Steve Bruce didn’t do particualrly well in his time as Huddersfield Town manager but he did, strangely enough, write a series of football themed novels during his time at Town. While the novels lack literary merit they are quite funny to read.
The original paperback copies of the novels have become collectors items and have been known to change hands for large sums of money. However, below is an audio version of Striker, Bruce’s first novel. Given that Huddersfield Town will face Steve Bruce’s West Brom tonight it seemed like a good time to share this intereting piece of footballing history.
The reading of the novel was produced by TalkSport a while ago and released as a podcast. The narration is pretty good, with the soft Geordie tones of Bruce well replicated and there are some funny asides thrown in by the narrator as he grapples with the text.
Listen to Striker by Steve Bruce
Click the play button above to listen to the novel (after the adverts have played). It may sound like it’s starting halfway through the story but it’s just a confusing start.
Some thoughts on Striker by Steve Bruce
This is not a good book but there are lots of interesting details to pluck from it. Firstly, it’s quite good fun to decode the fictionalised people and places in the story. Leddersfield is clearly meant to be Huddersfield and Steve Barnes is Bruce himself but I’ll not spoil it by giving any more details away.
The audio version runs to a few hours and I must confess that I’ve listened to the whole thing out of grim fascination. Was it time well spent? No, not really. The writing is so bad that it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on at times and the story makes no sense. Bruce is supposed to be investigating a murder and will get distracted for long passages where he describes his car instead.
The only thing I will say is that it’s impressive that Bruce managed to pen these novels alongside managing a football club. Maybe if he had spent a bit more time at the training ground and less hunched over his typewriter he might have acheived more in his time at Huddersfield.