Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 146

Celebrating 20 E-Books: ‘Red Gloves’

Quietly and without fanfare (that’s how we like it) my last three e-books snuck out into the ether this month. Red Gloves Volumes 1 and 2 and the new collection Frightening became available in new online editions. Frightening tidies up the short story backlist with the remaining new stories I produced in the declining days of the horror story […]

The Bad Boys Are Back

There’s a running gag in the Bryant & May books about Bryant and Gilbert & Sullivan that reaches its head in the the new novel out next week, ‘Wild Chamber’. I’m drawn to partnerships, the push and pull of people who can’t live with or without each other, and whatever one thinks of their music, […]

‘London. It Begins With Me And Ends With Me.’

That’s a quote I used from an anonymous teenager who was quite rightly pointing out that we each only get to see our own slice of a place in a particular time. The buildings remain in one form or another and become fascinating to us because we know they have seen other eras. As I […]

At Last The 1984 Show

Sales of the George Orwell novel have unsurprisingly risen in the last few months, along with Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and other grim dystopian novels, most of which saw the rise of totalitarian states, but in entirely the wrong way; nobody imagined that we’d reach it with our own complicity, via votes. Growing up in […]

My English Is Not Your English

As proof that the English language is always changing, in the British Library, the Evolving English WordBank now contains 1,500 contributions to date, many of which are dialect words. This is a system that records new words or old dialect ones from the public, but it turns out that some in current use have a […]

The Elle Word

No Spoilers In a week where a judge who asked a woman in a rape trial why she couldn’t just keep her knees together has resigned from the Federal Court of Canada, and in a time when America has a president who routinely degrades women for fun, it seems that ‘Elle’ could not be more […]

The Return Of The Political Dispatch

While I was at school I became obsessed with Watergate. I bought every book on the subject and tried to understand how the President of the United States could fall to the level of a common criminal, using the language and behaviour of a criminal. By the time I got around to G Gordon Liddy […]

Splashing Out In London

It’s easy to forget that England is a temperate zone, and so London, at its centre, gets no real extremes of weather. You can get sunburnt in Devon and see snow in Scotland but most of us are within a steady range of temperature. None of which explains our passion for open-air swimming. London has […]

Seeing London Through Someone Else’s Eyes

I have European guests staying with me at the moment, and each day they set off across the city to experience it before returning and describing what they saw. Of course it’s spring so they’re getting four seasons in one day, which is driving them mad, but it’s interesting to note what else they love […]

Fighting The Curse Of Sentiment

I’ve always believed in maintaining a healthy level of cynicism, but worry that sentiment may creep into my books with age. With a couple of exceptions I’ve managed to keep it low in the Bryant & May novels (and am actually raising my cynicism level in the next one) but sentiment has been the ruin […]