Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 172

Banning ‘Experience’: Words That Annoy

I’ve finally become my parents; they were sticklers for grammatical exactitude. I knew it would happen, but I think it’s largely because I read so much. Books, posters – this poster. As noted in the previous post, there’s a Sherlock Holmes ‘experience’ currently at Madame Tussauds. It’s a word routinely added to any activity which […]

We’re All Going On A…

…or are we? Going Where The Sun Shines Brightly?* Londoners traditionally holiday abroad, as they don’t care to wander around Bexhill-On-Sea going ‘I can’t believe they still don’t have olive focaccia’, although a few do tiptoe off into the countryside where locals make fun of them and hotels rip them off by charging for two-night […]

Rough On The Street

I’ve written about street problems and rough sleeping a few times, most notably in ‘Disturbia’, in ‘Plastic’ and now in the next Bryant & May novel. The statistics are alarming and show just how close people in debt are to rough sleeping. A lost job, a missed payment and you can be out. Once you’re […]

Crime Can Be Anything You Want…

Here are some jottings I found on writing crime fiction. I have a sneaking feeling some of these points came from a US TV writer, but I can’t for the life of me remember who – if it was you and I’ve not namechecked you, I’m sorry, tell me and I’ll correct it. Crime is […]

Ars Gratia Artis

An excellent BBC4 programme last night, ‘The Banker’s Guide To Art’, about the rules that govern the buying and selling of modern art, proved essential viewing for anyone researching a crime novel. Here is the one multi-billion-pound industry that is not governed by financial rules. It owes this unique place to history, when the titled […]

Sod It, Let’s Dance!

For a writer’s blog, this is an awfully random site, I know. But I’m not just interested in invisible authors, I admire the also-runs and all the people who get passed over in favour of stars. Tommy Rall was one of them – he was Astaire and Kelly combined, but something didn’t click and he […]

Invisible Ink: Horace McCoy

One of Malcolm Gladwell’s rules states that the key to success in any field is partly a matter of practicing a specific task for around 10,000 hours. This seems especially true of writers; it usually takes a great deal of experience to become a debut novelist. Horace McCoy clocked up a lot of experience before […]

From Paradise To Purgatory

When the Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman described suburban Neasden as ‘the home of the gnome’ he didn’t mean it nicely. London’s Metropolitan Railway accidentally created suburbia. The term ‘Metroland’ was coined in 1915 and used to describe a band of countryside north-west of London, sold as a land of idyllic cottages and gardens. But […]

5 Dark Urban Adventures Are Back This Week!

Hurrah! This Thursday sees the e-book release of my five Dark Urban novels, Rune, Red Bride, Disturbia, Psychoville and Soho Black. Designer Martin Butterworth created the beautiful matching covers for all twenty releases. ‘Roofworld’ and ‘Spanky’ are already available. All are priced just 2.99. Rune Strange suicides occur in the city’s corridors of power. […]

Wonderful Books, Awful Books

Now that ‘Invisible Ink’ is finally wending its way toward us in a definitive form (publishers being met, deals being studied etc) I find myself with a dilemma. The weekly column, which ran for almost ten years in the Independent on Sunday, perfectly suits expansion into a longform format, but I’d like to sift the […]