Faber & Faber

Home

The Year of David Peace :

2009 is turning out to be an extraordinary year for novelist David Peace. His cult series of crime novels, the Red Riding Quartet (1973, 1977, 1980 and 1983), published by our friends at Serpent’s Tail, have been adapted into three stunning two-hour films on Channel Four.

The Damned Utd has been turned into a major film by Sony Pictures. It's the 25th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike, which David wrote so powerfully about in GB84, whose film rights have also been optioned. And the second novel in his Tokyo Trilogy, Occupied City, will be published in August.

Certainly, David Peace's media profile has never been higher. The front page of the Independent recently described Peace as ‘Britain’s hottest author.’ The Guardian Guide claimed Peace is ‘the slow-burning, word-of-mouth success story of British publishing. An ultra-dark, unashamedly literary crime writer, in the last 10 years Peace has produced a formidable body of work chronicling the ‘occult history’ of Northern England.’ Tim Adams in the Observer wrote that ‘on TV and on the big screen and in all good bookshops, Peace will certainly be with you.’ Even the Radio Times described his writing as ‘bleakly brilliant’. And the success of Channel 4’s Red Riding, described by some as British television’s 'The Wire moment', has certainly kick-started a re-examination and rediscovery of his work.

‘David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet of crime novels is not the sort of thing you would put forward for your book club,’ claimed Benji Wilson in The Times. ‘That’s not to say the novels, published between 1999 and 2002, are anything other than superlative literature, but those who have read them will confirm that the experience is something like a full-frontal sandblasting.’

And the reception and ratings for the TV series have been a triumph for Channel 4 in this period of turmoil for commercial broadcasters. As BBC1 have recently relied on the success of a very different literary adaptation in Lark Rise to Candleford, 4 have staked their reputation on these prestige dramas and it appears to have paid off.

March 27th sees the UK release of The Damned United, a film which has already generated a great deal of pre-release buzz. Frost/Nixon and The Queen star Michael Sheen plays troubled football manager Brian Clough in Peace’s acclaimed account of his turbulent forty-four day tenure as manager of ‘dirty’ Leeds United. The subject matter together with the clout of Sony Pictures have taken Peace’s book to places no literary novelist has ever been before: Playstation online, Burton menswear and the Carlsberg website.

By the time the second in Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy, Occupied City, has been published in August, he may have transcended the gulf between cult author and household name. Which is extraordinary for an author of such uncompromisingly high standards and critical acclaim. And at the other end of the spectrum, the first academic conference dedicated to his work will be held on the 3rd June at the University of Brighton, which suggests a future for his work both in the mainstream and as part of a literary canon to which he surely belongs.