Nineteen Seventy-Seven was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2000. The Ripper is now active — women are being murdered across West Yorkshire — and the investigation is a catastrophe. Not because the police are stupid (though some are) but because the corruption revealed in Nineteen Seventy-Four has metastasized: officers with guilty secrets cannot afford a thorough investigation because it might expose their own crimes.
The novel follows two narrators: Bob Fraser, a detective sergeant who is compromised — alcoholic, violent, entangled with corrupt superiors — and Jack Whitehead, a journalist from the first novel who has descended further into self-destruction. Both men know more than they can safely reveal; both are trapped in a system that punishes truth-telling with death.
Peace’s Yorkshire is now fully realized as a landscape of total institutional failure: the police are criminals, the press is complicit, the political establishment is indifferent, and the women being murdered are dismissed as prostitutes whose deaths don’t merit the same urgency as “respectable” victims. The novel’s fury at this hierarchy of victimhood — the assumption that some women’s lives are worth less than others — gives it moral force beyond its crime-fiction structure.
Collecting Nineteen Seventy-Seven
First edition (Serpent’s Tail, London, 2000): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40