Tim Booth: the paramedic behind Post-Mortem
I sat down with paramedic-turned-author Tim Booth recently, and he told me how his third book, Post-Mortem, came about. It wasn’t planned. He was going through unread books on his shelf, trying to pick his next read, and landed on a forensic pathologist’s memoir. He said his first thought was, I bet he’s got some amazing stories. His second thought was that he and the pathologist were really just standing at different points on the same production line: Tim is the one who turns up in the first twenty minutes, does what he can, packs up his gear, does the paperwork, and hands the person on. The pathologist is further down that line. And in between the two of them sits a whole workforce most of us never think about: morgue transporters, funeral directors, crime scene cleaners, combat medics.
That became the idea for Post-Mortem: about thirty professions that deal with death regularly, or semi-regularly, or as a defining part of the job, each one carrying stories nobody’s really asked them for. Tim’s point wasn’t really about death. It was about access. Someone has to be the person who turns up and asks the people who work in the shadows, as he put it, employed by institutions that generally don’t want them speaking out, to actually tell their stories.
It’s the same thing our Don’t Be Caught Dead podcast has always tried to do. And it’s the same thing I keep noticing in some of the best books coming out of the death space right now. Not grief memoirs, although those matter too, but books written by people who’ve worked inside death’s machinery and decided the rest of us are owed an honest account of how it actually works.
Bill Edgar: the Coffin Confessor
Bill Edgar is probably the clearest example of this. Before he became the Coffin Confessor, Bill was a private investigator, working a finance case for a client on his deathbed. That client asked him to do something no one else would: deliver a message after he died, uncensored, to the people who needed to hear it. That one job turned into a calling, then a business, then two books with Penguin, and then, during COVID, when death stopped being something people could avoid thinking about, it turned into something close to a global phenomenon. Bill told me he was getting thousands of emails during that period, from people who weren’t even close to death but suddenly wanted to think about what they needed to put in place.
What Bill does that most funeral-industry writing doesn’t is refuse the idea that everything has to be spoken about kindly once someone’s gone, that grievances just get buried with the body. His whole career runs on the opposite premise, that the truth is owed, however uncomfortable it is. He was clear with me that he investigates every claim before he’ll take a job on, because the stakes of getting it wrong are too high, and because, as he put it, it would be too easy to manipulate people at their most vulnerable. That comes from his own history, as someone who survived institutional abuse and knows exactly what it costs when the people meant to protect you don’t.
I don’t believe Bill and Tim have never met. Different books, different worlds. But they’re doing the same job with different tools. One turns up before death, one turns up after. Both are translating something the rest of us are shielded from into something we can actually understand.
Leah Kaminsky: the doctor who feared the thing she treated
Leah Kaminsky joined us on the podcast to talk about her book We’re All Going to Die, and she opened by telling me straight out what the book came from. She said she was a doctor terrified of death, and that she’d woken up one morning, well into her career, and realised it: that she was scared of the very thing she dealt with every day. She put it simply. It’s like being a pizza chef scared of his dough.
She told me the fear had been building for years before that morning arrived. One of the moments she pointed to was a home visit to an elderly patient of hers named Merv, who lived alone with a menagerie of stray animals and a duck that never liked her. She asked him, out of nowhere, whether he ever thought about dying. He told her, no, because if he did, he’d die a thousand deaths a day. She said that was part of what pushed her to think she needed to get her own house in order, not just for herself, but for her patients, because a doctor who can’t talk about dying isn’t much use to the people who need to.
She traced the fear further back too, to a Christmas night early in her career when she was the only junior doctor on a paediatric oncology ward, and a dying boy asked her if a procedure was going to hurt. She lied and told him no. She said that moment stayed with her, and that for years afterwards she’d find herself softening test results and handballing patients on to specialists rather than tell them the truth herself. She was honest with me about where a lot of that fear started: her mother survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and died by suicide when Leah was twenty-one. She said you don’t have to analyse that very hard to understand why death frightened her.
What’s different about Leah’s book next to Tim’s or Bill’s is where she’s writing from. She isn’t gathering other people’s stories from their perspective. She’s a doctor who spent years managing death professionally while being afraid of it privately, and the book is her working through that, in her own words, in public.
Richard Gosling: the funeral director whose wife told him to write it down
Then there’s Richard Gosling, whose book After the Worst Has Happened exists, by his own account, because his wife got sick of hearing his stories at the dinner table and told him to write them down instead. Richard left a safe job in the civil service to become a funeral director, and what he found is close to what Tim found, coming at it from the other direction: every family he sits with hands him a whole life in the space of an hour, and most of that, the funny stories, the contradictions, the things a person’s own family didn’t know about them, would otherwise never be recorded anywhere.
Richard said: sitting with a grieving family is like walking through a museum, a new exhibit every day, and thinking there’s a book in that person. Most people, he says, don’t get the chance to write theirs. He did, and in doing that he’s done the same thing Tim, Bill and Leah have each done in their own way: taken something that would have stayed a private moment between one professional and one family, and made it useful to the next family, or the next reader, who’s trying to feel less alone in it.
What connects them
None of these four set out to become death authors. A paramedic tired of the hero narrative. An ex-PI who fell into a moral calling. A GP who’d spent years hiding her own fear behind a stethoscope. A funeral director whose wife got sick of hearing about his day. What connects them isn’t genre, it’s proximity. Each of them spent enough time close to death that they built up a kind of fluency the rest of us possibly don’t have. And each of them decided that fluency was wasted if it stayed theirs alone.
That’s the same thread running through the Don’t Be Caught Dead podcast. Not death itself, but the people who’ve spent enough time near it to come back and tell us honestly what they saw: the funny parts, the hard parts, and the parts that are simply true.
