Brian Glanville has had a prolific career as a sportswriter, novelist, and short-story writer. English critics who prefer writers to remain in tidy categories consider it paradoxical that he has managed to combine careers as a sportswriter and a fiction writer. Readers in the United States--where Ernest Hemingway could write a nonfiction piece on fishing, Norman Mailer can examine the first moon landing, and Joyce Carol Oates can analyze boxing--find Glanville's writing in diverse genres less surprising. Critics have called Glanville a British Damon Runyan and consider his subject matter his principal contribution to the modern short story. He has made the previously unexamined world of the professional footballer (soccer player) a subject of serious fiction. But he has done more than write the standard sports books for male adolescents (although he has also done that); he has captured the speech cadences of working-class Britons, giving voice to...