The history man

David Peace blends fact, fiction and speculation in books on Yorkshire murders, the miners' strike, Tokyo and Leeds Utd. For him, the novel is the perfect form to examine real life, reports Nicholas Wroe...

One of the most heartening features of the recently announced, Richard and Judy endorsed, Galaxy British Book Awards was the presence of David Peace on the shortlist for author of the year. Peace was named in Granta's 2003 list of the best young British writers and has gone on to build a reputation as an original new voice, but it was still a surprise to see him up against such writers as Ian McEwan (who won the prize), Doris Lessing, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Khaled Hosseini. First, Peace is usually - if potentially misleadingly - described as a crime writer. More interestingly, his work, with its ultra-terse dialogue, disturbing interior monologues and dark subject matter, would by most measures be regarded more as avant garde than daytime TV fare.

Peace is best known for an alternative contemporary history of Yorkshire. His Red Riding quartet, published from 1999 to 2002, covered the years 1974-83 and charted a region traumatised by the Yorkshire Ripper murders. GB84 (2004) focused on the impact of the miners' strike. But the book that has most caught the wider public's imagination is The Damned Utd (2006), Peace's tortured dispatches from inside the head of the late football manager Brian Clough, in the period that culminated in his ill-fated 44-day managership of Leeds United in 1974.

"I knew I was on to a good subject straight away," Peace says. "But the way it's taken off has surprised me a little, and its higher profile has brought its own problems." The film version, starring Michael Sheen and with a Peter Morgan screenplay, starts shooting in a few weeks, and tomorrow evening the book is the subject of The South Bank Show. Both Clough's family and former Leeds players have complained about their portrayal in the book, and midfielder Johnny Giles received an apology in court for any inference that he played a part in Clough's downfall.

The imaginative blending of fact, fiction and speculation has been a constant feature of Peace's work, and he is a diligent researcher. "I find things are very rarely black and white," he explains. "I read all the Clough biographies, but they all contradicted each other. People are not deliberately lying; it's just that so much is not clear-cut. In these circumstances, the novel is an obvious form to deal with the subject. I'm not saying everything in the book is literally true, because obviously I wasn't there and I wasn't inside his head. And literal truth in these matters, as those biographies prove, is a slippery thing. But it is a legitimate view of what might have happened, and I think it does illuminate reality while still being fiction."

Peace was born in Yorkshire in 1967 and grew up in Ossett, near Wakefield, where his parents were primary schoolteachers. Since 1994, however, he has lived in Tokyo - "it's probably helped that, for the most part, I have Yorkshire as was, not as is, in my head" - and the first book he bought in Japan instructively illustrated the potential of multiple viewpoints. "I didn't know too much about Tokyo before I arrived, but I had seen Kurosawa's film version of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Rashômon" and so bought the author's collected stories. But the one that really caught my eye was not "Rashômon"; it was called "In a Grove", which is essentially an account of a rape and murder told from six different and conflicting perspectives. It's stayed with me ever since."

Peace responded to this discovery in the same way that he had responded to all literary discoveries since he was a child. "When I come across a sentence or paragraph that impresses me, I write it out. I'm not sure if other writers do it, but I suspect they do and it's a dirty little secret. It is like practising five-finger exercises. I thought Cormac McCarthy's The Road was a fantastic piece of work. But the only way I could really understand how it was done was to write some of it out. Francis Bacon's Popes were copies of Velázquez. The first piece of writing I copied was from Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. But even before that, I had changed Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox into my own version called The Magic Fox."

There was plenty of reading at home when he was a child, ranging from the "religious books" that belonged to his mother to an ever-growing library of literary fiction owned by his father. "He read a lot in a self-educating way," Peace recalls. "So we had the Penguin Classics as well things like Raymond Chandler and Hemingway, and local writers such as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow." Barstow had a special significance, in that he lived in Ossett. "It was important to me that here was a writer living two streets away. I particularly like his novel Ask Me Tomorrow, which involves a landlady and ends with a murkily violent murder. It reminds me of a creepy Smiths song."

Peace attended Batley grammar school, then sixth-form college in Wakefield, but says he spent as little time as possible at school. He was more interested in DC and Marvel comics: "I definitely would have wanted to be a comic-book writer if I could draw." Literature was important to him as an adolescent - Burroughs and Ballard in particular - alongside music, politics and football. "When I was 13 or 14, I got into music, joined a band, and my writing became more about lyrics than prose." In his part of Yorkshire, post-punk meant goth and the Sisters of Mercy held sway. "It didn't seem right to go to football wearing a big black coat and backcombed hair, but it was a Leeds Service Crew hooligan, complete with Pringle jumper and wedge haircut, who first gave me a tape of Joy Division. And down at Wakefield Labour Club, young miners would be alongside some fairly extreme weirdos in being into the Fall. Things were surprisingly fluid between the tribes."

He had bought Das Kapital when he was about 12 - "though I didn't read much of it" - and subscribed to Soviet Weekly and Peace News. "But while people a little older than me were radicalised by the Clash, I was de-radicalised by the Sisters of Mercy, and became more interested in clubs and going out drinking. That said, by the time of the miners' strike, there was never any question of not supporting them, and my band played benefit gigs."

After "a bit of messing around", he ended up at Manchester poly in 1987, and began alternating periods of study and unemployment until 1992, during which time he attempted to write "The Great Novel - which was, quite rightly, rejected by every publisher in the UK. And these weren't just rejection letters: they were 'don't ever send us anything again' letters. At the time, I thought I was the William Burroughs of Manchester; looking back, it was pretentious rubbish."

In debt and depressed at the Manchester music scene's descent into violence, Peace left to teach English in Istanbul, the only place he didn't need any qualifications. "I worked all the time and still couldn't pay off what seemed huge debts. They were the only two years since the age of eight when I didn't write anything, so when a flatmate gave me a teaching contact in Tokyo, I moved there."

When he arrived, he knew no one and couldn't speak Japanese, so he gravitated towards second-hand English bookshops. "And along with the Akutagawa, I read a lot of crime. John Williams's book about noir writers, Into the Badlands, was my guide, and I discovered James Ellroy. His novel White Jazz was the Sex Pistols for me. It reinvented crime writing and I realised that, if you want to write the best crime book, then you have to write better than Ellroy." The books he liked best were either noirish crime, including British writers such as Derek Raymond and Ted Lewis, or by writers such as Braine, Sillitoe and Barstow. "And that meeting of the American crime tradition with a hard-edged northern working-class fiction was where I knew I wanted to write."

Taking the story of the Yorkshire Ripper as subject matter for his Red Riding quartet was the next step. "Millions of people were directly affected by the Ripper manhunt. It seems that nearly everyone in the north has a story about that time: their fathers being pulled over by the police, walking past murder sites on the way to school." While he says he wasn't baying, he was part of the mob outside Dewsbury Magistrates Court when Peter Sutcliffe appeared there after his arrest in 1981. He was also a witness to the miners' strike a few years later, "but when I came to write GB84, I realised just how much lip service I had paid to it all. I knew that people were losing their houses and so on, but I didn't really know what that meant. I met people whose lives had been ruined, and I do wonder whether it would happen now. Would people in productive pits, with good money and prospects, go on strike and lose their houses and savings for people they didn't know in unproductive pits? I doubt it, but you can't help but admire those who did."

He has been surprised at the lack of subsequent cultural response to the strike. "When we brought the book out on the 20th anniversary, we were concerned it would be lost in a welter of other books, but there weren't any. It seems that most people want to put it behind them."

Peace published his first book set in Japan last year. Tokyo Year Zero is the first part of a trilogy based on infamous crimes in war-devastated Tokyo in 1945. There were a lot of false starts with the Tokyo books, largely because recent Yorkshire history kept impinging on him. "The way it works is that I have these boxes full of research that get bigger and bigger and nearer to my desk. Tokyo was pushed out of the way by Brian Clough."

He has "at least" five books already planned for the future, on subjects ranging from the plot to overthrow Harold Wilson and the rise of Thatcherism to the Yorkshire and England cricketer Geoffrey Boycott, as well as a return to the Yorkshire Ripper story - "which is actually not really about him, but more about the general harrowing of the north".

Despite the scale of his literary ambitions, Peace is relaxed about being labelled a crime writer. "Ian Rankin has written a modern history of Edinburgh that has been a huge achievement and a fantastic body of work. If people are put off by him being called a crime writer, that is their loss. But, considering his sales, not many seem to be put off. I suppose I don't really have that great an imagination, and there is so much from the real world that I just don't understand. Some of that involves crime of whatever scale or form, and in that case I don't see the point of making something up. The novel seems the perfect form to examine what has happened in real life, the things that have deeply affected ordinary people and reflected the times they lived in."

The Damned United: The South Bank Show is on Sunday at 10.50