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Nineteen Seventy Four: Red Riding Quartet (Unabridged)
 
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Nineteen Seventy Four: Red Riding Quartet (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

by David Peace (Author), Saul Reichlin (Narrator)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Audio Download
  • Listening Length: 10 hours and 16 minutes
  • Program Type: Audiobook
  • Version: Unabridged
  • Publisher: Audible Ltd
  • Audible Release Date: 29 Jun 2010
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B003QRVJYK
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)

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Product Description

*Please note this audiobook contains explicit language.

Jeanette Garland, missing Castleford, July 1969. Susan Ridyard, missing Rochdale, March 1972. Claire Kemplay, missing Morley, since yesterday. It's winter, 1974, Yorkshire, Christmas bombs, Lord Lucan on the run, the Bay City Rollers, and Eddie Dunford's got the job he wanted - crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Evening Post. He didn't know it was going to be a season in hell. A dead little girl with a swan's wings stitched into her back. A gypsy camp in a ring of fire. Corruption everywhere you look.

In Nineteen Seventy Four, David Peace brings passion and stylistic bravado to this terrifyingly intense journey into a secret history of sexual obsession and greed, and starts a highly acclaimed crime series that has redefined how the genre is approached.

David Peace (born 1967) is an English author. He was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in 2003 and won the 2004 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He is also known for his novels GB84 and The Damned United; the latter was made into a feature film starring Michael Sheen.

©2000 David Peace; (P)2010 Audible
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First Sentence
'All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,' smiled Gilman, like this was the best day of our lives: Friday 13 December 1974. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
50 of 50 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I like my crime black as night and completely fearless. 1974 delivers not only great crime, just the way I like it, but great literature. Peace has redefined the crime novel.( I've heard this said many times as a crime afficianado, but in this case it really is true) Generally in crime novels bad things happen in an (essentially) good place. Someone then sets out to make things right. In 1974, the whole world (Yorkshire) is bad and NOTHING can set it right. The truth has to be squeezed out (and I don't use this cliche lightly) like blood from a stone. In Peace's world, the facts are profoundly disturbing and the emotions surrounding them are worse. Morality is virtually non-existent and what there is brings about only brutal survival. This is indeed a Godless universe, and visiting it through these pages truly gives a glimpse of hell. Peace has to be admired for his courage and his unflinching gaze into the abyss. It is troubling to read, what was it like to WRITE. Just to see the author's name - PEACE - after having read this book reminds you how far from peace this time and place are (were).
1974 is the first book of the red riding quartet (1974,1977,1980,1983) and cannot truly be appreciated (good as it is) without finishing the quartet. While a liitle rougher, and not quite as tight as the following three books, 1974 has a raw urgency and ends(?) with a lot of unanswered questions. Questions that are answered, or rather confronted and dissected in the following three books. 1974 lights the fuse,and then the bombs start falling. Woe to the reader with a weak constitution. Once read, these books will NEVER be forgotten
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39 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When it comes to crime fiction, I like it bleak, nasty and nihilistic (makes my own problems seem less overwhelming somehow) but nothing could have prepared me for 'Nineteen Seventy Four' by David Peace. A bleaker, nastier and more nihilistic novel you'd be hard-pressed to find. This book is disturbing to the point of insanity, sickening to the point of physical nausea. Not just because of the harrowing plot and relentlessly graphic detail, either - but because somebody actually dreamed it up in the first place!
I know a work of art should stand alone, independent of its creator, and there's no doubt that 'Nineteen Seventy Four' does that. This is noir at its most brutal and thought-provoking. But I couldn't help wondering about its author. What kind of hard-boiled nutcase is David Peace, to come up with such a book - the closest thing to literary hell this side of James Ellroy's 'Silent Terror'? I guess there's always the chance he's a sweet-natured, peace-loving, vegetarian optimist... but I wouldn't stake my life on it.

'Nineteen Seventy Four' takes the reader on a frenetic and brutal trip through the corrupt underbelly of Yorkshire society in the mid-seventies. An era of dodgy music and TV, and even dodgier fashion- not to mention bent cops, drunks, freaks, desperados, and crimes so heinous they defy belief. Bang smack in the middle of it all is Eddie Dunford, a young but jaded crime journo assigned to background research on a series of gruesome murders, whilst his nemesis Jack Whitehead - Crime Reporter of the Year - basks in the headlining glory. Still grieving over his father's recent death, and plagued by a plethora of personal demons that are never fully explained, Eddie soon finds himself caught in a criminal conspiracy from which the only escape-route leads straight to the abyss.

The book's first-person perspective allows the reader intimate access to Eddie's consciousness, experiencing his slide from bitter and disillusioned, to downright despairing and hopeless. One could be forgiven for mistaking him for a bad guy - he's a violent, dirty, womanising bastard, and only qualifies as a hero of sorts because most of the other characters' kinks and perversions make his own seem mild in comparison. But his narration is compelling, confronting - and ultimately moving. At times Peace's prose style reaches a poetic kind of fever pitch, heightening our sense of Eddie's internal delirium, and creating surprising beauty amidst the ugliness and misery.

Cliched though it may sound, this book had me in a stranglehold from the first page - and still hasn't released me, weeks after finishing the damn thing! It's that powerful. Hopefully, writing this review will help get it out of my system...

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
You won't forget this one in a hurry.
Serpent's Tail consistently put out top class work, and this is no exception.
Bleak, dark, sickeningly violent, horribly believable, populated by characters who are for the most part doomed, it's never an easy ride. Finishing this book genuinely gave me the feeling of coming up for air, and ever since I have had the contradictory feelings of wishing I hadn't read it, but being glad I had. I will be reading other books in the quartet, but not too soon.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
intense, visceral, gritty, dark, unrelenting and unsettling
I've heard '1974' being described as like reading a scream. I know exactly where that's coming from. Read more
Published 23 days ago by Rob Kitchin
M1 to nowhere. 90mph. If I drive fast, maybe they won't notice I don't...
To be fair, this novel has a distinctive tone of voice - first person, regional and terse - which is a difficult thing to achieve in fiction. Read more
Published 1 month ago by M. R. Cox
1974
I "enjoyed" this dark mixture of fact and prose. There are similarities to James Elroy but the Britishness is well handled ( this opinion not based on 1st hand experience of... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Man from poundstretcher
Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
I originally read this quartet in the Spring of 2010. I'm not usually drawn towards reading crime fiction (my only previous experience being Agatha Christie a very long time ago)... Read more
Published 15 months ago by duarcain
Proof positive that it's grim up north
Like many my interest in David Pearce was peaked by The Damned Utd. As a Derby lad, born in 1969, I was keen to find out more about the Brian Clough that brought sudden greatness... Read more
Published 16 months ago by MadridPhil
As bad decisions go......
I watched the TV adaptation of these books and thoroughly enjoyed them (especially Sean Bean, and I normally avoid anything with him in it) so based on this, and the premise that a... Read more
Published 16 months ago by M. J. Nash
Sometimes brilliant, often brutal
The Yorkshire tourist board won't be conferring any awards on David Peace anytime soon. This is a blistering tour of piss streaked toilets, squalid hotel rooms, dodgy pubs and... Read more
Published on 31 Mar 2010 by Dario McGeachy
Dark, Northern Grit
It'd been a while since I'd read fiction. One of the last fictional works I'd read was James Ellroy's "American Tabloid". Read more
Published on 25 Mar 2010 by bloo_toon_red
Muddled and Confused
I disliked this book due to the ham-fisted attempt to convey the main characters disintigration and the way everybody seemed to walk round plot holes big enough to sink the titanic... Read more
Published on 21 Jan 2010 by moonmoth
Nineteen Seventy Four (Red Riding Quartet 1)
I watched the television program a few months ago and enjoyed it so much that I wanted to read the David Peace books. Read more
Published on 14 Jan 2010 by Brian G. D. Lynch
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