A Potentially Seminal Critical Analysis Of Ronnie O'Sullivan's Literary Debut

"When the game is murder, you can't afford to lose"

– the tagline to Framed by Ronnie O'Sullivan

Sportsmen don't have a great record when it comes to writing fiction. This is a reputation I haven't exactly helped since I became the world's leading expert on the literary career of Steve Bruce. That particular author's bizarre and turgid novels introduced me to the adventures of football manager Steve Barnes and, more broadly, the strange, fascinating, even worrying world of professional sportsmen's vanity literature. There followed a momentary surge in interest regarding Bruce's oeuvre, and I became both a respected literary critic and a fabulously wealthy man, resplendent with high status and clothed only in the garb of kings. Naturally enough I was being sent several recommendations of other sport stars' literary output, urged to pursue their folly in much the same vein, but it was only when alerted about the release of Ronnie O'Sullivan's first novel Framed that I decided to descend from my ivory tower and dip back into another's work. I should be clear, I use ivory tower here in the metaphorical sense, since my home within the newly built Steve Bruce Literary Archive is more accurately a 4,000 acre, chrome-plated, Jaguar-themed ashram filled with pie vans.

Framed is a crime thriller set in the seedy underbelly of mid-nineties Soho. It stars Frankie James – like Barnes, an author surrogate for O'Sullivan himself – a smart, capable guy from a colourful background, who is jostled from his day job running a snooker club so he can investigate a murder for which his hapless younger brother has been implicated. There follows a Martina Cole-scented parade of ne'er-do-wells with filthy tongues and charming names. We're talking names like Shank Wilson, Sea Breeze Strinati and, gloriously, family lawyer Kind Regards. Kind Regards is so called because Frankie's dad found the polite phrase with which he signed his name innately hilarious. One presumes the elder Mr James would have preferred his lawyer end all missives with "fuck off you silly cunt" smeared in human shit, like a normal person.

Amidst this teeming underworld of brothels, gambling dens and, yes, snooker clubs, Frankie must try to say one step ahead of gangland undesirables and the smelly old bill. It would be crass and presumptuous to glance toward the author having some greater knowledge of criminal life due to O'Sullivan's own family history, but there are shades of that within the text, not least in the story of Frankie's father, sent down early in the boy's life, leaving him to fend for himself among the waistcoats and felt of the old snooker hall he calls home.

Unless you count Waterstones stock-takes, Framed isn't likely to trouble any year's end lists, but it does have a fairly stirring plot and some memorable moments, such as any utterance of Frankie's exclamation of choice, "Hell's tits!", or the one that describes a vanquished hard man "slithering down the wall like a stain" or atmospheric nods like "the pink evening sky was darkening into blood." There is everywhere the faint aura of vintage Partridge, nowhere more so than when Frankie visits a Greek thug who has mistreated his deceased mother's flat.

The old bird would be turning in her grave if she could see it now. Or smell it. It reeked. And not of anything so traditional or tasty as moussaka or kleftico. More like the sour death stench of crack, hash and piss.

The choice to set it in the mid-nineties is also a slightly strange one – "everyone was into Blur and Oasis these days, but [Frankie] still reckoned the old tunes were the best" – and the trappings of the era are vaguely gestured toward, rather than buttressed by necessary plot points. Some of the attempts to remind the reader of the utterly irrelevant time period are even more heavy-handed, such as when the thought of his brother Jack going to prison prompts the following unlikely reference to The Shawshank Redemption:

"He'd hoped Jack and the old man might have ended up in the same prison. He'd pictured them together at meal times, or watching films in some echoing, flickering communal hall, or reading well-thumbed books in a dusty library – all fucking clichés of course, culled out of Shawshank, which he'd watched in the Odeon in Leicester Square only last year with Jack."

None of these period details ever pays off in any way, nor do they serve to ground the story in any real sense of place and time. One does so hate to be cynical, but when reading potboilers and page-turners set in the past, it does sometimes occur that a period setting is little more than a cheap alternative to dealing with plot holes that arise in the presence of mobile phones. It's a sad fact that, although the always-contactable world in which we live is great for accessing cat memes, or telling your MP to go fuck herself because you're sad about the new Ghostbusters movie, it's utter death for any suspenseful thriller, and winding the clock back to before mobiles exist is a fairly common trope for avoiding such complications. Suffice to say, no plot development throughout the entirety of this book disabuses me of this suspicion.

Without getting drawn into the book's ludicrous plot, which features drug dealers and prostitutes and a diverse cast of heavies, hard nuts and head cases, Framed also possesses one of the most admirably long-winded scenes of exposition I've ever encountered, featuring a bravura two-or-three-chapter-length sequence in which the actual killer describes every single aspect of his plan in near forensic detail, ending with a gory denouement that perhaps outstays its welcome by half a dozen pages or so. Having said that, I've read less authentic crime thrillers and some of the interplay between the characters is actually done with a bit of heart and, dare I say it, panache. There is a wit and verve to Frankie's character that's just a shade above the lowest common denominator, and the depictions of his brother Jack as a queasily aimless stooge can be genuinely well drafted. Basically, if you're looking for the sort of laughable nonsense that Steve Bruce so reliably served up, you'll be disappointed. In its place you get a fairly straight-laced and accomplished airport page-turner, with a leaden plot and as few references to snooker as Ronnie's publishers could limit him to.

Speaking of which, some of those scant few snooker mentions contain fairly delicious references to the man himself, peaking with the following passage:

"[They] were discussing the local lad, The Rocket, and whether he might win the Masters for a second time. Hmm. Maybe there might be a way to lure him back here for an exhibition match."

Framed isn't quite the comically bad over-reach you might expect from a first time author/professional snooker player. Or if it is, it's more like the kind of over-reach that happens when a snooker player uses a rest to get at an awkward ball, despite the fact that even a cursory regard for sporting ethics should render any such additional props cheating. No, in the end, Framed's worst offence might be its rote premise and perfunctory execution, but neither crime stops it from racking up a few thrills.

@shockproofbeats