Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 105

Neglected Films No.16: ‘It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World’

1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was not well received in England. It was just too…American for repressed UK critics who were okay with Elia Kazan movies but not Technicolor fare. Had they bothered to look beneath the surface they’d have found something a whole lot darker. The film was unashamedly populist. It […]

Coming Attractions

‘Sunday For Seven Days’ – that’s what it used to say on cinema trailers. I’m aiming to spread the work over a rather lengthier time frame. First up this year will be the paperback version of ‘The Book of Forgotten Authors’ in October, and I believe it’s going to contain some extra material that wasn’t […]

Is London Safe?

Last Sunday saw the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack at Borough Market, and Londoners turned out in force to celebrate life. We don’t do candles and prayers, we raise glasses instead and have a party. We’re used to dealing with disasters, and handle them with grace and even humour (who can forget the shot […]

A Walk Through…West London

Making sense of London’s boroughs and working out how they all fit together can sometimes be a challenge. The western part of central London always gets overlooked, partly because there’s no special reason to visit a mainly residential area, partly because of the bewildering roads and bridges that mark out the territories from Paddington to […]

Why Isn’t The Crime Novel Catching Up?

This piece stems from a compliment the author Katherine Stansfield paid to me last week. She said; ‘You manage to write crime novels without meanness.’ We grew up with unthinking sexism as the norm, often benign, sometimes pernicious. From the James Bond novels to the Carry On films we laughed as ugly men were surrounded […]

Blazing June Is Here: Let’s Have A Song!

This is a track from Andrew Lippa’s play ‘I Am Harvey Milk’, about the first openly gay official in California, who was gunned down by his nemesis, a Christian co-worker…it’s an exhortation to come out and defy legislation against the right to be a free human, and was performed one night with a superb recording […]

A Walk Through…Cardiff

I was all prepared for my event in Wales, courtesy of Cardiff Central Libraries and WF Howes. I’d packed everything I needed including notes, a sweater, laptop, iPad and assorted tech-junk, only to spend the journey reading ‘Selling Hitler’ by Robert Harris (the story of the fake Hitler diaries). I arrived to find Cardiff sweltering […]

The Return Of Serious Science Fiction

Literary SF has a small but dedicated following, and usually defeats me, although I read a lot of it growing up, mainly because the ABCs, Aldiss, Asimov, Ballard and Clarke, were ubiquitous in paperback. There has been a gradual move toward ‘adult’ SF lately, but mostly on film. The genre has split itself into sub-groups; […]

Word-Smashing 3: How To Schedule Your Time

Every day for the past month I’ve been pulling down dawn-to-dusk working hours (often going well past midnight). I’ve been working to finish the second draft of the next Bryant & May novel. I keep very little written down about it, except in a single manuscript file in the Cloud – everything else is in […]

What’s The Most Annoying Tech?

Remington, Brother, Wordstar, Betamax, 8-Track, cassettes, for god’s sake – I feel as if I’ve been through the technological mill, and you probably do too…but good technology changes us daily. This morning I answered my door to a tradesman via my mobile from a different country. Last night I turned down the heat in my […]