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David Peace: Damned Utd author's next move INTERVIEW
After the Red Riding Trilogy and The Damned Utd, David Peace is the author who can't miss.
Grant Woodward caught up with the writer to find out his future plans.
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'It's not that I get up and think, 'What darkness am I going to write today?'," laughs David Peace, arguably Britain's least likely bestselling author. "It's just born of looking at particular times and places and wanting to know what happened and why it happened. As much to learn from it as anything else."
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For a creator of dark fiction populated by sick serial killers, corrupt coppers and paranoid anti-heroes, David Peace has a sunny dispostition completely out of kilter with his novels.
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He also has a habit of stumbling over his words, a semi-stutter that strikes you as surprising for a writer whose work radiates such self-assurance. Thankfully too there is no sense at all that he buys into his billing as the current star of the British book scene.
"No, I never think like that because that would be the end of me," he says in a broad West Yorkshire accent undimmed by more than a dozen
years spent living in Tokyo.
"I think you've got to keep your feet on the ground and when I lived in
Japan that was easier because no one knew who I was. It was a very anonymous existence, not that I get stopped very often in the street here, but it was just easier over there to get on with things.
"It's the nature of modern publishing for the author to become a brand but I've never ever wanted to be any kind of celebrity. All I ever wanted was to do was to write the books."
And he's quick to admit his surprise at how well those books have done.
"These are very dark books and they're written in a way that makes them difficult to read, they often have a vast cast of characters and rarely have neat and tidy conclusions," he says. "I'm obviously very humbled but yes, at the same time I'm also very surprised."
Despite his endearing modesty there is ample evidence to suggest the 43-year-old is one of the most successful authors of the age. Every single one of the eight books he has published so far either have been, or are in the process of being, turned into films or television dramas.
GB84 is being adapted for Channel Four by the same team being Red Riding. A Japanese company are on the verge of buying the option for Tokyo Year Zero, while Warner Brothers have the option on Occupied City, the second novel in his Japanese-set series.
Last year alone saw Channel Four screen his Red Riding trilogy (trimmed down from his original quartet of novels), while the big screen version of The Damned Utd, his reimagining of Brian Clough's ill-fated 44-day reign as manager of Leeds United, was a major hit.
But while Red Riding stayed true to the foreboding claustrophobia of the novels, The Damned Utd was a different animal altogether.
Originally it was going to be directed by Stephen Frears and was planned as a black and white-shot homage to This Sporting Life, which David cites as a huge influence on The Damned Utd.
"I thought that would be great," he says. "Then when Stephen Frears dropped out it changed the dynamic and it isn't quite the film that I imagined it would be.
"Personally I thought the film was more negative about Leeds than the book was, particularly about Don Revie at the end. I also thought it was a little too light in places. But you've got to be careful because you can sound like a churlish author.
"I was disappointed the first time I watched it but having seen it again with my 13-year-old son who hasn't read the book and loves it, as do his mates at school, I've decided it's time to stop being a grumpy old man about it. And I've certainly sold a lot more books on the back of it."
David moved back to Britain last year with his Japanese wife and their two children. They're living in Dewsbury so as to be close to his parents, who still live in Ossett where David was brought up.
He says returning to West Yorkshire has been something of a culture shock having spent so many years away.
"Obviously it takes some time to find your feet. I mean, I hadn't lived in the UK for 17 years. There have been a lot of changes, generally I would say for the better. Up until the last election, anyway.
"It's a difficult one to judge though because when I left Britain I was unemployed and up to my neck in debt. And then you come back and you're 42..."
And you're minted, I suggest.
"I wouldn't go that far," he laughs. "I've been very lucky but I think people imagine there's more money in books than there is. I don't want to cry the poor tale but for some people there might be a lot of money, whereas I have to keep working."
At the moment that means completing The Exorcists, the third and final book in his Tokyo-set series of novels. Once that's finished he's keen to get on with writing a book about Harold Wilson called UKDK, which will form part of a loosely-planned quartet with GB84, the book documenting a year of the miners' strike, The Damned Utd and a fourth book. Together they will chart life in Britain in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Given his astonishing run of success, David must surely feel pressure when he sits down to write these days?
"Yeah a bit, to be honest to with you," he says. "It's pressure from myself though more than anything. I've always been very hard on myself and it gets harder with every book.
"I've always said I'm going to stop after 12 novels, I've published eight and I'm writing my ninth. One reason I said that is because I want each novel to count and be the best book it can be. Basically I've got 12 books to get it right and after that who knows."
David has perfected the art of meshing fact with fiction. But doesn't he ever worry that he is guilty of taking liberties with history?
"Actually one thing I try not to do is take liberties with history," he insists. "With all the books I go back to the public records and any non-fiction books that have been written about the subjects.
"So with The Damned Utd I went through all the newspapers and books that had been written about it and those written by the players themselves. Then I just try to bring that to life.
"This always sounds like I'm trying to have my cake and eat it but I make no bones about the fact that it's a novel. I'm not saying this is what happened, I'm letting my imagination run with the facts. I would never stray into anything I knew was blatantly untrue.
"With The Damned Utd the last thing I wanted to do was to write that book to upset people. Johnny Giles was obviously upset but what bothered me more was that the Clough family were upset."
As for whether his future could see a move toward lighter subject matter and away from the darkness that pervades his work to date, he is not about to give any promises.
"I think that darkness comes from growing up in West Yorkshire in the 1970s and I know people say I give it a bad time and stuff but to me it was a dark time.
"You know, not just the Ripper, police corruption and miscarriages of justice but economically and politically. Certainly the first few books I wrote were an attempt to understand that time and place I grew up in.
"Using actual crimes and trying to understand why those crimes took place is a way to learn a lot about the society in which they occurred. You can't ignore the darker aspects of the past, often the only way you can ensure they don't happen again is to actually understand them."
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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