Get real

Did you know that in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire there were death squads of heavily armed policemen whose job it was to assassinate anyone who got too close — be he witness, investigating officer, or informer — to unmasking their mysterious bosses’ sinister web of lies, deceit, corruption, betrayal, wife beating, torture and serial killing? No, I didn’t either.

Did you know that in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire there were death squads of heavily armed policemen whose job it was to assassinate anyone who got too close — be he witness, investigating officer, or informer — to unmasking their mysterious bosses’ sinister web of lies, deceit, corruption, betrayal, wife beating, torture and serial killing? No, I didn’t either. But such is the thesis behind David Peace’s quartet of ‘Yorkshire noir’ Red Riding crime novels, now adapted into a lovingly made trilogy on Channel 4. Recently, Peace — who makes a big deal of how utterly grounded in reality his books are, merging very carefully researched facts (e.g., the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry) with his fiction so that the two seamlessly intertwine — was asked whether he wasn’t exaggerating a bit. Read ‘anything by the late Paul Foot’, he recommended.

But you know what? Even if I were remotely tempted to read a single word of that tedious, conspiracy-theory-obsessed public-school leftie — sorry Ian! — I bet I still wouldn’t be persuaded that the murky world depicted in Yorkshire noir is remotely plausible or probable. It’s a literary conceit. A graphic-novel-like parallel universe in which everything’s that little bit nastier and weirder than in this one. Peace’s dishonesty in failing to acknowledge this — he bangs on about the moral integrity of his work, how essential it is to respect the real victims of crime and not in any way exploit violence for sensationalism or money — makes me distrust the whole enterprise.