Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 150

Today’s Challenge: Share A Writers’ Secret

    Recently someone challenged me to offer up a writer’s secret, something we don’t even talk about with other. So here’s one. Many of the writers I’ve met are addicted to covetously measuring the success of others. We don’t mean to, but the yardsticks of style, intellect and erudition can prove obsessive. We don’t […]

Arctic Rollercoaster

  That’s right, this column was simply an excuse to hide the name of a seventies dessert in the heading. You know the drill, a TV show model developed in the US; half a dozen characters meet in a single location (or ‘precinct’) and find out what connects them, but it takes seven seasons to unravel […]

Bryant & May Covers – You Choose

Do books (and book covers) have to reflect our lives as they’re lived right now? I never really intended my detectives to become topical avatars, but it’s hard not to mirror the times in which we live. In a future book I’ll be looking at the state of the nation, but for 2018’s novel I’ll […]

Reading Between The Lines Part 2

I like Victoria Beckham. She knows how to play the journos’ game and seems pretty good at weathering its random cruelties, especially when the press periodically decides to gang up on her for no other reason than her being a successful career woman and mother. Ms Beckham grew up with social media and knows what […]

Reading Between The Lines Part 1

This comes in answer to a request from Elisabeth Rose, to give tips on spotting fake journalism. In the UK we downgraded the quality of journalism in the late ’80s by allowing Rupert Murdoch to trample over reporters’ rights. Traditionally stories are fully sourced within the first two paragraphs. That is, at least two names are […]

Latest Train Delay Excuse: Tudors On The Line

On February 10th, 500 exhibits are to be on show in the Museum of London in an exhibition called Tunnel: the Archaeology of Crossrail. Crossrail is the biggest London redevelopment I’ve seen in my lifetime. It started in 2012 and won’t finish until 2020.  The 118-kilometre railway line crosses London and reaches the home counties of Berkshire, […]

Leave London’s Parks Alone

Next month sees the UK arrival of the new Bryant & May novel, ‘Wild Chamber’. One part of the storyline has just become highly topical, as Westminster Council seeks to privatise part of a London park  in order to squeeze some more cash from tourists, and Camden Council, who destroyed its local markets to cater […]

Your Questions Answered: Taking It Apart

In ‘Sunday In The Park With George’ we see an artist gradually assembling the component parts for what will become his most famous painting, ‘Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte’, by Georges Seurat. We’re fascinated by how things are created. Yesterday, reader Anchovee says it’s a shame that I should pick apart a successful film […]

Why The Year’s Most Awarded Movie Will Be A One-Off

No Spoilers I liked ‘La La Land’ but I can understand why there’s a back(whip)lash going on in this most hated and moribund of genres. It looks as if the film is set to sweep Baftas and Oscars this year (with ‘Moonlight’, I hope), which in the last couple of months has meant a green […]

A Greylisted Writer

Much is now known about the blacklisting of writers in the 1950s and how many were forced into exile in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. But there was also ‘greylisting’, the strong-arming of writers to deny their pasts under threat of prosecution. With President Trump’s current tactics with journalists in mind, here’s the story […]