Although PR people are frequently frustrated in their attempts to get
their golden words into print, two leading industry figures have recently
achieved fulfilment by publishing novels.
One comes from that seasoned writer of international thrillers, Biss
Lancaster chairman Graham Lancaster. Another from new talent Alison Love,
better known as PR and press manager for the National Children’s
Bureau.
The two novels, Lancaster’s Payback, and Love’s Mallingford could not be
more different. Payback is a hard-hitting thriller partly set in a
management consultancy called WMC (no relation to David Wynne-Morgan’s
firm of the same name). Mallingford on the other hand is a pastoral
romance set in a Sussex mansion during the 1920s.
While Love is described in the blurb as ’fresh as a spring garden’,
Lancaster possesses an ’Ian Fleming-ish exuberance of imagination’.
On closer reading, Payback also reveals some fine insights into
client/consultant relationships. One particularly nasty client constantly
bullies poor old consultant Tom Bates. The book portrays him exploding
’ferociously, wounding and bullying indiscriminately one minute, and
carried on the next as if nothing happened’.
Where, I wonder, could Lancaster possibly have found the inspiration for
this relationship?
