It sort of looks like Howard Marks (Mr Nice Guy) can turn his hand to anything, drug dealing, writing autobiographies, guest starring on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and being really funny, and now he’s about to release his first fiction novel, Sympathy for the Devil.
Named after the Rolling Stones song, Sympathy for the Devil, which itself was based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margerita, it’s set to be released on 26th May (available from Play). Picking up on his life in the drugs underworld and tying it in with the mythology of the disappearance of Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards, Marks has put together a thriller that could be interesting.
The story follows Detective Catrin Price as she returns to Cardiff after 12 years away. However, when her ex-boyfriend Rhys, once a policeman but now a messed-up drug addict, is found dead on one of her first nights on patrol she is convinced that there is something suspicious about the death.
Unwilling to accept the fact that man that once save her life could have died of an overdose she refuses to let the situation lie. Thrown into the mix is the shadowy presence of a serial rapist and the mystery of a long-disappeared rock star to add to the thriller’s storyline.
However, it’s a big step from autobiographical tomes on your life in crime to the big leagues of writing novels, so it’ll be interesting to see how Howard Marks fares in Sympathy for the Devil.
