Red or Dead was published by Faber and Faber in 2013. It is a 700-page novel about Bill Shankly’s years as manager of Liverpool Football Club (1959-1974) — the man who transformed a Second Division club into the dominant force in English football. But it is not biography in any conventional sense: Peace renders Shankly’s fifteen years through radical formal strategies that capture the essential nature of football management.
The prose is deliberately, aggressively repetitive: training sessions described in the same language week after week, team selections listed in the same order, match results recorded with the same minimal notation. The effect is not tedious but hypnotic — the reader experiences the obsessiveness, the attention to detail, the refusal to relax that characterized Shankly’s approach to his work. Football management is not drama (though it contains drama) but routine: the infinite repetition of preparation from which occasional transcendence emerges.
The novel is also political: Shankly was a socialist, and Peace connects his commitment to collective football (the team, not the individual) with his political beliefs. Liverpool FC under Shankly was an expression of working-class solidarity — the Kop as community, the club as collective enterprise. The title — “Red or Dead” — captures both Shankly’s commitment and Peace’s argument that his football was ideological.
Collecting Red or Dead
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2013): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25