Steve Bruce: the football coach who moonlights as a crime author
God bless his cotton socks, there is just something lovably lame about football coach and general sports punchline Steve Bruce.
Perhaps I feel this warmly about him because I wasn’t one of the Geordie faithful who had to watch him field Jeff Hendrick, Ryan Fraser and a washed Andy Carroll week after week, but God help me, there’s something weirdly charming about how blithely terrible at his job he was.
This isn’t nostalgia talking either, I wasn’t there for his glory days as one of the best centre-backs in England. As a late-comer to football, all I knew of him was his mildly catastrophic managerial stints at Aston Villa and Newcastle United. Where he faced a mounting campaign of ire against him from some of the most loyal fanbases in English football with the same jocular blokiness that he’d probably negotiate a flat tyre on his son’s first car with.
It was a nice change of pace from the world of top-level football. One where the slightest misstep is met with howls of derision on social media at best and threats of physical violence to your infant offspring at worst. Absolutely nothing is that deep, it’s all just a bit of fun, and there were a few people who reminded us of that quite the way that Bruce did, in a way that made the neutral chuckle gamely at him, and anyone following his teams prolapse in sheer annoyance.
Yet still, there he was, reminding us that there were bigger things in life than football, and what’s more, the man practised what he preached. You see, football wasn’t the be-all, end-all of this man’s life. No, he was a man who didn’t just have interest outside of football (those are dime a dozen, just look at the way Arsenal forward Kai Havertz talks about donkeys), he had hidden talents. Talents that, shortly after his first management stint at Huddersfield Town began in 1999, he felt the need to share with the world.
You see, Steve Bruce fancied himself a novelist. Not only that, a crime novelist.
Did Steve Bruce really write a set of crime novels?!
It would appear so. At the very least, three novels were published in 1999 with his name on the (genuinely laughable) covers. Striker!, Sweeper! And Defender! are all works of Tommy Wiseau-esque anti-genius, the kind of works that mark Bruce out as one part Lee Child, one part Garth Marenghi. These were works that stretched Bruce’s creativity to the very limit. Focusing as they do on “Steve Barnes”, a football manager at “Leddersford Town” who had a celebrated playing career at “Mulcaster United”. Where does he get his ideas from?
The plots are, like Bruce himself, weirdly charming in how awful they are. Murdered players, snipers targeting football matches, Mossad agents, the gang really is all here. A more detailed breakdown of the books was written by the incomparable Seamas O’Reilly, so give that a look if you really must know the gory details. However, a spanner was thrown in the works in 2016 by Bruce’s own son Alex, when he claimed that the novels hadn’t actually been written by his father.
Rather, they’d been previously written, and all his dad did was agree to have their name put on them. Now, again, Alex would know these things, but from the start, this felt like a tough sell. These novels are a very special, very wonderful kind of bad. The kind of bad that isn’t a jobbing writer breezing through a mad-libs crime novel and offering it to a celebrity. It isn’t even the kind of bad you get from putting “write me a crime thriller starring a football manager” into ChatGPT. These books are a passion project. You don’t get stuff this wonderfully cringe without really, really meaning it.
Thankfully, Bruce himself cleared everything up the same year, saying that yes, they absolutely were his work. A surprisingly brave sentiment considering that his own son offered him a way out of this embarrassment, but, despite the fact that he wasn’t exactly proud of them, he took it on the chin. Would that all of us could own up to our embarrassments so easily.