PR man Carroll writes first novel

PAUL Carroll, the public relations executive who sold his Communique agency 11 years ago, has written his first book.

A Matter of Life and Death, a novel about an undertaker who comes up with new ways of selling funerals, tackles various subjects including celebrity and changing attitudes to faith and mourning.

Mr Carroll said it is based on his experiences running the the Co-operative Funeral Service PR account in the 1990s.

“I had always had an ambition to write a book and it was just a case of finding time to do it. Last year I thought ‘I’m going to nail this’,” he said.

“I sat down and thought I want to write a novel – the one thing the world does not need is another ‘How To Do PR’. I had literary pretensions, but thought ‘what am I going to write about?’ So I followed the old adage and wrote about what I knew.”

He took inspiration from the work Communique carried out for the Co-op which included a funeral music Top 10 – a list of the most popular tunes played at services. He says it reflected a change in public attitudes as people started to spurn hymns in favour of pop songs.

“Of course we had Diana when the nation went from stiff upper lip to a celebration of life. It’s got to the point now when everyone gets a reality TV send off.”

The protagonist of the novel, Farren Mortimer, takes these ideas to new extremes – including a pop video of the deceased’s life – and is eventually made the ‘bereavement czar’ by the government before he starts to, “question his own conscience about what he’s unleashed on the public”.

The book is available online and in paperback. It will be officially launched on November 1 at the Richard Goodall Gallery, High Street, Manchester.

Mr Carroll set up Manchester-based Communique in 1986 and sold it to Burson Marsteller in May 2001. He left the business three years later to launch the PR consultancy Zuma 011.