“There’s so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand and we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes. The crime genre is the perfect tool to understand why crimes happen,” explained our special author guest this morning.
Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was David Peace, one of the most critically acclaimed mystery novelists in the world. He is the author of The Red Riding Quartet (about the Ripper murders in England), The Damned Utd (which was recently turned into a film), and Tokyo Year Zero. He was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best Young British Novelists and won the French Grand Prix de Roman Noir for Best Foreign Novel.
Press play on the embedded player below to listen. The show will be archived around the mediabistro.com network all morning.
He talked about adaptations of his novels and his new American release, Occupied City–a retelling of a mass murder in Japan. He also pondered his own place in the mystery genre. “I make no bones about it. To me the greatest mystery or crime writer of the last 25 years is James Ellroy. When I started out, his LA Quartet really raised the bar–in taking the history of Los Angeles and America and found a new purpose for the crime novel,” he explained.
Peace concluded: “White Jazz pushed the boundaries you could tell a story, the pace of telling stories … I’m always trying to write a book better than Mr. Ellroy. I’ve yet to do it. But that’s my hope.”