Shankly novel a tribute to repetition and dedication

David Peace's latest book, Red or Dead , may have "divided the critics", as he puts it, but the support of late Liverpool Football Club manager Bill Shankly's family and the people of Merseyside mean more to him than a provocative review. Named by Granta in 2003 as one of the best young British novelists, 46-year-old Peace shot to prominence with the Red Riding Quartet , which was followed by The Damned Utd and three thrillers set in post-war Japan that began with Tokyo Year Zero , published in 2007. Peace, who is now working on the final book in the trilogy, was raised in Ossett, West Yorkshire, and now lives with his wife and two children in Tokyo, where he spoke with Julian Ryall.
 

When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

When I was eight years old. My dad was a teacher, but he had this ambition to be a writer and used to come home every night and go up to the spare bedroom. Also, when I was growing up, Stan Barstow, who wrote A Kind of Loving, was living in Ossett, so this was a small town and there was this famous writer living just a couple of streets away from us.
 

How difficult was it to get started?

I was in a band, which fell apart, and went to Manchester Polytechnic. The main thing I had liked about being in a band was writing the lyrics, so I spent two years on the dole writing and in 1992 I sent the book to every publisher in the UK. It was rejected by every one of them. That was the lowest I've ever felt in terms of my writing. I went to Istanbul in 1992 for two years and that was the only time that I never wrote. When I came to Japan in 1994, I used to go to used bookshops but eventually ran out of books, so I decided to write the book I wanted to read. It's heavily influenced by American crime novels, but set in the environment that I grew up in, Yorkshire. I used to put in five hours before I went off to teach and then I'd come back in the evening and go through it again. My dad came out in 1995 and read what was to become 1974 and said I should send it to some publishers. Eventually, I got a fax back from Serpent's Tail and they offered me a contract for two books, but it was only for £1,500 (HK$18,500) for both. That was a bit of a shock. Through an agent we were able to talk them up to double that, and because that first book did reasonably well, they paid £15,000 for the next two. I later moved to Faber and eventually it was foreign book sales that allowed me to give up teaching - but that was not until nine years after the first book.
 

Do you have a daily routine?

It's always the same. I'm awake at 5am and never need an alarm clock. I take the train with my daughter to school and then I go to a tiny office and work from 8am to 5pm. I tend to answer e-mail from Japan first then I'll write or research for four or five hours, have lunch and then reply to the UK e-mail after that.
 

How many words on the page is a good day for you?

It depends if I'm researching or writing, but by the end of Red or Dead I was getting 10,000 words down a day, but that was because everything was in place, the structure and the research, so I just had to get it down.
 

Your writing style in has attracted a lot of attention; why is the book constructed like that?

I always insist that the style comes first. With Red or Dead, it was a novel, not a biography of Bill Shankly. He is someone I admire and I wanted to capture the sacrifice and the style of the man, everything he went through. I didn't write it for supporters of Liverpool, because they all know it off by heart anyway, but more for people outside Liverpool, outside football, and to show what he did for Liverpool. I also wrote it for my son and my daughter because the man and those times are such an antithesis to modern life, the quick fix, the sense of entitlement that people have now. There's no sacrifice or struggle today. The repetition is in there to underline the struggle he had to go through. It uses simple language; football is relentless like a river and I wanted to try to capture that river of repetition with short sentences, incremental change.
 

What has been the reaction to ?

It would be fair to say that it has divided the critics. But that's the nature of the book. It is in that style and is written about a man who was out of step with his time. But I do find criticism hard to take, and particularly today because the nature of criticism is getting worse. Even if someone doesn't like the book, I hope they would at least say that it was an attempt to do justice to the man. The reception on Merseyside has been great and Shankly's family have all been kind and generous; I've had their complete support and that has been very moving. The fact that ex-players have also come out and said they like the book has been like a magic shield to me.
 

And what comes next?

The third book in the Tokyo series. I've done quite a lot of it and I'm aiming to deliver the book next year and have it published in 2015.