Whilst David Peace has been an acclaimed writer of crime fiction for over a decade, featuring in Granta’s list of 20 best young British novelists for 2003, 2009 was the year that his work really came to the attention of a wider audience due to high profile adaptations of his works for both television and film.

In March of that year Channel 4 began screening its “Red Riding Trilogy”, based upon Peace’s quartet of bleak novels set in Yorkshire between the mid 1970s and early 1980s.

At the end of that same month, the film version of his novel The Damned United, starring Michael Sheen as charismatic football manager Brian Clough, was released. The upsurge of interest in his books that this created makes this an appropriate point to review his career and the reputation he has built up through the 8 novels he has had published to date.

David Peace was born in 1967 in the market town of Ossett, near Wakefield, in West Yorkshire – a birthplace he shares with of one of his influences as an author Stan Barstow.

Although he has written all of his novels whilst living overseas, all bar two of his books are set in Yorkshire and, although he clearly has feelings towards the area that can at best be described as ambivalent, the county has had a strong influence upon his writing.

Peace, whose parents were both school teachers, attended Batley Grammar School and then moved on to Manchester Polytechnic.

After finishing his degree, Peace was unemployed for two years during which time he wrote what he has later described as the “great Manchester student novel”.

However, apparently this was rejected by every publisher in The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook that he sent it to – with some even telling him never to send them anything again!

In a 2008 interview in The Guardian, Peace says with typically self-deprecating humour “At the time, I thought I was the William Burroughs of Manchester; looking back, it was pretentious rubbish”. In 1991 Peace moved to Istanbul to teach English, choosing it as a destination as he didn’t require any qualifications to teach.

Subsequently, he moved to Tokyo in 1994, not returning to the UK until 2009 by which time he had two children with his Japanese wife.

Nineteen Seventy Four, Peace’s debut novel and the first instalment of what was to become the Red Riding Quartet, was published in 1999.

As the novel opens, its protagonist Eddie Dunford has recently moved back to Yorkshire to take up a position as North of England Crime Correspondent with the Yorkshire Evening Post and when a child, Claire Kemplay, goes missing, Dunford covers the story.

Soon his investigations unearth similarities with other missing child cases dating back to 1969. They also point to links with prominent local figures - architect John Dawson, councillor William Shaw and property developer Don Foster.

Although Dunford’s investigations draw the unwelcome attentions of the local police, who are shown as brutal and corrupt, he becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth – even renting a room in the Redbeck Motel to keep all the evidence he has safe.

The tension and intrigue build until the novel reaches a violent denouement at the Strafford club, the fallout from which sets in chain a series of events that are recounted in the subsequent novels in the quartet.

Nineteen Seventy Four, in common with the rest of the Red Riding Quartet, invites comparisons with the work of James Ellroy.

Both authors use short, staccato sentences to propel the narrative, both evoke an atmosphere of violence and corruption and interweave real historical events and characters into their fiction.

Even Dunford’s use of the Redbeck Motel is an homage to Lee Blanchard similarly setting up a base at the Red Arrow Motel in Ellroy’s 1987 novel The Black Dahlia.

Nevertheless, there are enough elements of the style of Nineteen Seventy Four that are distinctive to Peace’s work to make this an outstanding and original debut.

In common with the other novels in the quartet, Nineteen Seventy Four was first published in paperback by the Serpents Tail imprint. According to Peace, he received a fee of £500 for his debut novel which was given a first print run of 1,000 copies, 600 of which sold in the first year.

Consequently, copies are relatively scarce and, particularly following the airing of the TV series, you can expect to pay in excess of £50 for a copy in very good condition or better.