Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 121

Why Authors Are Forgotten: Part 3

Every book lover has a favourite forgotten author. But for everyone who loves an Agatha Christie, there’s another who adores a good Margaret Millar. For every Sherlock Holmes, there was another great detective. I decided to investigate further and was deluged with suggestions from readers. I uncovered a wealth of stories about why writers vanished. […]

Why Authors Are Forgotten: Part 2

Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you’re dead. Changing tastes, shrinking budgets, fads, fashions and poor cataloguing all conspire against the budding author. Authors often kill their own careers by refusing to do publicity, getting bored, being difficult or getting fed up with punishing delivery schedules. The more original and […]

Why Authors Are Forgotten: Part 1

Over the next six days I’m doing something different here; I’m going to publish a version of the talk I gave around the country on the subject of authors we have loved and misplaced. I started from a template and tended to spring off in different directions for each talk, depending on the mood of […]

Havana Laugh

Don’t worry – the shot above is not mine; I can’t access my photo cache (or much else) from here. It’s stormy in Havana. There’s a restless buzz in the air; dogs are fighting, the rains have brought torrential waterfalls from gutters and flooding in the streets but the bands, sheltering in the corners of […]

The Eleven Minute Rule

I’ve been looking for patterns in reader satisfaction. Working on the Forgotten Authors project for so long has given me a sense of what proves popular, and it seems to me that readers are both open to originality and experimentation, and a good, simple idea well executed. What I think readers don’t like is over-complexity […]

When Is A Bookshop Not A Bookshop?

…When it’s my home. And only one of many bookcases, I’m afraid. It’s a minor compulsion and nearly under control; I can deal with it. The habit starts young. My mother had a cavalier disregard for books; she’d plough through them, bending corners, filling them with crumbs, dropping them  in the bath, using a fag-end […]

Friday Song!

Before I lose contact with the online world for God knows how many hours I should at least post a Friday Song (which may well end up being a Saturday Song). A aptly political one today, given the prevalence of fake news. Here’s the old method that reigned before blatantly making stuff up; obfuscation. Charles Durning […]

Vacaciones!

It’s been a hectic year. First, thanks to all the well-wishers who contacted me about my eye surgery. I’m OK, although I may not be illuminating any medieval manuscripts for a while. The timing was fortuitous, as I’m between books and need to recharge the batteries, ready to take a run at three new novels, […]

London’s Best Shops: Fopp

In this series I’m not including any of the shops that usually go into glossy travel magazines, the ones which are meant to typify London, because they don’t. Lobb’s and Lock’s and Berry & Rudd and Smith & Co are beautiful and evocative time warps, but I’ve never met anyone who has shopped in them […]

If You Remember The Sixties, You Weren’t There

  So here’s the final cover artwork for the upcoming sixties-set Bryant & May mystery, entitled ‘Hall of Mirrors’, to be published on March 22 2018. The US is running a little behind UK, but I’m pleased to say that they’ll now sport similar covers. Hopefully we’ll get a full set of matching covers one day; […]