ShortList is supported by you, our amazing readers. When you click through the links on our site and make a purchase we may earn a commission. Learn more

Snooker champion Ronnie O'Sullivan writing crime novel

It's 147 pages long (we imagine)

Snooker champion Ronnie O'Sullivan writing crime novel
07 July 2016

Having long deployed a snookering cannon to glittering effect, Ronnie O’Sullivan is now attempting a literary canon as well, with news he's penning a crime novel.

Set for release in November, Framed, published by Orion, is set in ‘the ‘dog-eat-dog world of 1980s Soho’ and focuses on a character called Frankie James - a young man with a lot on his shoulders, whose mother disappeared when he was 15 and father is still in jail for armed robbery.

If this sounds familiar that’s because it's loosely based on the five-time world snooker champion's own life story: both of O'Sullivan's parents served time in prison – his mother for tax evasion and his father for murder, leaving him to take care of his sister as a youth making his way in the game.

In the book, Frankie inherits a snooker club from ‘one of London's toughest gangsters’, bringing with it a ‘sordid world of bent coppers, ruthless mobsters and twisted killers'. 

Hot on the heels of the BBC’s glitzy eighties snooker championship biopic The Rat Pack, Ronnie's foray into literature also comes after Jack O’Connell’s critically acclaimed turn in The Nap, a production itself revolving around crime and snooker. And we've a hunch Frame won't be far off in tone either.

Big Break it isn’t.