Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 159

One Night In Vauxhall

It’s a piece of London apocrypha that’s been circulating for years, a story unverified by the press at the time but which turned out to be true. Supposedly one night a bored Princess Diana left the Palace to hang out with her pals Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett. Complaining she never got to go anywhere […]

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

It’s not hard to understand why half the country voted Brexit. It was the half outside London, and they did it with good reason. London is now in a bubble, divorced from the rest of the country and running away with itself, a strange anglo-Switzerland where soup and a sandwich tops 8 (Pret […]

Inside The Peculiar Crimes Unit

The very Christmassy paperback featuring Bryant & May’s first collection of missing cases, ‘London’s Glory’, is out now, a snip at 8.99. It contains this Eagle-style cutaway by Keith Page, age 14, Upper 4B, along with an introductory essay on crime fiction and all kinds of surprises. Buy it for a relative you wish to […]

Arthur & Alma At Breakfast

Sometimes when I’m writing the Bryant & May mysteries I forget the sheer amount of conversational detail that has gone before in earlier novels, so today I selected a chapter at random and read it back, to see if the characters had shifted away from where I intended them to be – I’m delighted to […]

One Weekend, Three Entertainments

It’s the season for indoor fun, so this weekend I checked out a play, a movie and a TV series. ‘Westworld’ was the show, and the first surprise is that we follow the robot hosts, not the guests. Not sure I’m entirely buying into the idea that they conduct normal lives away from the customers, […]

We Need To Remember How Great America Can Be

An interesting aftermath to the election result that caught everyone out; Trump is not acting as he’s meant to, and young people are complaining about notions of dropping the wall and waterboarding. Since when did the young advocate torture? In Columbus University, young peopleare putting up white supremacy posters, as witnessed by my friend Jennifer […]

My Neighbourhood On Film

There are a lot of film locations around Kings Cross, where we live, including the most of the Harry Potter films, ‘Alfie’, ‘The Ladykillers’ (above), ‘Smashing Time’, ‘Batman’ and ‘Chaplin’. I always remember the scene in Ken Russell’s ‘The Music Lovers’ where Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky tries to drown himself in Regent’s Canal (standing in […]

Sir Dirk on Book and Film

For a long time he was the quintessential British film star, but it’s likely a sizeable portion of the population has now never seen a Dirk Bogarde film. OrDerek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, to give him his full name. His heyday as an actor ended over four decades ago, and in later […]

Keep Calm & Read A Book

Okay, now that we’re all on board for the Trumpseidon Adventure (or the Towering Trumpferno, if you prefer), let’s calm down. How? By reading a good book, of course! Not the lovely ‘Lost Cases of Bryant & May’ now climbing the charts as an e-book in the US for a low, low price and available […]

The Trumpocalypse Begins!

WTF. HFS. Initials don’t even cover it. The placing of a monstrous thuggish Putin ally in the White House plays right into the novelist’s hands. Especially if you’re writing satire. I’ve always thought of myself as a boring middle-class liberal who broadly thinks like the majority of my country. Suddenly I look like a persecuted […]