No Future and Spectrality in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

This chapter explores the radical potential of crime fiction as social commentary in relation to the work of David Peace, and his Red Riding Quartet, a series of four crime or ‘noir’ novels set in Yorkshire between the early 1970s and early 1980s. Using the frameworks of punk and spectrality as interpretative keys for expanding the scope of the tetralogy, this contribution focuses on a larger set of political concerns that can be associated with Peace’s work. According to this reading, beyond the immediate locality of Yorkshire, the British novelist is able to render a European sense of ‘no future’—a politicized but undoubtedly bleak vision—which characterized the late Cold War period and whose traces can be located in our own present.