor whose usual clients are pimps and whores but is out to prove that Michael Myshkin did not murder the young girls and sew on swan wings.

The chapters swing between the previous three book years and 1969 and 1972. We learn of the brutality that Myshkin (his mate Jim Ashworth), BJ and Piggott suffered as children. We also learn about the 'taking of the North' by the new 'Yorkshire Constabulary'. When Leeds is merged into the regional police force, the Chief Constable decides that it's time to take over the porn trade and use it to make all 'us coppers' rich. What it does is to corrupt the police force beyond recognition even to those inside of it.

All three major characters have their own quirks so that the writing seems at times to be by different authors. BJ always speaks of himself as BJ (as in BJ in car, BJ running away), in a childlike manner. Both Piggott and Jobson tend to begin their chapters speaking in the first person and it's not always clear who is speaking until after a couple of pages. The book is written in a staccato method and sometimes in 'train of thought' or intertwined with lyrics or poems making it absorbing and confusing at the same time.

Rapped around all this is the "Yorkshire Ripper" and the stories of three ten year old girls who were kidnapped and later found dead with the wings of swans sewn onto their backs. Myshkin who is mentally slow, has been forced to confess that he took the young girls (though the real killer(s) are caught in the 1977 book). But when questioned by Piggott he says the police told him what to say but he knows who did it. He tells Piggott that 'the Wolf' did it (sure it wasn't Grandma or the Wood Man). [Red Riding Quartet - get it]

The Yorkshire Ripper was a real murderer who terrorized the area around Leeds in the late sixties and early seventies. In the books he knocks out his prey (usually prostitutes) with a ball-peen hammer and then stabs them with a phillips screwdriver. The cops use this MO to get rid of some woman in their pornography business who have become trouble. It becomes harder and harder to tell who the 'real villains' are when every cop seems to be "bent". For me the ending was to vague and 'mysterious' and I would have loved to have had a epilogue or author's note to help the 'noir challenged' like me. A superb quartet of books.

Zeb Kantrowitz

My favorite book of the series. It not only gives an ending to the story, but explains the history of the corruption of the Yorkshire Police Department.

This book is told through the POV of three different characters. Maurice 'the Owl' Jobson, one of the heads of the corruption. You see his conscious eat away at him in the present as well as how he got pulled into the cover-ups and money making at the very beginning. Solicitor John Piggot, who is handling the appeal of the person arrested for the child murders in 1974. When a new girl is abducted the person arrested in 1974 wants to prove his innocence. John learns some interesting things about his past through his investigation. The final narrator is Barry 'BJ' Anderson, rentboy, and the key that ties all the stories together.

Every character goes through their own personal Hells, and no one leaves the series unscathed.

I don't normally read 4 books in a row by the same author, but Peace has written a very good series, and I'm sad that there aren't any more to read. I will definitely be picking up Peace's other books.

A word about the BBC adaptations of the books. They are extremely different. I only saw the 1974 movie, but it was vastly different from the book. I read spoilers on the other two films on Wikipedia, and they are very different from the books. I want to see the films, but I highly doubt they will as good as the books.