Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 102

America’s New International Role: Public Enemy

  It’s not usually what state visits are used for, but then the POTUS doesn’t go for usual. On his first presidential visit to the UK (primarily to open the so-called Fortress of Solitude, a bombproof embassy that has a moat) he’s announced no confidence in our PM and has instead nominated Boris Johnson, as […]

High Culture, Low Culture

….the recent talk of books and football brings us on to the next point several of you raised yesterday, viz, that you can read Proust and also read Viz. But conformity is pushed onto us in the world of books too. There’s a distinctly middle-class feel to many literary festivals (Cheltenham is probably the most […]

Reading A Book? You Loser!

  Reading VS Football Part 2. It was the game that had all English football fans dreaming, said the BBC, then the co-commentator Martin Keown launch a bizarre attack on book-lovers. The former Arsenal defender took umbrage at people who preferred to read rather than watch the England-Sweden quarter-final of the World Cup. ‘There might be someone […]

Going Where The Sun Shines Brightly…

…although I might as well stay in London, which has started to resemble the ending of ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’. It’s well worth watching that film again, BTW, it’s barely SF at all, more about the workings of old Fleet Street, because it was written by a newspaperman. I once met the film’s […]

Clerihews And Clues

Books are often dedicated to other writers. GK Chesteron’s strange novel about anarchist terrorism, ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’, is dedicated to EC Bentley, born in 1875. The pair had met as schoolboys at St Paul’s and became fast friends. Bentley went to Oxford, but left law studies to become a journalist, in which profession he […]

Books VS Football: An Outsiders’ View

Above the city you could hear the roar; I couldn’t help but hear England’s win against Colombia. There were crowds outside pubs and opposite me even the supposedly sophisticated cocktail bar had lugged a screen onto its terrace. It was as if the whole city was watching the football on this hot summer night. I wasn’t. […]

Six Strange Summer Reads

It’s the time of year when every newspaper gives us a list of summer reads, books selected – sometimes with the publishers’ collusion – to appeal to its particular demographic, so romances in Tuscan villas for the Sunday Times, and First World War exploits for the Telegraph. There are plenty of good reads around this […]

120 BPM

When it comes to films about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which had its beginnings over 35 years ago (yes, it’s been that long), it’s instructive to see how different countries have dealt with the subject. Hollywood gave us the execrably tasteful ‘Philadelphia’, which I always think of as ‘An Officer and a Gentleman 2’, independent US […]

Bryant & May Nominated For ‘Best Detective Duo’!

Well, this is nice. The lovely peeps at the Dead Good Reader Awards have nominated my detectogenarians Bryant & May for the Best Detective Duo Award, alongside Elly Griffiths for her characters Ruth Galloway and Harry Nelson, Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli and Isles, Sarah Hilary’s Marnie Rome and Noah Jake, Syd Moore’s Rosie Strange and Sam Stone, and P J Tracy’s Gino and Magozzi. […]

Caine’s Generation

I’ve just delivered the new Bryant & May novel, ‘The Lonely Hour’, along with my last new short story, specially written for crime editor Maxim Jacubowski’s possibly final collection, and before I go back into a new draft of my medieval epic I need to restock my brain, so I’m catching up with stuff I […]