Who says no one is writing well about contemporary Britain? With the publication of Nineteen Eighty, David Peace has completed his ambitious sequence of novels about 1970s England, a "decade of crime and corruption". Nicola Upson talks to a writer, resident in Tokyo, who remains haunted by the murders that traumatised his childhood

When David Peace was ten, his sister would say her prayers out loud each night, begging God not to let the Yorkshire Ripper kill their mother. In the playground, he would sit around with his friends, wondering if the killer was somebody's dad. Every day, on the way back to Ossett from his school in Batley, the bus stopped at Dewsbury, where the kids would traipse into a Portakabin erected by the police, to be played the notorious Ripper tape (which proved to be a hoax). These days, when Peace gives an interview in Yorkshire, the journalist invariably matches him memory for memory, perhaps recalling an arrested neighbour, or a youth club stopped in its tracks as the police played the tape over the sound system. Everybody, it seems, has their own Ripper story to tell, their own recollections of that peculiarly explosive charge that hung over the north of England during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Yet few have told the story as compellingly as Peace himself in the Red Riding Quartet (published by Serpent's Tail), a fictionalised but uncompromising portrayal of a decade of crime and corruption in Yorkshire. When Nineteen Seventy Four appeared two years ago, it was a refreshingly gritty, passionate and original addition to the overstocked shelves of crime fiction. Its follow-up, Nineteen Seventy Seven, which delved deeper into the Ripper inquiry, was, in hindsight, a transition novel through which Peace strengthened his voice and experimented stylistically. Both books promised something special, and the latest volume, Nineteen Eighty, delivers it. More ambitious in scope than its predecessors, it is also more disciplined, an intense account of an investigation carried out amid mounting public anger as the Ripper kills for the 13th - and final - time.

Peace's evolution as a writer has, he says, run parallel to his changing ideas of what the novel can achieve. "At the end of the day, the first book is a fiction - in Yorkshire in 1974, there wasn't a person going around murdering children - and it's guilty of some of the things I've come to dislike about crime novels, because I don't think you have to make these things up any more. Fiction can illuminate a time and a place more clearly than fact, but novelists in this country tend to avoid writing about recent history. In America, be it Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe or Don DeLillo, it's a tradition to take real events and fictionalise them. We don't have that, although we do have people like Gordon Burn who write well about true crime."

That said, the concluding volume, Nineteen Eighty Three, which will be published next year, is different again, returning to some of the unresolved issues from Seventy Four and giving the quartet, as a whole, a sense of closure. "Having been so immersed in fact, it's been difficult to go back to crime fiction," Peace says. "It's something that leaves me a bit uncomfortable."

If this seems an improbable comment from a man who has been called the future of crime writing, Peace goes further, suggesting that he would rather "kill" the genre than transform it. "I didn't want Nineteen Eighty to be an Inspector Rebus or an Inspector Morse novel. I wanted it to be more than a collection of characters that could be adapted for television. For me, the Yorkshire Ripper says a lot about the place and the time that I grew up, and that was more important than writing 'a crime novel'."

To Peace, the Ripper's reign of terror represents a broader decay, a collapse of society that is manifest in the Yorkshire landscape, in the very language of the people. His plea for a braver type of fiction, crime or otherwise, can be as unflinching as the best of his prose: "When I look at the novel, there doesn't seem to be much debate about where we're going as a society. Crime happens in specific times and places for specific reasons: you have to ask, for example, why was Jamie Bulger taken from a shopping centre in Liverpool and not in Leeds? Why was Stephen Lawrence killed in south London? These things don't happen by chance. It wasn't the Cornwall Ripper, it was the Yorkshire Ripper; it happened here for a variety of very specific reasons that we don't want to look at any more."

These specifics of time and place are the backbone of Peace's fiction. In Nineteen Eighty, he describes Yorkshire's new decade as a "collision of the worst of times, the worst of hells", and the dark secrets and paranoia of the inquiry are set against a general backdrop of John Lennon's murder, the Maze hunger strikes and the poor performance of Leeds United. The detail is meticulous (while writing the books, Peace submerges himself in the period), the violence is necessarily graphic, but most powerful of all, perhaps, are the apparently innocent sentences expressing everyday despair: "In a cold and rotting cafe, in the shadow of an industrial estate, we drink cold and rotting tea to kill the time, lorry drivers eating the fish special, kids playing the slot machine." So Nineteen Eighty is no more a book about the Ripper himself than James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand is a book about the Kennedys.

Peace's writing centres on moral ambiguity, on essentially good characters capable of bad acts, or vice versa, and Nineteen Eighty's Peter Hunter - loosely based on John Stalker - is no exception. Like Ed Dunford, Bob Fraser and Jack Whitehead before him, Hunter is haunted by his past, both personal and collective; it's a theme that has sparked more comparisons with Ellroy, even though Peace's influences are much closer to home. "I grew up reading John Braine, Stan Barstow, Alan Sillitoe and David Storey - a whole generation of northern writers who couldn't be more out of fashion. They portray people trying to escape their roots, and all these angry young men influenced the voices I've tried to create, particularly in Seventy Four, where Ed was a conscious attempt to ape the style of A Room at the Top. People make mistakes in their past," he continues, adding, almost apologetically, that spiritual redemption is also a strong part of the equation. "Faced with the terrible brutality in these books - and again, this isn't a particularly popular idea at the moment - I strongly think you have to believe in God, that there's something better within us all and something worth saving that will triumph in the face of whatever you're put through."

Nineteen Eighty has biblical overtones, particularly in the powerful narrative that runs between each chapter, acting as snapshots of each individual assault and reflecting an unstoppable wave of blood. "There were many photographs of the scenes in newspapers and crime books," Peace explains. "Often, it would be a black and white scene of a winter park, and there'd be a heap covered by a raincoat on the grass. I knew we couldn't put photographs in the book, but I wanted some way to convey those pictures. I asked myself: if Francis Bacon had painted these crime scenes, what would it look like, and how would I write that?"

The result is a remarkable linguistic device that runs through the book like a twisted prayer, an amalgamation of statements from witnesses or survivors, police pathology reports and borrowings from Dante's Inferno - apt, because what Peace is describing is a journey into hell.

It is hardly surprising that such a raw account of home could be written only after Peace had distanced himself from Yorkshire and moved to a new life in Japan, with his wife and young family. He returns regularly, but he has no plans to stay, and his relationship with the county remains ambivalent. "I lived in a small town, and people move there because it's predominantly white, which gives you an insight into the mentality. I grew up being interested in punk music, so obviously I looked different, and I was subject to the random violence that stalks the streets of the north. I was never fond of it. One thing about living in Japan is that you meet a lot of expatriates who say they miss their HP Sauce. I've never thought that."

One day, Peace will write again about the Yorkshire Ripper in a more factual way, but his next project is the other major event that stands out from his childhood - the miners' strike, which, he thinks, has been forgotten. "When the strike finished, there was a wave of books about it and a lot of debate between right and left as to what it all meant - then nothing. I'd like to write a compulsive fiction that also told the history of the strike. It was a divisive, paranoid and difficult time for this country, and we still bear the scars of it. It's a book I feel very strongly about, but very daunted by as well."

Nineteen Eighty is published by Serpent's Tail (£10). Nicola Upson is the New Statesman's crime fiction critic

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