On Wednesday, December 28th at 7PM the Hard Word Book Club will take its first step on a dark journey that will last through an entire series, David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet.
It’s been a running joke that Peace borrowed from the LA Quartet, James Ellroy’s look at crooked cop, gangsters, and serial killers in The City Of Angels, and went darker. The series spans over a decade of corruption in ’70s and ’80s Yorkshire. The infamous “Ripper Murders” serve as a backdrop, but not the focus. There is something more evil going on in Northern England. The books, each titled with the year they take place, change in protagonist with characters that may appear in one chapter in an early book coming into a clearer, darker focus in later ones. The series becomes an epic yet intimate look at the nature of personal and social corruption and the dependence each has on the other.
We will be starting out with the first book, Nineteen Seventy-Four, for our December Hard Word. It kicks off the series when a a morally questionable, young reporter connects a child murder of the past to one missing before Christmas and unravels a conspiracy that is connected to Yorkshire’s future.
There will also be a screening of the film based on the book directed by Julian Jarrold, starring Andrew Garfield and Sean Bean. On March 28th we will be reading the second book, Nineteen Seventy-Seven.
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