I had heard about this a couple of months ago but now it’s out in the press …

Snooker champ Ronnie O’Sullivan pens ‘gritty’ crime novel

Published July 6, 2016 by Katherine Cowdrey

Snooker genius Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan is publishing a “grittily authentic” crime novel with Orion. 

O’Sullivan, 40, is a five-time world snooker champion and in May received an OBE at Buckingham Palace. He is also Eurosport’s global snooker ambassador.

His upcoming thriller, Framed, is set in the “dog-eat-dog underworld of 1980s Soho” and is about “a young man with a lot on his shoulders”, called Frankie James. 

Said to draw on O’Sullivan’s own compelling life story, the book tells the tale of James, whose parent aren’t around after his mother disappeared when he was 15 and his father is in jail for armed robbery. James owes rent on a snooker club in Soho he’d inherited to one of London’s toughest gangsters. Worse, he swore to his mother that he’d look after his younger, “wilder” brother, Jack. So when Jack goes to prison after turning up at the club early one morning with blood on his hands, Frankie must do all he can to help his brother avoid conviction: he needs to find out who framed Jack and why. The task will mean “entering the sordid world of bent coppers, ruthless mobsters and twisted killers he’s tried all his life to avoid getting sucked into”.

O’Sullivan’s own parents both went to prison – his father was convicted of the murder of a driver of the Kray twins’ brother Charlie, for which he was given a life sentence, and his mother went away for tax evasion – leaving him to take care of his younger sister.

The book will be O’Sullivan’s first crime novel, after publishing his autobiography, Running, with Orion in 2014. 

Framed is due to be published in hardback on 17th November, priced £16.99. 

Now I’m curious …