Serializing Evil: David Peace and the Formulae of Crime Fiction

Abstract

In discussing David Peace’s fiction, this chapter will focus on the persistence of the formulaic nature of the crime genre coexisting with repeated attempts at reversing a ‘grammar’ (Eco 1969, 123–62) that readers have learned to understand as fixed. Peace writes principally crime series, from the so-called Red Riding Quartet to the still incomplete Tokyo Trilogy, and we know that they do demand — as subgeneric manifestations of crime fiction in general — a defined set of paradigms and formulae, whose stability is reinforced by the popularity of crime television series today (Jermyn 2007, 19–48, 109–40). It is my position that Peace keeps within an identified and identifiable narrative field, but meaningfully rejects the stability of the central character, who normally survives many adventures and therefore functions as the basic device connecting the series (Ascari 1998, 146). More specifically, Peace reverses the usual formula, denying survival to his protagonist and choosing a different, more complex articulation of the plot. He identifies the central character at the beginning of the story, misleadingly presenting him as the plot’s hub;¹ however, by the end of the novel, the protagonist has been removed — killed, imprisoned or condemned to madness — and, as the series goes on, is replaced by another protagonist, temporarily leading the action but bound to succumb at the end of the new story. Peace thus produces what might be called a fractal geography of evil,² in a narrative that appears troubled to the end by a series of unresolved dichotomies, most of them articulated around the inefficiency of the symbolic body of the state in its task of looking after the actual bodies of the citizens.