Nineteen Seventy-Four was published by Serpent’s Tail in 1999. It is the first volume of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet — four novels set in Yorkshire between 1974 and 1983, during the years of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, exploring the institutional corruption that allowed Peter Sutcliffe to kill thirteen women while the police pursued personal vendettas and covered their own crimes.
Eddie Dunford is a young crime reporter on the Yorkshire Post, assigned to cover the disappearance of a girl. His investigation reveals connections to previous disappearances, to property development schemes, and to a nexus of corrupt relationships between the police, local businessmen, and politicians. The deeper he digs, the more dangerous his position becomes — the corruption is not incidental but structural, built into the institutions that are supposed to provide justice.
Peace’s prose style is the novel’s most immediately striking feature: present-tense, staccato, repetitive, almost incantatory — the same phrases recurring like obsessive thoughts, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere from which neither the characters nor the reader can escape. The style renders the Yorkshire of the 1970s as a place of permanent dread: rain-soaked, economically devastated, morally rotting from the top down.
Collecting Nineteen Seventy-Four
First edition (Serpent’s Tail, London, 1999): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Peace’s debut — increasingly collectible as his reputation grows