Serializing Evil: David Peace and the Formulae of Crime Fiction

Traditionally, in crime fiction, a series is grounded in the permanence of the protagonist that keeps being the same all through the different stories that are told by the author, possibly evolving over time, but always keeping identifiable and providing the series with its unifying element. It is not so with David Peace. Unversally considered as one of the most brilliant and unusual novelist in contemporary crime fiction, Peace is the author of two series: the so called Red Riding Quartet (set in Yorkshire, UK, and also adapted as a television series) and the Tokyo trilogy (not completed yet, with its third novel still on the way). In both series, Peace chooses to construct a web of interlaced stories where the protagonists are all different while the setting stays the same. In the Red Riding Quartet, this strategy seems even more sophisticated, in that the protagonist of each book ends by either dying or going crazy, to be replaced, in the next novel, by one of the secondary characters that suddenly switches to a primary role. By his own admission in several interviews, Peace is interested in portraying the many sides of evil. Consequently, this strategic and stylistic choice seems to suggest a very specific stance, an ethic of persuasion that any human being, in given circumstances, may become a criminal. Just like in Dickens, the story is always well documented and moulded by a sharp awareness of the historic conditions marking the context, be it a small city in Yorkshire, in Thatcher’s years, or the recently defeated Tokyo. The settings are normally overdetermined, and so are also the choices of the characters and their behaviours, that appear tightly, often compulsively oriented by strongly restraining circumstances.