A Brand To Die For by Alex Pearl

by | Jan 10, 2023 | Author | 0 comments

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Alex Pearl, a retired advertising copywriter turned indie author living in NW London. I have published three novels, a short story that was included in a published anthology, and a large compilation of 100 author interviews conducted during Covid 19.

How you might ask, did I come to start writing novels? It’s a good question and one that isn’t so easy to answer. It certainly wasn’t something I had actually planned. It all started as a kind of way of relieving boredom when, in 2010, my working partner with whom I had worked for over 30 years announced that he was retiring from advertising to become an artist. Following his departure, the agency announced a massive global merger with one of America’s oldest advertising agencies FCB. And it was from this point onwards that the boredom began to set in for the simple reason that all work had dried up and the creative department was left twiddling its thumbs. Mergers, I ought to add here, are rarely good things to happen in the world of advertising – particularly when they are very large-scale mergers. And this was a ginormous global merger. Such things strike terror into the hearts of large clients who obviously worry about the culture of the agency they deal with changing out of all recognition; not to mention the changing of personnel; potential client conflicts with newly acquired business; and the general uncertainty that these things inevitably throw up. For all these reasons, all clients suspended their marketing activities, while some jumped ship altogether. And while the merger slowly progressed and would take the best part of a year to complete, work steadily ground to a halt. So it was against this background that I decided to keep myself busy by writing a story for my two young children. The story began to develop both on paper and in my brain and by the time the agency finally made the creative department redundant, the only possessions I had to remove from my office was a battered Collins Dictionary, a portfolio of laminated press ads, and a completed manuscript entitled Sleeping with the Blackbirds – a modern-day urban fantasy. In 2011, the manuscript was transformed into a paperback, published by PenPress and was launched at Waterstones in Swiss Cottage, North London. 

Fast forward to 2023 and I have now published three novels, my latest being A Brand to Die For – a comic murder mystery set in the pre-digital advertising world of 1983. Here’s the blurb:

                                                                                                                                                                 It’s 1983. Margaret Thatcher has been waging war on the Argentinians in the Falkland Islands. The miners are about to wage war on Margaret Thatcher. And Angus Lovejoy, once sent down from Charterhouse for shagging the Chancellor’s daughter in the cricket pavilion, has now landed himself a job as a copywriter at London adland’s creative hot shop Gordon Deedes Rutter where he is teamed up with art director Brian Finkle whose neurotic Jewish parents are the bane of his life. The two are an unlikely duo, but their mischievous and sardonic take on the world makes them a brilliant creative team. Everything goes swimmingly until a bizarre and mysterious murder rocks the world of Gordon Deedes Rutter and ripples out into the national media.                                 While the dearth of evidence leaves the police baffled, Lovejoy and Finkle take it upon themselves to apply their creative brains to solve the mystery, and in so doing, inadvertently get themselves into particularly deep water.

As far as I can tell, the last murder mystery set in a London advertising agency was penned way back in 1933 by Dorothy L. Sayers. So I thought it was about time someone penned another one. And the idea of setting it in 1983 appealed to me for several reasons. Firstly, it was a time when the UK was arguably producing some of its most creative and memorable advertising campaigns. Furthermore, it was the age of the creative lunch that turned into supper; it was the pre-digital age when art directors would draw up their campaigns with markers, and copywriters would have creative secretaries to type up their scripts and copy; it was the age of extravagance and eye-watering production budgets. And it was an age that I experienced first-hand as a  junior copywriter at one of London’s creative agencies. As a result, I didn’t have to do any research to write the novel. Indeed, many of the stories in the first half of the book are based on real incidents and aren’t exaggerated. Names, of course, have been well and truly changed.     Several people who have read it have asked me about the TV advertising campaign dreamed up for the Solid Fuel Advisory Service by the book’s two protagonists Angus Lovejoy and Brian Finkle. In particular, they were keen to know if the campaign was one I had actually created myself. The answer is that while I did in fact work on the account and produce TV advertising for the client, the TV campaign created by Finkle and Lovejoy was something they dreamed up.                                                                      

If you’d like to know anything more about A Brand to Die For or any of my other books, including my 682-page compendium of 100 author interviews – 100 Ways to Write a Book, please do visit my website at http://booksbyalexpearl.weebly.com

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