“The journalistic licence of it all”: Crime, Fiction, and Journalism in David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy Four

Abstract

This paper analyzes David Peace’s novel Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), first part of his Red Riding Quartet, to revise how the author uses the dynamics and conceptions of journalism and noir fiction to problematize the concepts of truth and fiction within the genre, on the one hand, and to reflect on the notion of historical past in relation to the present, also subordinated to the crossings between truth and fiction, on the other. By constructing a detective that in this case is embodied by an ambitious journalist in the Yorkshire County of 1974 and exploiting his sordid narrative style, the novel demands comparisons between the contemporary context and the past he fictionalizes through the presence of real-life events. Taking meticulous advantage of the precepts and expectations of noir fiction, the novel leads to a conscientious reading that exacerbates the growing instability of the boundaries between the discourses of reality and fiction in the 21st century. This analysis focuses first on the characterization of the protagonist since the construction of a reporter as the detective and narrator of a noir novel emphasizes the thematization of journalism when seen in relation to the search for truth for profit. Then, it turns to the importance of the journalistic style of the narrator and protagonist, since the narrative characteristics of the text outline very peculiar ways of reading that lead to questioning hegemonic discourses.