Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14802 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

John Simm (Life on Mars) in Word Magazine, March 2006
'Powerful, intense, gritty'

`Peace's writing style is incredible, he has a brilliant, unique voice'

Synopsis
Second in the "Red Riding Quartet", this tale is set in Jubilee year. Its heroes, the half-decent copper Bof Fraser and the burnt-out hack Jack Whitehead are the only two who suspect that there is more than one killer at large among the Chapeltown whores.

From the Back Cover
1977: the year the two sevens clash; the year of punk; the year of the Yorkshire Ripper and the Silver Jubilee.

No more heroes in 1977, just an urban wasteland where bad men do bad things and get away with them again and again and again.

If you thought fiction couldn't get any darker than David Peace's extraordinary debut, Nineteen Seventy Four, then think again. Nineteen Seventy Seven, the second part of his Yorkshire Quartet is one long noir nightmare. Its heroes - the half-way decent copper Bob Fraser and the burnt-out hace Jack Whitehead - would be considered villains in most people's books. Fraser and Whitehead have one thing in common though, they're both desperate men dangerously in love with Chapeltown whores. And as the summer moves relentlessly towards the bonfires of Jubilee Night, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large.

Out of the horror of true crime David Peace has fashioned a work of terrible beauty. Like James Ellroy before him, he tells us the true and fearsome secret history of our times.

Customer Reviews

Ultimately disappointing
As they would probably say in Yorkshire, "what the bloody hell was all that about?" Having now read two of this author's books, I feel I have sussed his technique which is to use the vagueness of abstraction to disguise lack of plot and inconsistency of storyline.

Strip away the "clever" switching of character telling the first person narrative and the italicised prose and the dream sequences and you have left something that doesn't quite add up. Back to the Yorkshie vernacular and I would say that Mr Peace is "too clever for his own good".

What could be a very gripping, sexy, noir and grity novel is spoilt for me by some unnecessarily complicated literal trickery. I enjioyed 1974 but by the time I was half way through 1977 I got very tired of his technique. The ending was totally baffling and, I suspect, made abstract to compensate for the absence of plot.

Northern noir for those who like their meat very rare
West Yorkshire. Silver Jubilee. Yorkshire Ripper. A bent copper. Drunken journalist. Whore lovers. Corruption. Mutilation. HATE. HATE.

Not an easy read, and not a comfortable one, but an absolutely compulsive, rivetting psychological/procedural noir novel with a rock-solid grasp of location. Everyone else says it so I suppose I'll have to - Peace writes in a style similar to James Ellroy (the parts of the book narrated by Bob Fraser remind me in particular of Ellroy's Dave Klein in "White Jazz") and covers similar subject matter; but Peace has a distinct voice and a different agenda to Ellroy.

A superb and chilling novel. Unmissable.

Sensational Sequel
Nineteen Seventy Seven is the second in Peace's Yorkshire Quartet; four books that chronicle the secret history of Yorkshire from the Seventies to the Eighties. I'm a big fan of the first book, Nineteen Seventy Four and this sequel is even better. Set against the background of the Silver Jubilee, foul weather, punk and reggae sounds, this is the harrowing but engrossing tale of a journalist and a policeman who are sucked into the devastating spiral of despair caused by the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper. The prose and plotting are simply superb, the former verging on a kind of brutal but beautiful poetry. Quite simply Nineteen Seventy Seven is the best novel of any genre I've read since his last book. Bring on the next!