What does a person do when they find they have become a successful consumer brand? Assuming you embrace this appalling fate, you’ll want to put your name to a memoir; you might even write it yourself. Then, depending on your field, there are options for clothes, sports kit maybe … perhaps a perfume? Some kitchen equipment? Umm … would a novel be pushing it?
I’m not sure whether it’s because publishers like to sign their authors for more than one book, and a second memoir doesn’t always make the tills sing,but more and more famous names seem to be going in for a spot of novelising. Everyone from Dawn French to Alan Titchmarsh, in fact, have successfully launched careers in prose fiction. Even the Kardashian sisters had a go in 2011, with Dollhouse, a novel about “a glamorous, high-profile, and complicated family which, at the center of their universe, is one with a huge heart and a lot of love”. I think you could write a reliable review of that one without having to pick it up.
In the broad field of people famous for other things who have written respectable-to-good fiction, you could list: Dirk Bogarde, Ethan Hawke, Molly Ringwald and James Franco. And a great deal of comedians: Alexei Sayle, David Baddiel, Robert Newman, Julian Clary, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie have all dabbled. Charlie Higson counts, too, because although he began writing fiction before he became famous in BBC’s The Fast Show, he was previously a minor-league rock star. Quite a lot of these novels were pretty good, too.
The latest to dabble in fiction is Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan. The justly revered snooker champion, who has five world titles to his name, has racked up two autobiographies, a decade apart. The most recent, 2014’s Running, revealed some fairly harrowing personal information, including details of his father’s conviction for murder when Ronnie was a boy.
Whether that amounts to a good grounding for crime fiction, I don’t know. But it’s going to be his next move, we learned this week. O’Sullivan’s next novel will be set in the “dog-eat-dog underworld of 1980s Soho”, the context in which his father ran a string of sex shops. Your heart may sink when you hear that it’s called Framed – but a bad snookering pun doesn’t guarantee it will be bad.
When considering sportspersons-turned-authors, one immediately thinks of Dick Francis. Before writing, Francis had a successful career in horse racing, becoming champion jockey in 1954. A publisher commissioned his memoirs, and offered Francis a ghost writer, which he spurned. The resulting 1957 autobiography, The Sport of Queens, was a mere curtain-raiser to a 40-book career in fiction. Francis more or less invented his own genre – the horse-racing thriller – and the resulting books were generic but very effective, winning admirers including Philip Larkin.
You could stretch the point and claim that Samuel Beckett was also a sports star turned novelist, since he found his way into the Wisden cricketing annals playing for Trinity College Dublin’s team long before he started publishing fiction. Disappointingly, he racked up some modest scores; ducks would have been better tuned to his later aesthetic.
Famous folk having a shot at writing fiction isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but it is not necessarily good, either. West End and Broadway theatres have in the last couple of decades learned that an eye-catching name is good box office, and they have been helped by the kudos that stage success brings in Hollywood. This is all tolerable, and some stars turn out to be very good actors. But some aren’t, and casting Joe or Jolene Stardust leaves some stage actors in the real-life Cinderella role.
The same goes for books. If the publishers’ budgets are being sunk into luring already-prominent names, there will inevitably be a horde of brilliant unknowns, tapping away at their keyboards, forever unheard.
