The Headboard Reviews

2009
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2012

 

Nineteen Eighty
David Peace

The third installment of Peace's Quartet spends a lot of time backtracking, trying to explain exactly what happened in the second part. I appreciated the attempt at clarification, even if the ending was a reversion to form that leaves us hanging from a cliff of ambiguity. Also helpful was bringing in an outsider with less of a tortured psyche to investigate all the "murder and lies, lies and murder." I was starting to think that everyone in Yorkshire was evil or insane (or both), and finding the place itself a bit claustrophobic (the "small world" syndrome of most paranoid fiction). Stylistically, the tightening circles of repetition reinforce these feelings, alerting us that Peter Hunter is caught in a trap before he himself is aware of the fact.

Nineteen Seventy-seven
David Peace

The second part of the Red Riding Quartet was the only one to be dropped from the film version (which was thus the Red Riding Trilogy), for what I think are obvious reasons. It is, for starters, easily the most muddled of the four. Peace's interiorized version of Ellroy's late style is often amplified by being broadcast from inside troubled minds, and here he gives a good example of just how confusing the results can be. The real Yorkshire Ripper murders, with names and details slightly changed, provide the backdrop, with two secondary characters from the first novel stepping forward and suffering spectacular mental breakdowns. Sex and violence are the drugs that keep it all going, but they can't hold it together. One can see, however, the larger structure of the quartet starting to take shape.

Nineteen Seventy-four
David Peace

Despite the time-stamped title, the first installment of the Red Riding Quartet doesn't feel like a true period piece. The background music is the main indicator that we're in the disco era. That said, this is a quick and bloody noir import that juggles all the traditional elements deftly, even if it doesn't sort them out very tidily. The nightmare quality, pace, and telegraphic prose (not as overdone as it would become in Peace's later work) go a long way toward redeeming what is an otherwise over-the-top plot that, in typical noir fashion, does more to test the hero's impressive physical resilience than his crime-solving prowess.

Death in the City of Light
David King

Some crime stories are harder to tell than others, but the case of Marcel Petiot has to be one of the hardest. Petiot was a psychopathic doctor in Nazi-occupied Paris who pretended to be a member of the French resistance or underground. People who came to him looking for help getting out of town (mostly Jews, but some gangsters as well) were robbed and murdered. After a circus trial, Petiot was duly sent to the guillotine, but just how many people he killed, when, and by what methods, is still unclear. Historian David King does his best to shed new light on this cold case, but much of the story remains a frustrating, and chilling, mystery.