Abstract
Shaw’s essay consider how the contemporary British author David Peace examines the destructive consequences of neoliberalism by situating his Red Riding Quartet (four novels set in the North of England between the late 1960s and 1983) as articulations of new formations of political and economic power. Shaw discusses the ways in which Peace’s novels are firmly situated in cartographically specific locations, yet also move beyond the confines of those locations to speak to a wider anxiety regarding developments in policing practices and a broader privileging of neoliberal economics. Peace’s novels pay close attention to the particularities of police brutality and to its real life occurrences in West Yorkshire—the “local hells” of the essay’s title—but Shaw traces the tensions that arise in his work when the state is bypassed in favour of private, deregulated interests. By exploring the complex intersections in Peace’s novels between crime, business and politics, Shaw shows us how particular acts of individualized violence only make sense as articulations of much larger political and economic processes—themselves linked to the deindustrialization of the North of England and the privatization of public life.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering thirteen women, and attempting to murder seven others, from 1975 to 1980 across the Yorkshire region. Dubbed by the press the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ in reference to nineteenth century London serial killer Jack the Ripper, Sutcliffe evaded police for five years, despite being brought in for questioning on nine occasions. His crimes and the failure of the police to apprehend him came to define both Yorkshire and the UK during this period.
- 2.
The ‘Moors Murders’ were committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965. The pair killed five children, some of whom were sexually assaulted, and disposed of some of their bodies on Saddleworth Moor, north of Manchester in the South Pennines. During the investigation police found photographs of Hindley posing on the Moors. Police hunting for the bodies of the missing children used these photographs as visual clues to the whereabouts of their victims’ graves.
- 3.
Yorkshire is famous as a site for the production of rhubarb. Force-grown in artificial darkness within heated cultivation sheds, the growing of rhubarb became such a big business that for a time part of the county was referred to as the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’.
- 4.
‘UK Decay’ is a reference to a UK post-punk band active between 1978-1983, but also functions as a critical metaphor for the state of the nation at this time.
- 5.
Asked whether he thinks the new West Yorkshire police force were actually like this, Peace replied, ‘Yes, or I wouldn’t have written the books in the way that I have. The cases of Stefan Kiszko, Judith Ward and Anthony Steel—all of which involved detectives from the Ripper Squad—offer nothing to contradict my fictions and even a cursory examination of the Ripper investigation itself reveals a monumental degree of failure on the part of senior detectives. Recent revelations (for money) in regard to killing kits only further prove that we do not know the whole story. The survivors and families of the victims, and the communities that were terrorised, still do not know the whole truth and that in itself is corrupt’ (Peace, “Big Issue”).
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Shaw, K. (2016). “Local Hells” and State Crimes: Place, Politics, and Deviance in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet. In: Pepper, A., Schmid, D. (eds) Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42573-7_4
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