Alex Pearl

Back in the distant mists of time, Alex spent three years at art college in Maidstone; a college that David Hockney once taught at and later described in a piece for The Sunday Times as the ‘most miserable’ episode of his life. Here, Alex was responsible for producing – among other things – the college’s first theatrical production in which the lead character accidentally caught fire. Following college, he found employment in the advertising industry as a copywriter. He has turned to writing fiction in the twilight years of his writing career.

His novella, Sleeping with the Blackbirds – a black, comic urban fantasy, was initially written for his children and published by Pen Press. It was long-listed by the Millennium Book Viral Awards 2018 and selected by the Indie Author Project in 2019 for distribution to public libraries across the US and Canada.

Alex’s debut thriller, The Chair Man is set in London following the terrorist attack in 2005. Self-published as an e-book, paperback and hardback, it was a Finalist in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards 2021.

His comic murder mystery, A Brand to Die For is set in the advertising world of 1983 and is, he thinks, only the second murder yarn ever to be staged in a London advertising agency; the first being Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers back in 1933. The sequel, One Man Down, has been taken up by Roundfire Books.

During the COVID epidemic, Alex conducted 100 author interviews in an attempt to delve into authors’ backgrounds, motivations and working methods. He self-published the interviews under the title 100 Ways to Write a Book, and all author proceeds go to PEN International.

In 2025, Alex and his brother David compiled, contributed to, and published an anthology of cricket writing entitled The Faintest of Tickles, in which novelists, journalists and those with a soft spot for the summer game contributed an eclectic collection of short stories, poetry, reminiscences, and history pieces. The Foreword was written by Daniel Norcross.

Later in 2025, Alex contributed a short story to an anthology of crime stories based on the titles of popular songs; Alex’s being My Father’s Gun by Elton John. The anthology is entitled Crime Songs and is published by Close to the Bone.

Alex’s claim to fame is that he is quite possibly the only person on this planet to have been inadvertently locked in a record shop on Christmas Eve.