‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and without getting into the detail of his argument, we can say that the impact of having read and admired others is always an issue for all but the most naive writers. And while Bloom’s attempts to ‘de-idealise our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another’ may seem a far cry from the workings of the current literary thriller, even a passing consideration of the influence of James Ellroy, master of LA noir, on his admirer David Peace quickly raises some interesting questions on how we perceive authorship, and authority, in contemporary fiction.
Peace, who has been called ‘the English Ellroy’, draws inspiration from his predecessor not only in his prose style but also in his method, which mixes historical investigation with the techniques of fiction, a modus operandi they publicly debated in 2010. In response to Peace’s question ‘Why do you write history as a novel and not as non-fiction?’ (something that he himself has often been asked), Ellroy answered:
Because I want to change things. If I don’t like something and the way it plays out, I don’t want to be beholden to the facts. And I want to tell the private stories. If you look back at what I call the private nightmare of public policy, then these fictions of mine are actually valid.
This risky approach is evident in Tokyo Redux, which revolves around the disappearance in July 1949 of the first president of Japanese National Railways (JNR), Sadanori Shimoyama, an unsolved mystery that has been the subject of several investigative articles, documentaries and even manga works, as well as an as-yet untranslated historical novel by Yasushi Inoue.
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